The ancient Elder Futhark system of 24 runes is used to gain insight into your question or current energy state. You choose the number of runes (1, 3 or 5) and the casting layout. Each drawn rune receives an in-depth interpretation covering its mythological background, elemental nature, message for past, present and future, and practical advice. The analysis recognizes reversed rune positions and their specific influence.

Where it comes from

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet, in use across Germanic Europe from roughly the second to the eighth century AD. It has twenty-four characters, and the name comes from the sound values of its first six. The letters are carved rather than written — straight lines and diagonals, no curves, because they were cut into wood, bone and stone. Tacitus describes Germanic tribes casting marked strips of wood for divination in the first century AD, which is the earliest written account of the practice, though he does not say the marks were runes. The modern system of reading them was assembled in the twentieth century, largely from the Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems.

How the method works

Runes are drawn blind from a bag or cast onto a cloth. A single rune answers a narrow question. Three runes are read as the situation, the action and the outcome. Five and nine rune spreads add context, opposition and the influence of others. Each rune carries a name and a field of meaning: Fehu is cattle and so wealth and what wealth costs; Uruz is the aurochs and so raw strength; Isa is ice and so a halt. Nine of the twenty-four are symmetrical and cannot be reversed; the rest are read differently when they fall upside down.

What a reading covers

A reading gives the name and meaning of each rune drawn, its position in the spread, and whether it fell upright or reversed. It reads the runes against one another, since a set of them describes a sequence rather than a list. Runic readings tend to be blunter than tarot — the images are fewer and the meanings narrower, so the advice comes out more direct.

Common questions

Is there a blank rune?: Not in the historical Elder Futhark. The blank was added by Ralph Blum in a 1982 book and has been widely adopted since, but it has no basis in the old sources.
Elder, Younger or Anglo-Saxon Futhark?: The Elder Futhark with twenty-four runes is the one used in almost all modern readings. The Younger Futhark has sixteen and the Anglo-Saxon up to thirty-three; both are historically real but rarely used for divination.
Do the rune poems agree on the meanings?: Not entirely. The Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic poems describe some runes very differently, and modern interpretations pick between them. A reading that names its source is more honest than one that presents a single fixed meaning.