The origins and layers of the tradition: how runic knowledge has come down to us

The first lecture established the approach: the runes are not a set of symbols with interpretations, but a living tradition in which sign, force, and meaning are inseparable. Now a natural question arises. If the runic tradition is precisely such, then how has it come down to us. What do we actually know about it, what is the foundation of contemporary practice, which sources are reliable and which are reconstruction. This question is not an academic digression that may be skipped. Without a clear seeing of what the tradition stands on, the practitioner risks one of two things: either taking literally what is a late reconstruction, or rejecting valuable knowledge as "not authentic." The second lecture is devoted to giving a sober and respectful picture of the runic sources.

Two planes of the tradition: outer and inner

The first and most important distinction concerns the two layers in which the runic tradition exists. The outer layer is what has remained in material form. First, there are the inscriptions on stone, metal, wood, and bone. Second, the texts in manuscripts. Third, the poems. Fourth, the sagas. Fifth, the descriptions of rituals preserved in later sources. This layer can be studied by philological and archaeological methods, it can be dated, classified, translated. It is objective in the sense that it does not depend on the subjective experience of any particular person.

The inner layer is what has never been recorded in full and never will be. This is the living work with the forces, the modes of entering the field of a rune, the bodily and energetic nuances of practice, the personal relationships with each rune. This layer was transmitted from one practitioner to another through direct interaction, through observation, through shared work. It is not objective in the sense given above, but it is real: without it the outer layer remains dead material.

The error of many contemporary approaches is that they recognise only the outer layer. Everything not recorded in the sources is declared "invention" or "New Age." The opposite error is to declare the inner layer self-sufficient and to ignore the external sources as "unnecessary ballast." Both positions are mistaken. The outer layer without the inner is archaeology. The inner layer without the outer is fantasy. A living tradition is their union, in which the outer serves as support and verification, and the inner serves as the core and the meaning.

The first historical layer: early inscriptions

The oldest datable runic inscriptions belong to the second century of the common era. The earliest undisputed example is a bone comb from the Danish island of Funen, carrying a single carved name in the Elder Futhark, dated to around the year 160. They are found across present-day Denmark, southern Sweden, and northern Germany, on household objects, weapons, and ornaments, and later on stones. This is the initial period of the existence of the Elder Futhark, which lasts approximately until the eighth century, with the earliest complete attestation of the row appearing on a Gotland stone of around the year 400.

What these inscriptions tell us. They are short, often consisting only of the name of the owner of an object, the name of the master who made it, or one or two words that had a particular meaning for the one who carved the inscription. Among them are inscriptions with actual runic names (that is, with the names of the runes themselves used as words of power), inscriptions that look like magical formulas, and inscriptions of a protective or commemorative character.

What these inscriptions do not give us. They give us no systematic description of the runic tradition. No manual, no instructions, no list of meanings. The bearers of the tradition at that time did not leave us theoretical texts about the runes, because such texts simply were not written in their culture. Knowledge was transmitted not through written instruction but through belonging to a kin, a community, a particular tradition of living practice. What has reached us in the form of inscriptions is only the visible part of a much larger submerged iceberg.

The second historical layer: the runic poems

Centuries after the emergence of the Elder Futhark, texts appear that are the first systematic source on the meanings of the runes. These are the runic poems, preserved in three principal variants: the Old English, the Old Norwegian, and the Old Icelandic. Each poem is a short verse description of the runes, in which several lines are devoted to each rune.

It is important to understand several things about these poems. First: they were recorded in a later period, in some cases centuries after the runes had ceased to be a living magical practice in open form. Second: the Old English poem describes the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, which differs from the Elder Futhark, while the Old Icelandic and the Old Norwegian describe the Younger Futhark, which also differs. No surviving rune poem describes the Elder Futhark itself, and the meanings of the elder row therefore have to be reconstructed by careful comparison across the three poems and the inscriptional record. For this reason a direct transfer of meanings from the runic poems onto the runes of the Elder Futhark demands caution. Third: the poems are not open interpretations for the uninitiated. They are built on the principle of riddles, in which each line at once names and conceals, gives a hint rather than an explanation. To understand a runic poem fully is possible only for one who already has experience of working with the corresponding rune.

