How many runes are in the Elder Futhark?

There are 24 runes in the Elder Futhark, arranged in three groups of eight called aettir (singular aett). The three aettir are named after Freyr, Hagalaz, and Tyr in most modern runic traditions.

What is the difference between the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark?

The Elder Futhark contains 24 symbols and was used across much of the Germanic world from roughly the second to eighth centuries CE. The Younger Futhark, which developed in Scandinavia around the ninth century CE, reduced the alphabet to 16 runes and is the script most closely associated with the Viking Age.

Did the Norse actually use runes for divination?

There is historical evidence that runes were used for more than simple writing: inscriptions suggest protective and ritual functions, and the Roman writer Tacitus described a Germanic lot-casting practice using marked wooden slips in the first century CE. Whether this resembled modern runic divination precisely is not certain, as most contemporary rune-reading methods were codified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What does Odin's hanging on Yggdrasil have to do with runes?

The Old Norse Havamal poem describes Odin hanging on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine nights, sacrificing himself to himself, before he perceived the runes below him and seized them. This myth frames the runes as wisdom won through ordeal rather than simply an alphabet, and it gives the runic tradition a distinctly initiatory character.

Elder Futhark Runes: History, Meanings, and Divination

The Elder Futhark is the oldest surviving runic alphabet, a set of 24 symbols that served the Germanic peoples of northern Europe simultaneously as a writing system, a magical toolkit, and a divinatory oracle. The name Futhark comes from the first six letters of the runic sequence: F, U, Th, A, R, K. The word “elder” distinguishes it from later runic systems, particularly the Younger Futhark of the Viking Age and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, which expanded the alphabet to accommodate the sounds of Old English.

Each rune in the Elder Futhark is not merely a phoneme. It carries a name, often a word in a Proto-Germanic or related language, and a cluster of associated meanings that extend far beyond the sound it represents. Fehu, the first rune, names cattle, and by extension wealth, abundance, and the management of material resources. Uruz, the second, names the aurochs, the wild ox, and carries meanings of strength, health, and untamed natural force. This layering of sound, word, image, and concept is what makes the runes powerful tools for contemplation and divination.

History and origins

The earliest Elder Futhark inscriptions date to approximately the second century CE. They appear on objects across a wide geographic area spanning Scandinavia, Germany, and the territories of other Germanic tribes, including sword fittings, jewellery, burial goods, and stone memorials. These early inscriptions demonstrate that the runes were already in widespread use by this period, but the origins of the script itself remain debated among scholars.

The most widely supported scholarly hypothesis is that the Elder Futhark derived from an Italic script, possibly the Old Italic alphabets used in northern Italy, that was adapted by Germanic peoples who had contact with Mediterranean culture. The adaptation transformed a writing system into something that also served ritual functions: the angular forms of runic letters were well suited to carving in wood or stone, and from very early times runic inscriptions appear in explicitly magical contexts.

The Havamal, a poem preserved in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript known as the Poetic Edda, contains Odin’s description of how he discovered the runes by hanging on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights without food or water, sacrificing himself to himself, until he saw the runes and seized them. This myth gives the runic tradition its foundational narrative: the runes are not invented but discovered, and their discovery costs something. Whether this myth reflects older oral tradition or reflects the Christianising period’s reframing of older practice is not known with certainty.

The use of runes for divination and magic persisted in Scandinavian folk culture well into the early modern period. Runic inscriptions on amulets, protective staves, and healing objects have been found from across the medieval Norse and Germanic world. In the nineteenth century, German Romantic scholars developed an intense scholarly and cultural interest in runes that unfortunately also fuelled nationalist and, eventually, National Socialist appropriation of runic symbolism. Contemporary practitioners of runic divination work to reclaim the symbols from this history, returning them to their pre-nationalist contexts.

The three aettir

The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark are traditionally organised into three groups of eight, called aettir. These groupings have both practical and mythological significance.

The first aett, associated with Freyr and Freyja, opens with Fehu (cattle, wealth) and moves through Uruz (aurochs, strength), Thurisaz (giant, force), Ansuz (a god, particularly Odin; communication), Raido (riding, journey), Kenaz (torch, knowledge, craft), Gebo (gift, exchange), and Wunjo (joy, harmony). These eight runes concern themselves broadly with the material and social dimensions of life.

The second aett, associated with Hagalaz or with the goddess Hel, begins with Hagalaz (hail, disruption, patterns beneath chaos) and continues through Nauthiz (need, constraint), Isa (ice, stillness, blockage), Jera (year, harvest, cycle), Eihwaz (yew tree, the axis of worlds), Perthro (lot cup, fate, hidden knowledge), Algiz (elk, protection), and Sowilo (sun, success, wholeness). This aett is concerned with the forces of change, challenge, and the hidden workings of fate.

