What are runes?

Runes are the characters of a family of alphabets used across the Germanic-speaking world from roughly the second century AD until the end of the Middle Ages. They were carved into wood, bone, metal and stone, and they were used for the same purposes writing is normally used for: names, ownership marks, memorials, messages, prayers, jokes and insults.

That last sentence is the part most popular writing leaves out. The single most common misconception about runes is that they were primarily magical or oracular. The surviving evidence does not support that. Of the several thousand runic inscriptions we have, the overwhelming majority are mundane.

The short version

• They are letters. Each rune stands for a sound, and they were used to spell words in a spoken language.
• There is no single runic alphabet. There are at least four, used in different places and centuries. See all runic alphabets compared.
• The Vikings used the Younger Futhark, a 16-rune alphabet. The 24-rune Elder Futhark that appears on most "Viking rune" charts had gone out of use before the Viking Age started.
• Each rune also has a name, and those names are words: "hail", "ice", "birch", "need". That is where most modern rune meanings come from.
• Runic writing outlasted the Vikings by four hundred years. Medieval runes were an ordinary everyday script in Scandinavia until about 1500.

What the surviving inscriptions actually say

The largest single body of runic material is the Bryggen find from Bergen in Norway: several hundred inscribed wooden sticks recovered from a medieval wharf. They include business correspondence, ownership tags, Latin tags, love notes, an obscene verse or two, and a message that translates roughly as "Gyða says go home".

The Viking-Age runestones of Sweden, of which there are thousands, are mostly memorials. The formula is remarkably stable: X raised this stone in memory of Y, his father or brother or son. Some add where the man died, which is how we know about expeditions to the east and to England.

Where the magical reputation comes from

It is not baseless. A small number of inscriptions do appear to be charms, curses or protective formulas, and Old Norse literature contains passages about carving runes for specific effects: Óðinn hanging nine nights to win them, victory runes cut on a sword hilt, a curse in three staves. Those texts are set out on runes in Old Norse literature.

But that literature was written down in the thirteenth century, centuries after the alphabets it describes, by Christian scribes recording a tradition already at a distance from them. It tells us what medieval Icelanders believed about runes. It is weaker evidence for what people in fourth-century Denmark were actually doing.

Where the word comes from

Old Norse rún and Old English rūn both mean something like "secret" or "mystery", and the same root gives modern German raunen, "to whisper". That etymology is sound, and it is the strongest single argument for the runes having had some esoteric dimension.

It also needs careful handling. Writing itself is a kind of secret to a society where few people can read, and the same word covers "a written character" and "a confidence" in several early Germanic languages. The etymology proves the association existed; it does not settle what people did with it.

How to go deeper

Start with the alphabet you actually care about. If your interest is Vikings, read the Younger Futhark. If it is modern rune reading, that is built on the Elder Futhark. If you want to write English, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc fits best. Then look at the rune poems, which are the primary evidence for what the runes were called.