Runes meanings full#

Investigating the situation, he discovers that a whale bone with a crudely carved rune symbol has been placed in her bed, probably by a local boy in an attempt to help the girl. In the Saga of Egil, the warrior encounters a farmer whose daughter is very ill. Odin, finder of the runes, along with the goddess Freya, was considered expert in the practice, and as we know the Norns used the runes to control fate.Ī story from the Norse sagas also points to the magical powers of the runes. The Romans, observing pre-Vikings Germanic people, observed that they used the runes for magical purposes and record practices such as carving runic symbols onto sticks and throwing them on the ground to see a pattern.Ī Viking poem hints at the same practice in the Viking age, describing wooden chips carved with the runes being tossed into blood in order to divine the future.įrom stories of Norse mythology, it seems that the magical art of Seidr, which involved discerning and changing fate, involved the runes. Runes in the VKNG Collection Nordic Rune Magic Logr (power of water) – L – Formlessness, Chaos.

Madhr (man) – M – Augmentation, Support.Bjarkan (birch twig) – B – Fertility, Growth, Sustenance.Ar (a good year) – A – Plenty, Good Harvest.Naudhr (need) – N – Need, Unfulfilled Desire.Raeidh (riding) – R – Movement, Work, Growth.Óss (god/mouth) – O – Inspiration, Wisdom.Ur (drizzle/slurry) – U – Strength of Will.These insights have all been garnered from rune poems documented from Iceland and Norway that provide a short description of each of the runes. Also given are the sound associated with each rune, and the general significance of the rune.

But each rune also had a philosophical and magical significance.īelow is a list of the names of the individual Norse runes and what those names mean in Old Norse. They were used in this way for mundane notes and records as required. Like our own familiar alphabet, the runes symbolize sounds, that can be used to spell out different words. This probably explains the sharp straight lines of the alphabet, which would have been easier to inscribe on hard surfaces than rounded letters. The runes were generally carved into stone, wood, bone, metal or other hard surfaces. More than 6,000 inscriptions using Younger Futhark symbols survive from around Scandinavia. While few examples of Elder Futhark in use survive, Younger Futhark seems to have been used widely. These runes were used until about AD1200, when they were completely replaced by Latin due to the influence of Christianity. This was a shorter alphabet of only 16 runic symbols, and there were three slightly different versions of the alphabet in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. With the rise of the Vikings, Scandinavian languages began to change and Elder Futhark was replaced by Younger Futhark from about AD800.

Runes meanings full#

This alphabet was certainly used in Scandinavia as a full set of the 24 runic symbols has been found on the Kylver stone in Sweden. The first Germanic rune alphabet, known as Elder Futhark, emerged in about the first century AD. Linguists suggest that the runes were adopted by Northern Europeans from early Italic alphabets. It is unclear from Norse mythology whether the runes simply came to him from a combination of the trauma of the ordeal and looking into the heart of the cosmos, or whether they were in some way sent up to him from the Well of Urd, which is located at the base of Yggdrasil.Īccording to Norse mythology, this is where the Norns (the fates in Norse Mythology) live, and they carve runes onto the Tree of Life itself in order to write the fates of men. He then shared that knowledge with mankind. In this story from Norse mythology, he willingly hung himself from Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, for nine days while pierced with his own spear in order to gain knowledge of the runes. According to Norse mythology it was Odin, king of the gods, and god of wisdom and war, that gained knowledge of the runes. The word rune comes from the Germanic word run, which means secret or whisper.

Read on to learn more about the origins of the Nordic runes, the meanings of individual runes, and how the Vikings used the runes. Indeed, the Vikings themselves thought that these symbols, that they also used for the mundane such as commerce and politics, carried magical powers. Almost as famous as Viking warriors are the Nordic runes, evocative symbols that have a feel of magic about them.