The third aett, associated with Tyr, opens with Tiwaz (the god Tyr, justice, sacrifice for principle) and moves through Berkano (birch tree, growth, new beginnings), Ehwaz (horse, partnership, loyal movement), Mannaz (humanity, self, community), Laguz (water, flow, the unconscious), Ingwaz (the god Ing, potential, internal gestation), Dagaz (day, breakthrough, transformation), and Othala (ancestral land, heritage, what is truly yours). This aett engages the social, spiritual, and transpersonal dimensions of experience.

Rune meanings and divination

Contemporary runic divination draws on the historical record of runic meanings, including the Rune Poems (three medieval poems in Old English, Old Norwegian, and Old Icelandic that give verses for many of the runes), modern runic scholarship, and the living practice of those who have worked with runes for decades. The most influential twentieth-century systematisers of runic divination include Ralph Blum, whose 1982 Book of Runes introduced many English speakers to the practice, and Freya Aswynn, whose Northern Mysteries and Magick offers a more historically grounded approach.

Each rune functions as a symbol with a range of interrelated meanings rather than a single keyword. Fehu is cattle, moveable wealth, abundance, energy in motion, the management of what you have. Isa is ice: stillness, blockage, clarity through pause, the moment when things must stop moving before they can move again. Perthro is the lot cup or the dice cup, the symbol of chance, of what is hidden, of fate operating below the surface of what is visible. Practitioners work with these layered meanings through meditation, journalling, casting the runes, and studying the historical poems and myths associated with each symbol.

Working with the runes today

Rune sets are traditionally made from wood, though bone, antler, ceramic, and stone sets are also common. The Elder Futhark can also be worked with through writing the runes in a journal, meditating on individual symbols, or incorporating them into visual art and ritual. For divination, runes are often drawn one at a time from a bag or cast onto a cloth and read by which symbols fall face-up and how they relate spatially to one another.

The tradition of making your own rune set, carving or painting the symbols on wooden tiles and anointing them, remains a valued practice among many runic workers. The act of making creates a relationship with the symbols from the beginning.

In myth and popular culture

The myth of Odin’s acquisition of the runes is one of the most narratively distinctive origin stories in Norse mythology. The Havamal, preserved in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, describes Odin hanging on the World Tree for nine days and nights, wounded by his own spear, as a sacrifice of himself to himself, until he perceived the runes and seized them. This narrative differs from most divine gift-giving myths in that Odin does not receive the runes from a superior power but wins them through a form of initiatory ordeal. The runes are not invented or bestowed but discovered through suffering and sustained attention, a narrative that has given the runic tradition its characteristically initiatory character.

The Elder Futhark’s unhappy twentieth-century history includes its appropriation by the German National Socialist movement, which used SS runes and Sowilo staves as insignia, and various other runic symbols including Othala as ideological markers. This history, thoroughly documented by scholars including Stephen Flowers and Michael Moynihan, is not ancient but is recent and specific; it has no basis in the historical meaning of the symbols and represents a political misuse that contemporary practitioners work to address by returning the runes to their pre-nationalist contexts.

In popular fiction, the Elder Futhark appears most prominently in J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, which uses runic scripts throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as the writing system of the Dwarves. Tolkien adapted actual runic letterforms while changing their phonetic values, creating a system that is functionally runic in character while being distinctly his own. Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series, aimed at young adult readers, engages with Norse mythology and runic concepts through an accessible contemporary lens.

Myths and facts

Several persistent misunderstandings attach to the Elder Futhark and its use.

A common belief holds that runic divination is an ancient unbroken practice passed down continuously from pre-Christian Germanic peoples. Most contemporary runic divination methods were codified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on historical runic inscriptions and the Rune Poems but without a demonstrable unbroken chain of transmission.
The idea that each rune has a single definitive meaning is contradicted by both the historical record and the nature of the symbols themselves. Each rune carries a cluster of interrelated meanings that shift with context, and different runic scholars and practitioners have developed genuinely different interpretive traditions.
Runes are sometimes presented as exclusively Scandinavian. The Elder Futhark was used across the entire Germanic world, including peoples in what are now Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, not only in Scandinavia, and predates the Viking Age by several centuries.
The blank rune, popularized by Ralph Blum’s 1982 Book of Runes as a twenty-fifth tile representing the unknowable, has no basis in historical runic practice and is rejected by most serious runic scholars and many practitioners as a modern invention.
The association of runic symbols with white nationalist ideology is sometimes taken to mean the symbols themselves carry that meaning. The Elder Futhark predates this appropriation by approximately two thousand years; the symbols belong to their historical and reconstructionist contexts, and reclamation of them from misuse is an active and legitimate project in the contemporary runic community.