Rune Meanings, Then and Now: All 24 Elder Futhark Runes in Plain English, Upright and Reversed, with the Medieval Rune Poems

Every rune guide tells you what the runes mean today. This one also shows you what the oldest writings about them actually say, and where today's meanings came from.

For each of the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, this book quotes every verse the three medieval rune poems give it, English, Norwegian and Icelandic, in Bruce Dickins's 1915 scholarly translation, and sets them beside the reading rune guides give it now. Sometimes the two agree. Often they do not. The wealth rune is a comfort in one poem and a cause of quarrels among kin in the other two. The rune read today as creativity is a torch in the English poem and a sore fatal to children in both Norse ones. Of the 24, eight are a close match, thirteen a partial one, and three carry a modern meaning found in no old verse at all.

It also says plainly what most rune books leave out. No book written before the twentieth century teaches anyone to read runes for fortune-telling. Today's meanings, reversed readings, spreads and the blank rune were put together in the twentieth century and reached most readers through a mass-market rune book of 1982, which popularized a practice already found in sets and books before it. This book tells that story with names and dates, and treats modern rune reading fairly, as a tradition in its own right.

Every entry gives you the same things in the same order: a quick box with today's usual meaning and whether the rune reverses; the rune's shape, name and sound, and how to say it; the old verses, quoted exactly and explained; the modern reading, upright and reversed, showing how widely each word is backed; a one-line verdict on how closely then and now agree; and two questions to sit with. Each rune is drawn clearly at the head of its entry.

You can start on the first day. A one-rune first reading comes before the first entry, and Part Four covers your rune set, casting and drawing, reversed runes, the blank rune, and three layouts with a worked example. At the back: where the runes came from, from the oldest inscriptions to the Viking Age, with a rune row from a medieval manuscript and the sixth-century Vadstena bracteate; where today's meanings came from; how a few rune shapes were misused as hate symbols, and how this book handles them; a quick reference to all 24 runes; a glossary; and further reading.

There are no predictions in this book. A rune is offered as a prompt for reflection, never a forecast, and nothing here is medical, financial or legal advice.

For the reader holding a first bag of runes who wants to know what they mean, and for the reader who has cast them for years and would like to know which parts are old and which are new.