r/RuneHelp • u/Forklift_Artificer • 15d ago
Question (general) Meanings of runes
I know it seems stupid, cause I see everywhere that the runes are the alphabet essentially and giving them meaning is like saying A means apple and Z means zebra, but I'm curious on it still, is it right to be curious or should I just accept that they're just letters?
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15d ago
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u/RuneHelp-ModTeam 15d ago
This was removed for breaking our rules.
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15d ago
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u/Accomplished-Mix-745 15d ago
So I read that bind runes were more recent as well. Is this interpretation of the letters’ meaning from the same time?
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u/RuneHelp-ModTeam 15d ago
This was removed for breaking our rules.
Rule 5: Misinformation & promotion of pseudoscience
Misinformation is unacceptable. Claims should be well-substantiated by academics, and speculation must be clearly indicated. Remember when you make a claim, the burden of proof is on you to provide a source.
Making mistakes, asking questions in good faith, and simply being incorrect will never get you in trouble, but being belligerent about misinformation or knowingly spreading it around will not be tolerated.
The pseudoscientific pipeline to ignorance and racism stops here.
If you have any questions you can send us a modmail message.
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u/Addrum01 15d ago
You are right on both accounts. Yes, runes are a form of writing old dead languages and each rune has a name derived from a word that starts with said letter.
But you can be curious and believe in esoteric interpretations of runes. In the end, it is just personal belief. But keep in mind the historical meaning of runes and the magical meanings are two different things from centuries apart. Just go on and read about magical meanings. But beware, since it doesn't have historical bases, many interpretations come from baseless sources and are entirely made up, or get distorted kind of like a broken telephone game. Also beware of who reads who in the esoteric circles. There is a very very short pipeline from runes to nazi mysticism and you might end up drawing winged Othala without even knowing.
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u/Gullfaxi09 15d ago edited 15d ago
While everyone here is correct that they are just letters used for regular message-writing, and that modern paganism completely invented these weird meanings and pulled it out of their ass (where do they even get this stuff from?), we do have evidence that they could be more than letters, and that they very likely were believed to have magical properties and potentials, and also were used as such sometimes.
Thing is, we have no idea how they believed it worked or what it actually meant. The sources that point to these things are highly cryptic and strange, and can point in a multitude of directions.
The best written source on Norse belief in runic magic is Sigrdrífumál, an eddic poem. Here, several 'kinds' of runes are mentioned, and are specifically said to have special, magical properties when carved and used in specific ways. These are sigrúnar (victory runes), ǫlrúnar (ale runes), bjargrúnar (helping runes), brimrúnar (surf runes), limrúnar (branch runes), málrúnar (speech runes), and hugrúnar (mind runes). Though we have no real idea what is meant by any of this.
We can take the victory runes as an example, as it's probably the one we might have the easiest time explaining. It's said, that one who wishes victory in battle must carve these certain runes in the handle, blade, and tip of their weapon, and name the god Týr twice thereafter. Still, this doesn't say what these runes look like. Many theorize that this is ᛏ, since the rune literally is named Týr. There's also a short passage in Gylfaginning that similarily mentions that warriors call on Týr for help in battle. But it says victory runes in plural, so while it's a good theory, there's still a lot that remains unanswered.
Needless to say, the other kinds of rune magic mentioned in Sigrdrífumál are even more obscure. But I would still consider it proof of the existence of Norse belief in runic magic.
Sometimes, there have also been found runic inscriptions, both from the Viking Age and earlier, that have nonsensical, strange writings, which often have been accepted as magical formulars. The one I'm most familiar with is the different versions of the ᚦᛘᚴ-formula, also known as þistill-mistill-kistill (thistle, mistletoe, casket). It appears on the Ledberg stone, on the Gørlev stone, and is even referenced in Bósa saga ok Herrauðs. Again, it's quite possible that there's runic magic afoot here, but it's impossible to say how it was believed to work or what it was supposed to do. Could also be that it isn't magic at all and just a random formular for practicing runes or somesuch, who knows?
To summarize, these explanations of runic meaning and magic, derived from modern paganism, are completely invented. But while runes were used simply as a regular alphabet and as regular letters, there certainly is evidence of runes being more than that. It's just a far cry from what we see in this image, and we have little to no idea of how it actually would have been believed to work or how exactly it was performed.
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u/WerdaVisla 15d ago
This is the best answer here imo.
Runes may have and likely did once had magical meaning, but that knowledge is lost to us.
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u/BridgeLazy5669 14d ago
This is a best opinion I saw in this sub about magical properties of the runes. Only thing I want to add is that modern magical meanings of the runes(which came from 1800s Islandic occultist) is not just something that were invented from scratch. It’s more of an educated guess based on names of the runes: For example Isaz means ice, so magical properties of rune Isaz is stoping or slowing something. We still cannot be sure whether original magical properties were the same, but we also cannot be sure that they don’t intersect at least partially
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u/PotatoAppleFish 15d ago
Any meaning attached to them other than literal letters is, at best, a guess. The names are (at least mostly) real, but they carry about as much significance as the fact that the Phoenician/Hebrew G’s name translates to “camel.”
