Runes in Old Norse literature
Óðinn hanging nine nights to win the runes, victory runes carved on a sword hilt, a curse cut in three staves, a sick girl and a badly carved charm. All four are real texts. None of them is a contemporary account.
Almost everything people believe about runes as magic comes from about five passages of Old Norse literature. They repay reading in full, both on their own account and because they are constantly quoted at second hand and out of shape. This page sets out what each one says.
The caveat, stated once
The Rúnatal: Óðinn wins the runes
This is the origin story, and it is the single most quoted passage about runes there is. It sits near the end of Hávamál, the long wisdom poem of the Poetic Edda, at stanzas 139–146 in Bellows's numbering, which is the numbering you will meet online, because his is the translation that circulates freely. Editions following the manuscript order run one lower, 138–145: Bellows takes the closing stanza Ljóðalok from the very end of the poem and places it before the Rúnatal, so everything after it shifts up by one.
I know that I hung on a windswept tree nine whole nights, wounded by a spear and given to Óðinn, myself to myself, on that tree of which no one knows from what roots it runs. They gave me no bread, nor any horn to drink from. I peered down. I took up the runes, screaming I took them, and I fell back from there.– Hávamál, the Rúnatal (our translation)
What follows is less famous and more revealing. Óðinn is given nine mighty songs and a draught of the precious mead, and then the poem turns into a catechism: do you know how to carve, how to read, how to colour, how to test? The runes themselves are said to have been made by the great powers and cut by Óðinn. The passage closes with a warning against overdoing it: better not to ask than to sacrifice too much.
The Rúnatal is a real text, in a real manuscript, and it plainly connects runes with Óðinn, with sacrifice, and with knowledge won at a price. Nobody disputes that.
What it is evidence of is another matter. Hávamál is usually dated to the 10th century at the earliest and survives only in a 13th-century manuscript. Whether the Rúnatal preserves an ancient tradition about the origin of writing, or is a poetic composition of the late Viking Age looking back at a script already old, is argued and unresolved.
The Ljóðatal, and the thing everyone gets wrong about it
Immediately after the Rúnatal comes the Ljóðatal, stanzas 147–165 in the same numbering: a list of eighteen charms the speaker claims to know. I know a first, I know a second, and so on. It is the passage most often described as "the eighteen rune spells".
It is not that. The eighteen charms are songs, not runes, and the list is not attached to an alphabet at any point. Runes are explicitly mentioned in only one of the eighteen: the twelfth, where the speaker carves and colours runes so that a hanged man will come down and talk with him. The other seventeen say nothing about writing at all.
Why this matters
Sigrdrífumál: the victory runes
In Sigrdrífumál the valkyrie Sigrdrífa wakes and instructs the hero Sigurðr in runes. She names several kinds: victory runes to be cut on a sword and Týr named twice, ale-runes, birth-runes, sea-runes, limb-runes, speech-runes, mind-runes. And she lists a startling range of surfaces to cut them on, from a shield and a horse's hoof to a bear's paw and the god Bragi's tongue.
This is the source for the widely repeated claim that repeated tiwaz runes meant victory. It is a good story and a 13th-century manuscript poem, and no inscription clearly matches the instruction. Notice the list of surfaces too: whatever else it is, it is not a practical procedure.
Skírnismál: a curse in three staves
In Skírnismál, Freyr's servant Skírnir fails to persuade the giantess Gerðr and turns to threats. He tells her he carves þurs for her, and three staves besides: lewdness, frenzy and unbearable longing, and that he can scrape them off again as easily as he cut them.
This is the literary root of the association between the þurs rune and harm directed at women, which the Norwegian rune poem echoes independently. Two traditions pointing the same way is better than one, though both are medieval, and the Elder Futhark rune they descend from is several centuries older than either.
Egils saga: the runes carved wrong
The most quoted saga episode about runes is also the most quotable. Egill Skallagrímsson finds a young woman gravely ill; a farmer's son has cut runes on a piece of whalebone to cure her and made a mess of it. Egill scrapes the runes off, burns the shavings, cuts new ones, and she recovers. He then delivers the line the episode is remembered for: no one should carve runes unless he knows how to read them well.
Taken as a description of practice this is 13th-century fiction about a 10th-century poet. Taken as a description of attitude it is more useful: it assumes an audience for whom carving runes badly was a recognisable kind of incompetence, which is a small but real datum about how ordinary the skill was.
Weighing them up
| Text | Written down | Describes | Good evidence for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rúnatal (Hávamál) | 13th-c. manuscript, poem perhaps 10th-c. | Óðinn winning the runes by sacrifice | A Norse mythology of writing. Not a historical origin. |
| Ljóðatal (Hávamál) | Same manuscript | Eighteen charms | Charm-lore. Only one of the eighteen mentions runes at all. |
| Sigrdrífumál | 13th-c. manuscript | Named categories of rune and where to cut them | What medieval Icelanders thought runes could do. |
| Skírnismál | 13th-c. manuscript | A curse cut in þurs plus three staves | A tradition also visible in the Norwegian rune poem. |
| Egils saga | 13th-c., about the 10th | A healing charm carved wrong and re-cut | The idea that runes could be got wrong by an amateur. |
None of this makes the literature worthless: it is the richest material there is on how runes were imagined. It makes it a different kind of source from an inscription, which is the distinction the evidence labels on this site exist to keep visible. For what the inscriptions themselves actually say, see how runes were used.
Questions this guide answers
- Did Odin hang on a tree to get the runes?
- That is what the Rúnatal section of Hávamál says: nine nights on a windswept tree, wounded by a spear and given to himself, after which he takes up the runes screaming. It is a real medieval text. It is a myth about the origin of writing, not a historical account of where the runic alphabet came from.
- What are the eighteen rune spells in Hávamál?
- There are no eighteen rune spells. The Ljóðatal lists eighteen charms, and runes are mentioned in only one of them, the twelfth. The idea that each charm belongs to a rune comes from Guido von List's invented Armanen system, not from the poem.
- Is Egils saga evidence that runes were used for healing?
- It is evidence that a 13th-century Icelandic author expected his audience to find the idea plausible. Egill is a 10th-century figure and the saga is some three hundred years later, so it is testimony about belief rather than about practice.
- Which Norse text is the best evidence about runes?
- None of them, if you want to know what runic writing was actually for. The inscriptions are the evidence for that, and they are overwhelmingly mundane. The literature is the evidence for what runes meant to people looking back at them.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.