Elder Futhark Runes and Their Meanings

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet: 24 letters, called runes, used by Germanic-speaking peoples from about the 2nd century CE. Each rune stands for a sound and has a name, such as Fehu, "cattle," or Isa, "ice." The table below lists all 24 in order, with their signs, sounds and the meanings given to them in modern rune reading.

What is the Elder Futhark?

It is an alphabet. The name "futhark" is made from its first six letters, f, u, th, a, r, k, in the same way that "alphabet" comes from alpha and beta. "Elder" sets it apart from the alphabets that grew out of it.

The oldest runic inscriptions known are from the 2nd century CE; one of the earliest is a comb found in a bog at Vimose in Denmark, dated to about 160, with a single word scratched on it. Early inscriptions are short and practical. They sit on weapons, brooches, combs and tools, and many are simply a name: the owner's, the maker's or the giver's.

Runes went on being used, in changing forms, for many centuries; the Unicode Standard, which encodes them for computers, counts about 6,000 known inscriptions. The alphabet itself did not stay the same. In England and Frisia new runes were added, until the Anglo-Saxon row had as many as 33. In Scandinavia the opposite happened: around the 8th century the row was cut to 16 runes, the Younger Futhark, which is the alphabet of most Viking Age rune stones.

The 24 runes and their meanings

The "sound" column shows the letter each rune stood for. The "name" column gives the usual modern spelling and the plain meaning of the name. The last column gives the keywords used in modern rune reading, including our own rune reading tool; they are a 20th-century layer, explained further down. Each name links to a full page on that rune.

The first ætt: Fehu to Wunjo

The second ætt: Hagalaz to Sowilo

The third ætt: Tiwaz to Othala

Where do the rune names come from?

Nobody who used the Elder Futhark left a list of what the runes were called. The names were written down centuries later, in manuscripts from England and Scandinavia, and by then the languages had changed. Linguists work backward from those late forms to the ones printed above. The runologist Tineke Looijenga notes the gap of several centuries between the first runes and the recorded names, and marks two of her reconstructions, for Kenaz and Perthro, with question marks.

The richest sources are three medieval rune poems, which give each rune a short verse:

• The Old English rune poem covers 29 runes of the Anglo-Saxon row, including all 24 older ones. Its manuscript is lost; the text survives in an early printed copy.
• The Old Norwegian rune poem, from the 13th century, covers the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark.
• The Old Icelandic rune poem covers the same 16 and survives in manuscripts from about 1500.

Because the Scandinavian poems describe only 16 runes, eight of the 24, among them Gebo, Wunjo, Perthro and Dagaz, have a single verse to their name. And where all three poems speak, they do not always agree. Uruz is a wild ox in England, slag in Norway and drizzle in Iceland. Kenaz is a torch in one poem and a sore in the other two. The rune pages quote the verses in Bruce Dickins's 1915 translation, so you can see the differences for yourself.

What are the three ætts?

The 24 runes are traditionally divided into three groups of eight. Each group is called an ætt (plural ættir), an Old Norse word. The division is old: rune rows on gold pendants of the 5th and 6th centuries are already split into three parts. Why the alphabet was divided this way is not known.

The groups are often named after their first runes or the gods linked with them: Freyr's ætt, Hagal's ætt and Tyr's ætt. Those names come from much later Scandinavian tradition. The themes that modern books give each group, such as everyday life for the first, hardship for the second and society for the third, are modern summaries. They are handy for memorizing the order and no more than that.

The order itself is fixed except at the very end. Some early rows finish with Dagaz and then Othala, others the other way around.

Were runes used for divination?

The honest answer is that we do not know, and that modern rune reading is not an ancient survival.

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing about Germanic peoples around 100 CE, describes how they cast lots. In the 19th-century translation by Church and Brodribb, a branch from a fruit tree is cut into pieces that "are distinguished by certain marks, and thrown carelessly and at random over a white garment"; a priest or the father of the family then picks up three and interprets them. Tacitus does not say what the marks were. They may or may not have been runes.

The inscriptions themselves are mostly names and short messages. Looijenga, reviewing the earliest ones, concludes that some may have had a magical purpose but that the confident claims of older scholars on this point were unfounded.

What people now call rune reading took shape in the 20th century. A few of its habits are worth knowing for what they are:

• Fixed meanings such as "Fehu means reward" are modern interpretations built on the rune names and poems.
• Reversed meanings, for runes that land upside down, are a modern convention. The poems give one verse per rune, and several runes look the same either way up.
• The blank rune is a modern addition, usually traced to Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes of 1982. The Elder Futhark has 24 letters and no blank.
• Spreads, such as a three-rune cast, are borrowed from card reading.

None of this makes rune reading worthless as a way to reflect. It does mean the meanings should be held lightly. A rune can prompt a useful question. It cannot predict events.

Runes misused as hate symbols

Several runes were taken up as emblems by the Nazis in the 20th century and are still used by white supremacists, which is why the Anti-Defamation League lists some of them in its database of hate symbols. The same database stresses that runes are also used innocently and must be judged in context. The four affected most are Algiz, Sowilo, Tiwaz and Othala; each of those pages has a short note with a link to the relevant entry. The letters are many centuries older than that misuse, and on this site they appear only in their historical sense.

How to try a rune reading

Our tool keeps to what can be defended: all 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, no blank rune, upright meanings only. Draw a single rune as a prompt for the day, or cast three for the situation, the challenge and the likely outcome.

If a rune catches your attention, follow its link in the table. Each page sets out what the old poems say and where the modern reading begins. For a different kind of daily prompt, there is also a tarot card of the day.