The Rune Reading System You Learned Was Invented in 1982 by a Man Who Admitted He Made It Up

The Rune Reading System You Learned Was Invented in 1982 by a Man Who Admitted He Made It Up

You probably own a set of rune stones or you have thought about buying one. Maybe you have already pulled a rune from a bag and looked up its meaning in a book. Maybe you read that Fehu means wealth, or Ansuz means communication, or Algiz means protection. Maybe there was a blank stone in the set and you read that it represents the unknowable, the will of Odin, the void from which all possibilities emerge.

If so, nearly everything you were taught came from one book. And the man who wrote it had no background in Norse history, no training in runology, no knowledge of Old Norse, and no connection to any Scandinavian or Germanic tradition. He said so himself.

His name was Ralph Blum. He was a Harvard educated cultural anthropologist and novelist who lived in Los Angeles. In 1982, he published The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle. It came packaged with a small bag of ceramic tiles stamped with runic symbols. It became one of the bestselling divination books in history. It was praised by Buckminster Fuller. It sold millions of copies. And it taught an entire generation a system of rune reading that bears almost no relationship to what runes actually were.

The Elder Futhark, the genuine runic alphabet that your rune stones are based on, is nearly two thousand years old. It was carved into combs, weapons, jewellery, and standing stones across northern Europe by people who believed that these symbols carried real power, power that was won through suffering so extreme that even the gods were not spared it. The difference between what those people understood about runes and what Ralph Blum put in his book is so vast that it would be comic if it were not so widely believed.

This is the real history of your rune stones. It starts with a god who stabbed himself and hung from a tree for nine days. It does not start in a publisher’s office in New York.

A god who tortured himself for knowledge

In Norse mythology, the runes were not invented. They were discovered. And the price of that discovery was one of the most disturbing acts of self sacrifice in any mythology anywhere in the world.

The story is told in the Havamal, a poem preserved in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript written down around 1270 CE but containing material that scholars date to between the ninth and tenth centuries. The Havamal, which translates as Words of the High One, is attributed to Odin himself, the chief of the Norse gods, the god of wisdom, war, death, and poetry.

In stanzas 138 and 139, Odin describes what he did to obtain the runes. He hung himself from Yggdrasil, the world tree, the immense ash tree that connects all nine realms of Norse cosmology. He pierced himself with his own spear, Gungnir. He refused food and water. He hung there for nine full nights, wounded and starving, staring down into the abyss beneath the roots of the tree.

No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn. Downwards I peered. I took up the runes, screaming I took them, then I fell back from there.

The runes were not handed to him. He had to reach for them in a state of extremity, at the edge of death, half mad from pain and deprivation. He sacrificed himself to himself, the poem says. Odin offered to Odin. It is an act of cosmic self mutilation in pursuit of knowledge, and it tells you immediately that the Norse understood runes as something dangerous, powerful, and sacred. These were not party tricks. These were not self help tools. They were secrets ripped from the void by a god willing to destroy himself to obtain them.

This was not the only sacrifice Odin made for wisdom. He also gouged out one of his own eyes and gave it to the giant Mimir in exchange for a single drink from Mimir’s well, which was said to hold the water of wisdom. The Norse concept of knowledge was inseparable from the concept of sacrifice. You could not learn the deep truths without paying for them in blood.

This is the mythological origin of the runes. Keep it in mind when we get to the part where Ralph Blum reorganised them based on the I Ching.

What runes actually were

The Elder Futhark is the oldest known runic alphabet. It consists of twenty four symbols, each representing a sound, and each carrying a name that connects it to a concept in the natural or human world. The name Futhark comes from the first six runes in the sequence: F, U, Th, A, R, K. Just as the word alphabet comes from Alpha and Beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

The oldest known runic inscription dates to around 160 CE and was found on a comb discovered in a bog at Vimose on the Danish island of Funen. The inscription reads harja, which is either a personal name meaning warrior or simply the word for comb. It is not a mystical pronouncement. It is a label. Someone carved their name, or the name of the object, onto a comb nearly two thousand years ago.