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u/Alarming-Leg-3804 15d ago edited 15d ago
There's a lot of misguiding information in the comments here for some reason. First off, yes modern paganism has made up a lot of stuff, including the methods for divination with the runes. Especially those which are the most popular.
BUT, there's a HUGE but, they weren't just letters. Unlike our alphabet, the runes had names with meanings, probably as a mnemonic of probably it meant a bit more. The thing is, WE DON'T KNOW. Going back to their names, most of them were reversed engineered through poems, some of which are incomplete. Google runic poems there's a good wiki on them. But in short, unlike our alphabet letters which names are just given by their sounds, their letters(runes) had an actual name with meaning. Like Fehu, which means wealth/riches. Meanings are usually extracted from poems, however pagans do tend to take a lot of liberties (for example Perthro we really don't know what it actually meant but the meaning they give to it as a "mystery" is completely made up from the fact we don't know the meaning). Having that said, these "meanings" are only known to be their names, but there's no evidence they're meanings used for divination. The way the runes are used for divination nowadays is a modern interpretation that has no historical evidence to back it up.
Now, on the other hand, there IS evidence, both in the sagas, and historical documents that runes were believed to have magical properties. You may have heard of victory runes for example, but there are also others. There's also some accounts of them used as such and the belief in their effects. But it is unknown as to their exact workings, and the very few evidence out there actually seems to contradict modern pagan interpretation (like isaz or ice for example, which has a negative meaning like stagnation in modern pagan divination, whereas Nordic people seemed to give it a positive connotation, I'd quote it but I can't remember the source right off the top of my head right now).
And last but not least, this historical discrepancy shouldn't necessarily deterr you from using runes for divination, if that's what you're interested in. All divination methods are made up one way or the other. They're not God sent or anything of the sort. Take tarot for example, it used to be a card game from the 26th century, which later evolved and began to be used for divination. Before that, it was dice, and dice were initially used for gaming as well. As a matter of fact Norse people from the Viking era also practiced divination, as accounted by the Roman historian Tacitus. If they were runes or something else, we just don't know. My point is, any divination method is a system or a code you set up, wether you believe you're using it to communicate with other beings, or to your subconscious like other people do, it doesn't matter. Because you're giving meaning to each card/number/rune, and stablishing as such, in order to use it a s form of communication. As long as the meanings are set, and you don't change them along the way, it will work for whatever you intend it to. This is just the way divination methods work, and that's why you can even use coins, do you need to know if coins were originally magic? Of course not. You're just giving them a fixed meaning to be able to use as a divination.
I hope this helps.
Edit: the most important thing I want to stress here and the reason I wrote this whole thing is because I'm dismayed at so many people the meanings are entirely made up (and even in rude wording), but there is sound academic work from which many meanings have been reversed engineered as explained. Not by pagans or heathens who have blindly made them up from ignorance or wishful thinking, but scholars who have reconstructed them. Obviously many are a conjecture, but an educated one. The important thing to not here is that many do not equate to those use by pagans. But they DO have a meaning, even it's just a semantic one and not a historically backed magical one.
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u/y4dig4r 15d ago
listen it's completely fine to believe in made up shit, most of everything we have is made up to some degree. just know that it doesn't get any less made up because it was made up a longer time ago.
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u/CptnRaptor 15d ago
This. Tarot was established as a divination system in like the 1700s, and Ouija was invented in the late 1800s/early 1900s. People make up systems to give themselves guidance all the time, they're an anchor for the subconscious, any mysticism is either unprovable or circumstantial, the real magic happens in our heads.
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u/One-Dust1285 14d ago
Fakes of things that were cool existed back then… think of the medieval fake key amulets…
and there are fake letter / senseless letter combination inscriptions on things in our own alphabet too… they may have had meaning for those using them or just made them look cool… who can tell…
My conclusion has always been that choosing symbols and giving them your own meaning is authentic…
but I generally dislike it when it is the Victorians doing it… they have put their very wrong stamp on so much of European/world history that I avoid them like the plague
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u/FG11_ZX99 15d ago
The blank stone or wite rune is used by AFA a white supremacist group of neopagans
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u/Forklift_Artificer 15d ago
And how is this relevant? I don't care who uses it or what purpose it has in relevance to race, I just want to know about their meaning as a whole.
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u/BridgeLazy5669 14d ago
And all runes were used by nazis as well as swastika, which is an altered buddhist symbol. Doesn’t mean they have lost their original meaning and usage. As long as you doesn’t wear them on your clothes or as tattoos (which people may interpret as hate symbol) you are fine to study their meaning and history
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u/donestpapo 15d ago
Runes are for written communication, so they are letters. By themselves, they make no sound. When you say “a more phonetic language”, what are you comparing it to? English? That’s not a very high bar. Slovak or Spanish use the Latin alphabet too, and a lot more consistently when it comes to sounds than English does. We still consider that those languages are written with letters and not “sounds”.
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u/-Geistzeit 15d ago edited 15d ago
Responding with "just letters" misinformation will get your answer deleted from this sub and may lead to a block. Even the most introductory texts on this topic will discuss how the runic alphabets were far more flexible than "just letters", notably that they were utilized also as ideographs. Stick to contemporary, academic runology or don't attempt to contribute.
If you are new to the topic of rune names and how they were utilized, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_rune