Origin Story

Lingsberg Runestone

“To learn the most profound truths, begin with the alphabet”
- Japanese proverb

The Runes are an ancient alphabet. They have been used by the Germanic tribes since approximately 2000 years ago. They have been found from North America to Constantinople. Though they have been used and written about for well over 1500 years, I personally think that the ideas they represent have been around for far longer than the symbols themselves. Humans are conservative, and they can carry knowledge - sometimes very unwittingly - for thousands of years without blemishing it. Beauty and the Beast, the story we know and love, may have been transported through time for over 5000 years. Turns of phrase like "goods and chattels", still used in legalese, can be dated to Proto-Indo-European language of about the same vintage. We carry a lot of historical baggage, but it's unnoticeable because nobody realises they're carrying it. I believe it is the same way with the Runes: stuff that was important to us, resonated with us, and was carried by us in our culture (knowingly or not) is stuck to the Runes. I'm interested in using any method at all to dig for that stuff, and hopefully find why it stuck.

I’ve studied the Runes for more than 25 years. Unfortunately, the process of studying something tends to reveal gaps in knowledge rather than fill them. Recently, I’ve been trying to patch up a major gap in my knowledge of the Runes: the sources of the ideas and names that go with the characters. Here is a primer so you can hopefully join me in this study - if you haven't already started.

There are 24 symbols in the Runic alphabet I study. The word “alphabet” here is inappropriate because “alphabet” comes from the Greek characters alpha and beta put together. This is just like the Hebrew aleph-bet, which comes from the names of the first two Hebrew characters, aleph and beth. The first six letters of the Rune row make up its name, and they are F, U, þ (th), A, R, K, so we call it the Fuþark. This should be pronounced foo (like Mr. T would say) thark (like saying “shark” with a lisp). The Fuþark of 24 Runes is the “Elder” Fuþark because there are a few different versions of the Runes through history, and this one happens to be the oldest. Some languages needed more or fewer sounds, some languages needed different sounds, so the Fuþark had to adapt to new realities as languages changed. The Elder Fuþark is the earliest recorded Fuþark we have, and therefore the closest to the ancient ideas I am trying to study.

Each Rune has a name and a meaning. Since Runes have been around a long time, the meanings have multiplied. Words that describe the Runes have also grown in number over the years. The first Rune represents the letter “F”, and in English, we can call it “Fee”. In the language spoken by the ancient Germanic tribes, called “Proto Germanic”, this Rune was likely called something like “Fehu”, meaning “movable property”. We’re not sure if it was really called that, but linguistic research provides us with a lot of accurate tools to figure out how ancient languages sounded, so we think it’s a pretty good guess. A lot of other languages have similar words based on the same sound and concept, so it’s possible to reconstruct older languages based on the sounds and meanings of these words. This gives us the capability to drill down into the historical and pre-historical record – through language and myth – to find out where the Rune names came from.

This etymological path is one way to mine the vein of Runic knowledge. Another is poetic. There are several poems and signatures that may give hints as to Runic meanings. Some, like the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, explain in sideways references what each symbol might mean. Some, like the Cynewulfian Signatures, are even more riddle-like than the poems. Many of the references are eerily similar, or at least comparable, in scripts that occur over the stretch of about 500 years. The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem at least has a full listing of all the Elder Fuþark Runes, and it is a good jumping-off point for the study of the ideas behind their meanings.

It is important to remember that these ideas are not simply as old as this poem. The linguistic, historical and archaeological evidence all points to the Runic tradition itself being at least 1500 years old. The linguistic roots go even deeper. For instance, there are two separate references to horses in the Elder Futhark, but the German tribes of the age of Tacitus were by no means a horse-oriented society. Their cavalry was, at best, pathetic in comparison with Roman auxilia of the time. The root of one of the Runic symbols, *ekwos, meaning horse, goes all the way back to the time of the Indo-Europeans, who were a horse (*ekwos-) riding (*reidh-) people. These roots come up to us through early Germanic, close to the Indo-European in both sound and meaning. Though one of these (*ekwos) did not survive the transition to the Younger Futhark, there is a definite chain of ideas from deep antiquity to the present. 

Our most ancient – and yet historically silent – ancestors speak volumes to us through the transmitted knowledge embodied in the Runes.

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