In 2021, archaeologists at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo excavated a grave field near Tyrifjorden in eastern Norway and discovered what may be the oldest dated runestone in the world. The Svingerud stone, a block of reddish brown sandstone measuring roughly 31 by 32 centimetres, bears inscriptions that radiocarbon dating places between 1 and 250 CE. Some of the carvings appear to be the earliest known sequence of the futhark alphabet. Others may be someone practising, learning, or experimenting with the script.

The Elder Futhark was in use from roughly the second to the eighth century CE. Scholars believe it was created by Germanic peoples who had come into contact with Roman culture, possibly as mercenaries serving in the Roman army or as traders dealing with Roman merchants. The script appears to have been derived from Old Italic alphabets, possibly North Etruscan or Rhaetic variants, or from the Latin alphabet itself. The Rhaetic alphabet of Bolzano in northern Italy is often cited as a likely ancestor, with only five Elder Futhark runes having no counterpart in that earlier script. Scandinavian scholars tend to favour derivation from the Latin alphabet directly, pointing to the extensive trade and military contact between Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire during the first and second centuries CE.

About 300 inscriptions in the Elder Futhark survive, found on weapons, jewellery, amulets, tools, combs, bracteates, and runestones across Scandinavia, Germany, and as far afield as Ukraine and Romania. The earliest inscriptions are concentrated in what is now Denmark and northern Germany, in the area scholars call the North Sea Germanic runic koine. Runic literacy was rare. Of 366 lance heads excavated at Illerup in Denmark, only two bore inscriptions. Knowledge of the runes was probably a genuine secret for most of the Migration Period, held by a small number of literate individuals in each community. The word rune itself comes from a Proto Germanic root meaning secret or mystery, which tells you something about how the people who used them understood the act of writing.

The twenty four runes were divided into three groups of eight, called aettir. Each aett was associated with a different aspect of existence. The first aett, beginning with Fehu, dealt with material wealth, primal forces, and the physical world. The second aett, beginning with Hagalaz, dealt with forces beyond human control, hardship, necessity, and the natural elements. The third aett, beginning with Tiwaz, dealt with the gods, social order, and human destiny.

Each rune had a name, and those names were not arbitrary. Fehu meant cattle, which in a pastoral society was synonymous with wealth. Uruz meant aurochs, the massive wild ox that roamed northern Europe and symbolised untamed strength. Thurisaz meant giant or thorn, a force of chaos and danger. Ansuz meant god, specifically Odin. Raidho meant journey or riding. Kenaz meant torch, the light of knowledge. Gebo meant gift, the sacred obligation of generosity that bound Norse society together. Wunjo meant joy or harmony.

These meanings are known primarily through three surviving rune poems: the Old Norwegian Rune Poem, the Old Icelandic Rune Poem, and the Old English Rune Poem. These poems, composed between the eighth and tenth centuries, provide a verse for each rune that explains its name and significance. They are the closest thing we have to an authentic ancient source for what individual runes meant to the people who used them.

By the late eighth century, the Elder Futhark was replaced in Scandinavia by the Younger Futhark, a simplified system of just sixteen runes. This seems counterintuitive, fewer symbols to represent a language that was actually becoming more complex, but the Younger Futhark was the script of the Viking Age, the runes that appear on the great runestones of Sweden and Denmark, the runes carved by raiders and traders from Newfoundland to Constantinople. Nearly six thousand Younger Futhark inscriptions have been found, compared to about three hundred in the Elder Futhark. The Anglo Saxons meanwhile went in the opposite direction, expanding the Elder Futhark into the Anglo Saxon Futhorc, which grew to as many as thirty three symbols.

Knowledge of how to read the Elder Futhark was lost entirely after the script fell out of use. It was not deciphered until 1865, when the Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge cracked the code. For over a thousand years, the oldest runic alphabet was unreadable. Nobody alive knew what the symbols meant. This is worth remembering when someone tells you that their rune reading practice is based on an unbroken ancient tradition. The tradition was broken. Completely. For a millennium.

