Runes in popular culture
God of War, Assassin's Creed, Vikings and Tolkien have done more to shape what people expect runes to look like than every runestone in Sweden combined.
Most people meet runes through a screen first and a book second, if at all. Take that seriously rather than sneering at it: popular culture is the main channel through which this material reaches anyone, and it shapes what people arrive expecting.
Tolkien
Tolkien was a professional philologist, and his runic usage is the most linguistically careful in popular culture. The Hobbit uses real Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, adapted where English needed it. The Lord of the Rings introduces the Cirth, an invented runic-looking script with its own internal logic.
The distinction matters: the Cirth are not runes. They are a constructed alphabet designed to look like runes, and Tolkien was entirely explicit about it. The Dwarvish "runes" on Balin's tomb inside Moria are Cirth, not futhorc. The famous West-gate inscription is not runic at all: it is Elvish tengwar writing Sindarin, a different script and a different language.
God of War (2018) and Ragnarök (2022)
The games use runic text extensively and with visible care. The environmental writing largely uses runic characters correctly, transliterating meaningful text, and the art direction draws on real Norse material culture rather than generic fantasy.
The main liberty taken is the usual one: alphabets get mixed, and characters appear together that no single tradition used at once. This is aesthetic rather than careless (the games are not trying to be a textbook), but it is why a rune copied from the game may not belong to the alphabet you think it does.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla (2020)
Set in ninth-century England and Norway, so Younger Futhark is the historically correct alphabet, and the game does use it in places. It also uses Elder Futhark and futhorc characters where they suit the visual design.
The game drove an enormous spike in searches for rune meanings on release, which is a reasonable illustration of how much this material depends on release cycles nobody in the field controls.
Vikings and Vikings: Valhalla
The television series takes considerably more licence. Runes appear as tattoos, as body paint and as decoration in ways that go well beyond what the archaeological record supports: runic tattoos in particular are not attested for the Viking Age.
Popular use of the vegvísir as a "Viking" symbol accelerated sharply alongside this kind of television, and alongside its adoption by Icelandic musicians, despite the design's first appearance being in an Icelandic manuscript of 1860.
What pop culture gets consistently wrong
| The trope | The reality |
|---|---|
| Runes glow when magic happens | They are letters. They do not do anything. |
| Vikings covered in runic tattoos | No solid evidence for runic tattooing in the Viking Age. |
| One universal runic alphabet | At least four, separated by centuries and countries. See the comparison. |
| Elder Futhark labelled "Viking runes" | The Elder Futhark was obsolete in Scandinavia before the Viking Age began. |
| The vegvísir as a Viking compass | First recorded in 1860, in Iceland, and it is not a compass. |
| Runes as a secret code only initiates could read | Medieval Bergen produced hundreds of everyday runic notes, including shopping-list-grade material. |
This is not a complaint
Questions this guide answers
- Are the runes in God of War real?
- Largely yes as characters, and much of the environmental text transliterates meaningful content. The games do mix alphabets for visual effect, so an individual rune may not belong to the tradition you assume.
- Did Tolkien use real runes?
- In The Hobbit, yes: adapted Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. The Cirth used in The Lord of the Rings are an invented script designed to look runic, and Tolkien said so.
- Is the Vikings TV series accurate about runes?
- Less so than the games. Runic tattoos and body paint feature heavily and are not supported by evidence, and the series helped popularise the vegvísir as a Viking symbol despite its 19th-century origin.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.