The Distance Between Runology and Rune Magic

Academic runology and modern rune practice are describing different things, and the gap is worth stating precisely rather than polemically. The surviving corpus of runic inscriptions is overwhelmingly ordinary: names, ownership marks, memorial formulas on stones, orders and messages on wooden sticks, a certain amount of graffiti. A small number of inscriptions look formulaic in ways that may be operative. There is no surviving instruction for divination with runes from any period in which they were the everyday script, and the passage most often cited for it, in the Germania of Tacitus, describes drawing marked slips of wood but does not say the marks were runes and predates the earliest inscriptions.

The rune poems, in Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic, are medieval mnemonic verses in which each character gets a stanza, and they are the main source for the traditional names. They are not a system of meanings for interpretation, though they are the raw material from which modern ones are constructed. A widely sold twentieth century handbook added a blank rune with no historical precedent at all. Thorsson published work is explicit that the practice he teaches is a modern construction resting on the historical evidence, which is the reason the atlas can hold both bodies of material without confusing them.