And crucially, the rune poems describe the runes as letters with meanings. They do not describe a divination system. They do not explain how to pull runes from a bag and lay them in spreads. They do not offer reversed meanings. They are a mnemonic catalogue, a way of teaching people the alphabet and the concepts behind each symbol.

What Tacitus saw

The earliest written account of Germanic divination practices comes from Tacitus, a Roman historian who wrote his ethnographic work Germania in 98 CE. In Chapter 10, Tacitus describes what he understood of the lot casting practices of the Germanic tribes.

They attach the highest importance to the taking of auspices and the casting of lots, he wrote. Their procedure is simple. They cut off a branch from a fruit bearing tree and slice it into strips. These they mark with different signs and throw them at random onto a white cloth. Then the priest of the state, if it is an official consultation, or the father of the family in a private one, offers prayers to the gods and looking up towards heaven picks up three strips, one at a time, and according to which sign they have previously been marked with, makes his interpretation.

This passage is fascinating but problematic. Tacitus never travelled to Germania himself. His account was secondhand at best. He does not say what the marks on the wooden strips were. He does not call them runes. And he was writing in 98 CE, while the earliest confirmed runic inscriptions date to around 160 CE. The marks he describes may have been runes, or they may have been an earlier system of symbols that preceded the runic alphabet. We simply do not know.

What we do know is that some form of divination involving marked wooden lots was practised by Germanic peoples in the first century CE. We know that the practice was taken seriously, that it was performed by priests and heads of households, that it involved prayer, and that an unfavourable result meant the matter was dropped for the day. We know that this was a religious act, not a parlour game.

But Tacitus gives us almost nothing about how the lots were interpreted. He tells us they were marked with signs. He tells us three were picked up. He tells us the reader made his interpretation. That is all. The actual system of interpretation, whatever it was, died with the people who practised it. No surviving text from the ancient or medieval period describes a specific method of reading individual runes as divinatory symbols in the way that modern rune readers do.

This is the gap that Ralph Blum walked into.

Runes were an alphabet

Before we get to Blum, it is important to understand what runes were actually used for during the centuries they were in active use. Because the answer undermines the idea that runes were primarily magical or divinatory tools.

Runes were a writing system. They were an alphabet. People used them to write messages, label property, record legal agreements, compose poetry, mark gravestones, and conduct business.

In the medieval trading city of Bergen in Norway, archaeologists have found hundreds of runic inscriptions on wooden sticks dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. These inscriptions are not spells or prophecies. They are business records, love notes, insults, prayers, and everyday correspondence. One reads Ragnar owns this fishnet. Another reads Torkjell Coinmaker sends you pepper. A third records a debt: Bard has paid one and a half ore, but with scanty weight. One merchant named Tore Fager wrote a letter in runes to his business partner Havgrim explaining that he had lost some of their company’s goods in a bad trade and asking not to be held responsible.

These inscriptions reveal a literate, practical, everyday use of runes that has nothing to do with divination or magic. Runes were the texting of the Viking age. They were carved quickly onto sticks and sent as messages. They were scratched into walls as graffiti. They were used to mark who owned what and who owed whom.

This does not mean runes had no magical associations. The Poetic Edda and various sagas contain references to runes being used in charms and spells. In Egils Saga, the protagonist carves runes onto a drinking horn to counteract poison. The Sigrdrifumal, a poem in the Poetic Edda, describes different categories of runes for different purposes: victory runes to be carved on sword hilts, ale runes for protection against bewitchment, birth runes to help with difficult labour, wave runes for the protection of ships, branch runes for healing, speech runes for eloquence, and thought runes for sharpening the mind.

But even in these magical contexts, the runes are being used as an active tool, carved onto objects with specific intent. They are not being pulled from a bag and read as oracles. The saga characters carve runes onto things to make things happen. They do not draw random runes and ask what they mean.

The idea of using runes as a divination system, pulling them one at a time from a pouch and interpreting each one as a message about your life, has no clear basis in any surviving historical source. It is possible that something like this was practised and simply was never written down. But the evidence we have, from Tacitus to the sagas to the thousands of surviving runic inscriptions, points to runes being an alphabet first and a magical technology second, used actively rather than passively, carved with intent rather than drawn at random.