Despite these limitations, the runic poems remain one of the most valuable sources. They show which associations, images, and meanings were bound to each rune in the consciousness of that time. They give firm ground for further work, even if they do not by themselves exhaust the meaning of the runes.

The third historical layer: the Eddic texts and the sagas

A separate layer is the texts that are not directly devoted to the runes but contain important information about their world. These are above all the Eddic poems (the collection of Old Icelandic poetic works about gods and heroes) and the sagas (prose narratives of events and persons). In these texts the runes are mentioned in various contexts: as a magical instrument, as a means of healing, as a means of influencing events, as a sign of fate.

The most famous fragment that directly describes the acquisition of the runes is an episode from an Eddic poem in which the supreme god of the Northern pantheon obtains the runes through an ordeal: he hangs for nine nights on the world tree, given to himself by himself, wounded by his own spear, without bread and without a drink from a horn, and at the extreme point of suffering takes up the runes with a cry and falls back from the tree. This is not merely a legend about the origin of the runes. It is a key to understanding how the runes come to a person: not as information that can be learned from a manual, but as the outcome of an inner ordeal that changes the one who undergoes it.

Another important fragment, often cited in connection with the runes, is the enumeration of the "eighteen songs" (incantations) that the same god received through his ordeal. These songs are not named directly by the names of the runes, but their descriptions give a sense of the spectrum of possibilities of runic magic: healing, protection, release from bonds, the quenching of fire, the calming of storm, the seeing of the future, influence on the heart of another person. This does not mean that the contemporary practitioner should expect precisely such effects from the runes. It means that the runic tradition from the very beginning encompassed a wide spectrum of spheres of life, from healing to seeing.

Separately the sagas deserve mention, in which concrete cases of the use of the runes are described. In one of the most famous Icelandic sagas the hero carves runes on a drinking horn and smears them with his own blood to expose poison in the drink, and the horn breaks open. In a separate episode of the same saga, the hero finds a young woman wasting from runes wrongly carved on a piece of whalebone by an unskilled neighbour. He scrapes off the bad runes, burns the bone, carves a correct working, and the woman recovers. These two episodes (the first an act of grounded defence against an attack, the second a correction of harm caused by untrained work) are valuable not as instructions but as illustrations of how the runes were perceived in a living context: as a real force that one must know how to handle.

The fourth layer: the later runic tradition

After the official decline of the runic tradition in its usual form (approximately from the thirteenth century in most regions, in the wake of the Christianisation of Scandinavia and the gradual displacement of the runic script by the Latin one), runic knowledge did not disappear entirely. It continued to exist in folk magical practices, in calendar runes, in protective signs on houses, tools, and household objects. In some isolated regions (especially in Iceland, where a continuous tradition of magical manuscripts has come down from the sixteenth century into the modern period, and also in parts of Sweden and Norway) elements of runic practice were preserved into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century within the folk milieu.

This layer is difficult to evaluate. On the one hand, it contains genuine elements of the ancient tradition that were transmitted in unbroken continuity. On the other hand, it has undergone considerable influence from Christianity, folkloric overlay, and local transformations. Some elements of late folk runic magic are valuable and authentic, others are already derivative or simply erroneous. To distinguish between them is possible only for one who has sufficient knowledge both of the ancient sources and of living practice.

A characteristic feature of this layer is its syncretism. The post-medieval magical manuscripts of the Northern world place runes and runic-derived signs alongside invocations to Christian figures and to the Northern gods, alongside herbal instructions, alongside symbols that look runic but whose origin is post-runic. This mixture is not in itself proof of corruption. It is the natural shape of a practice that continued for several centuries in a culture whose surface religion had changed. The practitioner who approaches this layer with a categorical "ancient only" filter will throw out a great deal that is in fact alive, and the practitioner who approaches it with no filter at all will accept as ancient many elements that were added in much later centuries. The fourth principle of this lecture (one's own living practice as the final verification, with the early sources as frame) is the only stable way through the layer.

