The first systems of writing developed and used by the Germanic peoples were runic alphabets.

The runes functioned as letters, but they were much more than just letters in the sense in which
we today understand the term. Each rune was an ideographic or pictographic symbol of some
cosmological principle or power, and to write a rune was to invoke and direct the force for which
it stood. Indeed, in every Germanic language, the word rune (from Proto-Germanic *runo)
means both letter and secret or mystery, and its original meaning, which likely predated
the adoption of the runic alphabet, may have been simply (hushed) message.[1]
Each rune had a name that hinted at the philosophical and magical significance of its visual
form and the sound for which it stands, which was almost always the first sound of the runes
name. For example, the T-rune, called*Tiwaz in the Proto-Germanic language, is named after
the god Tiwaz (known as Tyr in the Viking Age). Tiwaz was perceived to dwell within the
daytime sky, and, accordingly, the visual form of the T-rune is an arrow pointed upward (which
surely also hints at the gods martial role). The T-rune was often carved as a standalone
ideograph, apart from the writing of any particular word, as part of spells cast to ensure victory
in battle.[2][3] (SeePart IV for more examples.)

The runic alphabets are called futharks after the first six runes (Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz,
Raidho, Kaunan), in much the same way that the word alphabet comes from the names of the
first two Semitic letters (Aleph, Beth). There are three principal futharks: the 24-character Elder
Futhark, the first fully-formed runic alphabet, whose development had begun by the first century
CE and had been completed before the year 400;[4] the 16-character Younger Futhark, which
began to diverge from the Elder Futhark around the beginning of the Viking Age (c. 750 CE)
[5]
and eventually replaced that older alphabet in Scandinavia; and the 33-character Anglo-Saxon
Futhorc, which gradually altered and added to the Elder Futhark in England. On some
inscriptions, the twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark were divided into threettir (Old
Norse, families) of eight runes each,[6] but the significance of this division is unfortunately
unknown.
Runes were traditionally carved onto stone, wood, bone, metal, or some similarly hard surface
rather than drawn with ink and pen on parchment. This explains their sharp, angular form, which
was well-suited to the medium.
Much of our current knowledge of the meanings the ancient Germanic peoples attributed to the
runes comes from the three Rune Poems, documents from Iceland, Norway, and England that
provide a short stanza about each rune in their respective futharks (the Younger Futhark is treated

in the Icelandic and Norwegian Rune Poems, while the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc is discussed in the
Old English Rune Poem).
Part
Part
Part
Part

I: Introduction
III: Runic Philosophy and Magic
IV: The Meanings of the Runes
V: The 10 Best Books on the Runes

While runologists argue over many of the details of the historical origins of runic writing, there
is widespread agreement on a general outline. The runes are presumed to have been derived from
one of the many Old Italic alphabets in use among the Mediterranean peoples of the first century
CE, who lived to the south of the Germanic tribes.[7][8] Earlier Germanic sacred symbols, such as
those preserved in northern European petroglyphs, were also likely influential in the
development of the script.[9][10]
The earliest possibly runic inscription is found on the Meldorf brooch, which was manufactured
in the north of modern-day Germany around 50 CE. The inscription is highly ambiguous,
however, and scholars are divided over whether its letters are runic or Roman. The earliest
unambiguous runic inscriptions are found on the Vimose comb from Vimose, Denmark and the
vre Stabu spearhead from southern Norway, both of which date to approximately 160 CE.
[11]
The earliest known carving of the entire futhark, in order, is that on the Kylver stone from
Gotland, Sweden, which dates to roughly 400 CE.[12]
The transmission of writing from southern Europe to northern Europe likely took place via
Germanic warbands, the dominant northern European military institution of the period, who
would have encountered Italic writing firsthand during campaigns amongst their southerly
neighbors.[13] This hypothesis is supported by the association that runes have always had with the
godOdin, who, in the Proto-Germanic period, under his original name *Woanaz, was the
divine model of the human warband leader and the invisible patron of the warbands activities.
The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that Odin (Mercury in the interpretatio romana) was
already established as the dominant god in the pantheons of many of the Germanic tribes by the
first century.[14]Whether the runes and the cult of Odin arose together, or whether the latter
predated the former, is of little consequence for our purposes here. As esteemed IndoEuropean scholar Georges Dumzil notes:

If Odin was first and always the highest magician, we realize

that the runes, however recent they may be, would have fallen
under his sway. New and particularly effective implements for
magic works, they would become by definition and without
contest a part of his domain. Odin could have been the
patron, the possessor par excellence of this redoubtable power
of secrecy and secret knowledge, before the name of that
knowledge became the technical name of signs both phonetic

and magic which came from the Alps or elsewhere, but did not
lose its former, larger sense.[15]
From the perspective of the ancient Germanic peoples themselves, however, the runes came from
no source as mundane as an Old Italic alphabet. The runes were never invented, but are instead
eternal, pre-existent forces that Odin himself discovered by undergoing a tremendous ordeal.
This tale has come down to us in the Old Norse poem Hvaml (The Sayings of the High
One):

I know that I hung

On the wind-blasted tree
All of nights nine,
Pierced by my spear
And given to Odin,
Myself sacrificed to myself
On that pole
Of which none know
Where its roots run.
No aid I received,
Not even a sip from the horn.
Peering down,
I took up the runes
Screaming I grasped them
Then I fell back from there.[16]
The tree from which Odin hangs himself is surely none other than Yggdrasil, the world-tree at
the center of the Germanic cosmos whose branches and roots hold theNine Worlds. Directly
below the world-tree is the Well of Urd, which contains the entirety of the past within its
depths, and is therefore a source of incredible wisdom. The runes themselves seem to have their
native dwelling-place in its waters. This is also suggested by another Old Norse poem,
the Vlusp (Insight of the Seeress):