What Ralph Blum did

In 1982, Ralph Blum published The Book of Runes. He had no training in Norse studies. He had no background in Germanic languages, runology, or Scandinavian history. He was a novelist and cultural anthropologist who had studied Russian at Harvard and Soviet cinema at Leningrad University. He had written science fiction novels and a book about UFOs.

Blum was transparent about this. He stated in the book itself that his interpretations were inspired, meaning he invented them. He did not claim to be recovering an ancient tradition. He did not pretend to be a scholar of Norse religion. He created something new and called it an oracle.

But what he created bore so little resemblance to the actual Elder Futhark that scholars of Norse history were appalled. Blum made several changes that have no basis in any historical source.

First, he rearranged the order of the runes. The Elder Futhark has a specific, well documented sequence that begins with Fehu and ends with Othala. This sequence is confirmed by inscriptions dating back to the Kylver Stone of approximately 400 CE. Blum changed this order. He never explained why, except to say that his arrangement was inspired.

Second, he changed the meanings. The rune poems and surviving historical sources give specific, concrete meanings for each rune. Fehu means cattle and wealth. Isa means ice. Hagalaz means hail. Blum reinterpreted these as psychological and spiritual concepts, drawing heavily on the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text. He stated openly that the I Ching was one of his primary sources. He essentially mapped Chinese philosophical concepts onto Norse symbols, creating a hybrid system that belonged to neither tradition.

Third, he introduced reversed meanings. In Blum’s system, if a rune lands upside down, it carries a different, usually negative, interpretation. This concept appears nowhere in the rune poems or in any historical source. Several runes, such as Isa, look identical whether upright or inverted, making the concept of reversal logically inconsistent even within Blum’s own system. The idea was borrowed directly from tarot, where reversed cards carry altered meanings. Blum also introduced tarot style spreads and layouts for casting runes, another innovation with no basis in any historical practice.

Fourth, he introduced references to Christianity into his interpretations, at one point writing that the Cross is the condition for wisdom, Christ on the Tree, Odin on the Tree. The Elder Futhark is a pre Christian alphabet. It predates the Christianisation of Scandinavia by centuries. The runes are wholly and thoroughly heathen in origin, as one Norse scholar put it. Mapping Christian theology onto them is not interpretation. It is replacement.

Fifth, and most controversially, he invented a twenty fifth rune. The blank rune. Blum called it the Odin rune, or the Wyrd rune, and described it as representing the unknowable, the divine, the blank page on which fate has not yet written. He presented it as the most powerful rune in the set.

There is no blank rune in the Elder Futhark. There is no blank rune in any historical futhark. No blank rune has ever been found on any archaeological artefact anywhere in the world. The concept does not appear in the Eddas, the sagas, the rune poems, or any other surviving Norse text. Blum invented it. He created a rune that never existed, named it after the god who sacrificed himself for nine days to discover the runes, and sold it in a box set with ceramic tiles.

The blank rune is perhaps the clearest example of how completely Blum’s system departs from historical reality. It would be as if someone added a twenty seventh letter to the English alphabet, called it the Shakespeare letter, and claimed it represented the mystery of unwritten literature. It is invention presented as discovery.

Why it matters

Blum’s book sold millions of copies. It spawned seven follow up books, a set of rune cards, and an entire industry of rune sets marketed with twenty five stones including the blank. For an entire generation, The Book of Runes was the only rune book most people ever encountered. It shaped how millions of people understand runes to this day.

If you have ever read that Algiz means protection, you may be reading a Blum interpretation. The historical rune poems associate the Algiz rune with elk sedge, a type of marsh grass, not with a shield or a protective gesture. If you have ever been told that reversed runes carry a shadow meaning, you are using a system that Blum borrowed from tarot, not from anything in Norse tradition. If you have ever drawn a blank rune and been told it represents fate or the unknowable, you are holding an object that was invented in 1982 by a man who was thinking about the I Ching, not about Odin.

