Runes are the letters of the early Germanic peoples. The word meant “secret” or “whisper”: the letters were used for writing, for carving names and charms on objects, and, in later tradition, for divination.
Runes were made to be cut into hard surfaces: wood, bone, antler, stone and metal. That is why they are built from straight strokes, mostly vertical staves with short slanting branches, and why they avoid long horizontal lines that would follow the grain of a wooden stick and split it. Most runic writing was on wood, and almost all of that has rotted away, so what survives today is mostly stone, metal and bone.
Most inscriptions are short and practical: the owner of a comb or a spearhead, the maker of a brooch, the name of someone remembered on a memorial stone. Some are charms or curses. Each rune also had a name, a whole word, so a single carved letter could stand for a sound or, for a reader who knew the tradition, for the idea in its name.
The oldest runic alphabet has 24 runes and is named from its first six letters, F, U, Th, A, R and K, just as “alphabet” is named from alpha and beta. It is traditionally split into three groups of eight, the aettir (singular aett, roughly “family”), named for the first rune of each: Freyr’s, Hagal’s and Tyr’s. Every rune stands for a sound and also carries a word that names it:
The runes in this app are drawn from the Elder Futhark, but real inscriptions from the period are still in museums and fields across Northern Europe. A few well-known ones, with approximate dates:
Runes changed with the people who used them. Around 800 CE, in Scandinavia, the alphabet shrank to 16 runes, the Younger Futhark, as the spoken language changed, and one rune then had to cover several sounds. In England and Frisia the Anglo-Saxons went the other way and grew the alphabet to more than 30 runes, the futhorc. Rune Reading uses the Elder Futhark, the oldest and most widely used set for modern divination.
No ancient description of how runes were cast for divination survives. Modern rune reading is a revival, built on the rune names, on the medieval Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, and on twentieth-century practice. That does not make it less useful as a way to reflect on a question, but it is worth knowing which parts are old.
Each reading draws runes from the bag of 24 without replacement, so a rune never appears twice. Every rune has its name, its sound (click the speaker icon on a drawn rune to hear its name), its old meaning, and a short upright and reversed reading written for this app. Treat a reading as a mirror for your own judgment rather than a verdict.