There stands an ash called Yggdrasil,

A mighty tree showered in white hail.
From there come the dews that fall in the valleys.
It stands evergreen above Urds Well.
From there come maidens, very wise,
Three from the lake that stands beneath the pole.
One is called Urd, another Verdandi,

Skuld the third; they carve into the tree

The lives and destinies of children.[17]
These three maidens are the Norns, and their carvings surely consist of runes. We therefore
have a clear association between the Well of Urd, the runes, and the ability to shape the course of
destiny one of the foremost tasks of Germanic magic.
Presumably, then, after Odin discovered the runes by ritually sacrificing himself to himself and
fasting for nine days while staring into the waters of the Well of Urd, it was he who imparted the
runes to the first human runemasters. His paradigmatic sacrifice was likely symbolically imitated
in initiation ceremonies during which the candidate learned the lore of the runes,[18][19]but,
unfortunately, no concrete evidence of such a practice has survived into our times.
In the pre-Christian Germanic worldview, the spoken word possesses frightfully strong creative
powers. As Scandinavian scholar Catharina Raudvere notes, The pronouncement of words was
recognized to have a tremendous influence over the concerns of life. The impact of a sentence
uttered aloud could not be questioned and could never be taken back as if it had become
somehow physical. Words create reality, not the other way around.[20] This is, in an important
sense, an anticipation of the philosophy of language advanced by the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger in his seminal essay Language. For Heidegger, language is an inescapable
structuring element of perception. Words dont merely reflect our perception of the world; rather,
we perceive and experience the world in the particular ways that our language demands of us.
Thinking outside of language is literally unthinkable, because all thought takes place within
language hence the inherent, godlike creative powers of words.[21] In traditional Germanic
society, to vocalize a thought is to make that thought part of the fabric of reality, altering reality
accordingly perhaps not absolutely, but in some important measure.[22]
Each of the runes represents a phoneme the smallest unit of sound in a language, such as t,
s, r, etc. and as such is a transposition of a phoneme into a visual form.
Most modern linguists take it for granted that the relationship between the signified (the concrete
reality referred to by a word) and the signifier (the sounds used to vocalize that word) is
arbitrary.[23][24][25] However, a minority of linguists embrace an opposing theory known as
phonosemantics: the idea that there is, in fact, a meaningful connection between the sounds
that make up a word and the words meaning. To put this another way, the phoneme itself carries
an inherent meaning. The meaning of the word thorn, for example, derives in large part from
the combined meaning of the phonemes th, o, r, and n.
The phonosemantic view of language is in agreement with the traditional northern European
view, where words create reality, not the other way around. The runes, as transpositions of
phonemes, bring the inherent creative powers of speech into a visual medium. Weve already
noted that the word rune means letter only secondarily, and that its primary meaning is
secret or mystery the mysterious animistic power carried by the phoneme itself. We must
also remember the ordeal Odin undertook in order to discover the runes no one would hang
from a tree without food or water for nine days and nights, ritually wounded by his own spear, in
order to obtain a set of arbitrary signifiers.

With the runes, the phonosemantic perspective takes on an additional layer of significance. Not
only is the relationship between the definition of a word and the phonemes that comprise it
inherently meaningful the relationship between a phoneme and its graphic representation is
inherently meaningful as well.
Thus, the runes were not only a means of fostering communication between two or more
humans. Being intrinsically meaningful symbols that could be read and understood by at least
some nonhuman beings, they could facilitate communication between humankind and the
invisible powers who animate the visible world, providing the basis for a plethora
of magical acts.
In the verses from the Vlusp quoted above, we see that the carving of runes is one of the
primary means by which the Norns establish the initial framework of thedestiny of all beings
(the other most often-noted method being weaving). Given that the ability to alter the course of
destiny is one of the central concerns of traditional Germanic magic, it should come as no
surprise that the runes, as an extremely potent means of redirecting destiny, and as inherently
meaningful symbols, were thereby inherently magical by their very nature. This is a
controversial statement to make nowadays, since some scholars insist that, while the runes may
have sometimes been used for magical purposes, they were not, in and of themselves, magical.
But consider the following episode from Egils Saga. While traveling, Egil eats a meal with a
farmer whose house is on the vikings route. The farmers daughter is dangerously ill, and he
asks Egil for help. When Egil examines the girls bed, he finds a whalebone with runes carved on
it. The farmer explains to Egil that these runes were carved by the son of a local farmer
presumably an ignorant, illiterate person whose knowledge of the runes could have only been
flimsy at best. Egil, being a master of runic lore, readily discerns that this inscription is the cause
of the girls woes. After destroying the inscription by scraping the runes off into the fire and
burning the whalebone itself (!), Egil carves a different message in different runes so as to
counteract the malignancy of the earlier writing. After this has been accomplished, the girl
recovers.[26]
We can see from this incident that the heathen northern Europeans made a sharp distinction
between the powers of the runes themselves, and the uses to which they were put. While the
body of surviving runic inscriptions and literary descriptions of their use definitely suggest that
the runes were sometimes put to profane, silly, and/or ignorant purposes,[27] the Eddas and
sagas make it abundantly clear that the signs themselves do possess immanent magical
attributes that work in particular ways regardless of the intended uses to which theyre put by
humans