This matters because the real history of the Elder Futhark is far more interesting than the sanitised self help version. The real runes were carved by people who believed that writing itself was a form of magic. The real runes were discovered by a god who hung himself from a cosmic tree and screamed as he seized them from the abyss. The real runes were scratched onto spear shafts before battle, carved into the keels of longships to calm the sea, and cut into wooden staves to heal the sick and curse the wicked. They were an alphabet soaked in blood and ice and northern wind, shaped by centuries of use in societies where survival was never guaranteed and the gods themselves were destined to die at Ragnarok.

Ralph Blum took all of that and turned it into something you could do quietly in your living room with a bag of ceramic tiles and a cup of herbal tea. He stripped the runes of their cultural context, their linguistic history, their mythological weight, and their genuine strangeness, and replaced it all with gentle affirmations about personal growth and spiritual journeys.

The real Elder Futhark deserves better than that.

What the Elder Futhark actually tells you

If you want to work with runes in a way that honours their actual history, the starting point is the rune poems. These poems, composed in Old Norwegian, Old Icelandic, and Old English between the eighth and tenth centuries, are the closest thing we have to authentic ancient interpretations of the individual runes.

The rune poems are not gentle. They do not offer reassurance. They describe the world as the Norse experienced it, which was often brutal.

Hagalaz, the ninth rune, means hail. The Old Norwegian Rune Poem says that hail is the coldest of grains. The Old Icelandic poem calls it a cold grain and a shower of sleet and a sickness of serpents. This is not a metaphor for a challenging period in your personal development. It is hail. It destroys crops. It kills livestock. It falls from a sky that does not care about your feelings.

Nauthiz, the tenth rune, means need or necessity. The Old Norwegian poem says that need gives scant choice, and the naked man is chilled by the frost. This is about genuine deprivation. The experience of being cold and having no shelter and no options.

Isa, the eleventh rune, means ice. The Old Norwegian poem calls it the broad bridge. The Old Icelandic poem says ice is the bark of rivers and the roof of waves and a danger for doomed men. Ice was not symbolic to the Norse. It was the thing that killed you in February.

These are not self help prompts. They are descriptions of forces in the natural world that can sustain you or destroy you. The Elder Futhark is a map of reality as the Norse understood it, encompassing wealth and poverty, joy and suffering, gifts and obligations, journeys and homecomings, gods and giants, life and death. Every rune carries the weight of a people who lived in a landscape where winter was a genuine threat and the line between prosperity and disaster was thin enough to snap in a single bad harvest.

When you hold an Elder Futhark rune stone in your hand, you are holding a letter from that world. Not from Ralph Blum’s living room in Los Angeles.

Why Elder Futhark rune stones matter

There are twenty four runes in the Elder Futhark. Not twenty five. There never were twenty five.

Each of the twenty four carries a sound, a name, and a meaning that connects it to a specific force or experience in the natural and human world. Fehu is cattle, wealth, the moveable riches that determined status in a pastoral society. Uruz is the aurochs, raw power, the wild strength that civilization has not tamed. Thurisaz is the giant, the thorn, the dangerous force that guards a boundary. Ansuz is the god Odin, the breath, the spoken word, the moment when meaning enters the world.

These symbols were not designed for self help. They were designed to name the forces that shape existence. They are blunt, concrete, rooted in the physical world. When you work with them on their own terms, without the overlay of I Ching philosophy or tarot card spreads or invented blank runes, they offer something that most modern divination systems do not. They offer honesty. The Elder Futhark does not promise you that everything will work out. It tells you that hail falls, ice forms, need is real, and even the gods must sacrifice to gain wisdom.

Our Elder Futhark rune stone sets are carved with the original twenty four runes in their traditional order. No blank rune. No invented twenty fifth symbol. No made up meanings borrowed from Chinese philosophy. Just the twenty four symbols that have survived for nearly two thousand years, from the Vimose Comb to the Svingerud Stone, from the fjords of Norway to the bogs of Denmark, from the hands of Viking traders in Bergen to the grave fields of the Migration Period.

When you cast them, you are not using a system invented in 1982. You are using an alphabet that a god bled for.

Explore our Elder Futhark Rune Stone collection at Divine Warrior: https://divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/rune-stones-uk