Divination: Runes overview.

 Dear Reader,

I am not the most proficient or strictly by the book reader of runes. At the same time, I have an intuitive method that seems to work pretty well (as long as I am not struck by performance anxiety). Runes are the basis of a number of alphabetical systems. They are the precursor of the Icelandic, Norwegian, Scandinavian, Finnish, and other Nordic written languages. They are also the precursor of the English language. There were runes that were still in use in the English language up until early Modern English, such as the rune Thorn as a short hand for the dipthong 'th'. If we look at early English and Anglo-Saxon we will find a combination of the Latin alphabet and the Younger Futhark used in manuscripts. This period has inconclusive evidence that they were used as a divination system.

Indeed, the only historical mention of runes as a divination system is mudded by the fact that Tacitus doesn't say what exactly is inscribed upon the slips of wood that the Germanic peoples he was interacting with were using to perform their divination. He doesn't give a very good description of the divination practice. This is part of the reason why there are historical questions if runes were used as divination tools. There are some indications with the Rune Poems that were preserved in the historical documents of the post-Christianization era of the Nordic and Germanic regions that this is a distinct possibility. But the evidence is very difficult to discern.

Ralph Blum wrote The Book of Runes in the late 1980s and published in the mid-1990s. With this book's popularity, the use of runes as a divination tool exploded. Suddenly, there was a great many people who were claiming that Blum was accurate and others claiming that Blum was inaccurate in his portrayal of the Runes. More books about the runes and runic magic came out during the late 1990s and early 2000s. They muddied the waters further because they were not academic texts but tried to pass themselves off as having the authority of such. It was not a good period for the research into runic magic and runic studies. Some authors, like Ann Moura in her Green Witchcraft series presented the runes as a magical short hand script for accomplishing things. Other authors, like Diana Paxton in her various works, did their best to provide a more nuanced method of using runes. 

While there were authors in the pagan community throwing out just about anything that would stick to the proverbial wall, there was some serious academic research going on into runic magic and the practices of the Sami peoples (the last indigenous practitioners of native religion in that part of the world). That research was largely ignored outside of the academic circles because it didn't immediately clarify the use of runes. As a result, multiple systems of runic magic and divination have arisen completely divorced from all but the barest historical basis. (Now, this does not mean that these systems don't work. It just means that they're not the same as what the ancestors used. And that's ok because we live in a world that is very different from the ancestors and have different needs. I think that the gods answer our needs and do their best to meet us where we are rather than expect us to recreate lost practices whole cloth.)

I will be providing, in this series of posts, my interpretation of the Elder Futhark runes. These are, as far as I can tell, the ones used by the Germanic and Teutonic tribes that Tacitus interacted with. I suspect that they were used in divination cut into fruit bearing tree slips. I do not know if they were stained with blood as some 'traditionalists' insist or some dye like ocher. I don't have access to a rune set that is cut into slips of wood from a fruit bearing tree. I have the tile set from Ralph Blum's book set that I had bought ages ago when it first came out. It's rather worn and one of them is cracked. I also have a set that I made using pebbles and a set that is a bit larger that I made using glow in the dark 'pebbles'. In the case of all three sets, I've gotten the same results. This leads me to believe that the materials that your rune set are made from does not impact their effectiveness. At some point in time, because I'm half magpie and I collect things, I will probably acquire or make a set of runes from slips of a fruit bearing tree. If I do this, I will report back any finding as to how this impacts their effectiveness.