The fifth layer: the twentieth-century revival

Apart from the others stands the question of the contemporary revival of the runic tradition, which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and gathered full force in the second half of the twentieth. In this period there appeared a great quantity of books, schools, systems, and authorial interpretations of the runes. Among them are valuable works that have genuinely reconstructed and revived the tradition on a firm basis. Among them are also many dubious or frankly fanciful constructions that present as ancient knowledge things invented by the author himself.

How to orient oneself in this material. The first criterion: does the author rely on primary sources (inscriptions, poems, Eddic texts, sagas), or build his system on his own speculative constructions. The second criterion: does the author leave room for the reader's personal experience, or impose a rigid system of meanings. The third criterion: does the author keep the connection with the wider context of the Northern tradition (cosmology, ethics, the relation to fate), or tear the runes out of this context as an isolated instrument. The fourth criterion: does the author have experience of living practice, or only theoretical knowledge. As a rule, this is evident from the very style of the text.

A separate problem of the twentieth century is that runic symbolism was appropriated by certain political movements that used it for their own ends. This led to certain runes and runic symbols acquiring heavy associations that do not belong to the tradition itself but which one must know in order not to be perceived wrongly. Working with the runes in the contemporary world demands a clear inner distinction between the living tradition and the political overlays that have nothing whatsoever to do with the tradition itself. The detailed treatment of this danger, and of the inverse error of being so wary of the contamination that one cannot work with the runes at all, belongs to the fifteenth lecture.

How to work with the sources without falling into extremes

A sober relation to the sources demands at once respect and criticality. Respect for what has come down to us across the centuries, and criticality toward one's own interpretations. A few practical principles.

The first principle: the primary sources (inscriptions, runic poems, Eddic texts, sagas) have precedence over the secondary (contemporary manuals, authorial interpretations). This does not mean that the secondary sources have no value, but if there is a contradiction, precedence is given to the primary.

The second principle: what is not fixed in the sources is not necessarily an invention, but requires personal verification through experience. If a contemporary author offers an interpretation that is not present in the ancient sources, that interpretation may be a valuable discovery or an error. To distinguish between the two is possible only through living practice.

The third principle: contradictions between different sources need not be reconciled artificially. If the runic poems give different accents in the interpretation of one and the same rune, this does not mean that one of them is "correct" and the other "incorrect." It means that the rune has a wide field of meanings, within which different aspects manifested themselves in different cultural contexts.

The fourth principle: one's own living practice is the final verification. No text, even the most ancient, can replace the experience of working with a rune in one's own body and consciousness. Texts set the frame, verify, warn against errors, but the core of knowledge comes through living it through.

Why this matters for the practitioner

It may seem that the second lecture is primarily informational and does not relate directly to practice. This is not the case. The way in which a practitioner relates to the sources directly affects the quality of his work. If he takes every word of an ancient text literally as absolute truth, he loses the space for personal experience. If he ignores the sources and relies only on his own feelings, he loses support and falls into his own projections. But if he holds at once both respect for the tradition and openness to his own experience, he can walk a path that is at once rooted and alive.

As a small introductory exercise that can be done after this lecture: choose one primary fragment about the runes (for example, the description of the acquisition of the runes in the Eddic poem) and simply read it attentively, without trying to understand it quickly. Allow the words to touch you not as information but as image. Notice what comes in reply: a bodily reaction, an association, a question. This is not a practice in the strict sense, it is a way of establishing personal contact with a primary source, without intermediaries. Such contact is important whenever the practitioner turns to an ancient text.

Conclusion

The second lecture was to establish a sober relation to what the runic tradition stands on. Now we have a picture of the sources and of their possibilities, we know what to expect from each source, we see the difference between the outer and the inner layer of the tradition. This foundation will allow us, in the lectures that follow, to speak of concrete themes (the structure of the Elder Futhark, the aettir, cosmology) with complete clarity about what we know precisely, what we reconstruct cautiously, and what remains open to the practitioner's personal experience.