I’m frustrated with people who want “their” cultural symbols handed to them on a silver platter. They want to “reclaim” things that were never anything except Nazi symbols, like the 12-spoked black sun or the symbol of a Nazi volunteer militia, yet they can’t be bothered to figure out what runes Vikings used. Nazis say “here are the symbols of our ancestral heritage (that are a bunch of crap we made up) and you all go “give it back!” When it comes to the runes they took 1,500 years of tradition and steamrolled it. It could never have been any other way. Nationalism is the enemy of culture. They cannot coexist in harmony. Nationalism is piss on the graves of our ancestors.

I keep seeing people say that they want to reclaim the runes, but you can’t reclaim something that was never yours. And if your conception of the runes is coterminous with Nazi use of them, then it is shallow, superficial, not worth saving, the death of tradition with a few half-rotten specimens preserved pinned under glass.

I know it’s hard when you don’t know who you can trust. We wouldn’t be in this situation without wolves in sheep’s clothing sneaking lies between a handful of facts to distract you (Thorsson/Flowers). We have a lot of work to do uprooting the deceit that lies at the core of modern heathen reception of the runes. Now’s a good time to start. Since the part of the problem that’s most active on everyone’s mind regards visual perception of symbols of Norse and Germanic culture this is gonna focus on that, with lots of pictures.



~ Get excited, kids, it’s runology time ~



Nazis didn’t take “runes,” they took an aesthetic more or less from the Gallehus horn.

This one particular object has runes that happen to appeal to their sense of aesthetics and as a result became “the” runes, and all of you people fell for it. They’re into straight lines because there were Nazi philologists who thought runes were the original writing system that the Mediterranean alphabets ripped off (echoing Johan Bure in the 16th century). The straight lines reminded of their origin in ancient rock carvings (rather than the truth, that their origin is in the (Semitic) Phoenician alphabet via something else like Latin, Greek, another Italic alphabet, or perhaps even with direct influence from a Semitic source). They were considered a symbolic mystical system first, that later achieved some utility as a writing system. The pristine geometric shapes reflect their archetypal mystical nature (specifically within the “Ariosophical” (racist) Armanen system of runes based on a “hexagonal crystal structure”). And I guess these blocky slabs are “manly” or something.



So yeah, it relates to an actual inscription but it’s just an aesthetic. I know this because I can do this:

These are Latin letters that “look like runes.” The only problem is, they don’t. They look like one inscription that reads “I, Hlewagastiʀ Holtijaʀ, am a huge fucking bigshot who drinks out of gold.” The non-runologist part of me is glad his shit got stolen and melted down.

Most of this goes for the other widely-visible variant – the same thing but with thin lines (like tawido at the end above). Those are somewhat better represented in the runic corpus but it’s not because that’s what runes “are,” it’s because it’s easier and not everyone is a professional. I’m still gonna attack the idea that these are in any way prototypical. In fact I believe that for most (but not all) rune-carvers rounded runes were the prototype, and when this wasn’t adhered to it was for stylistic or utilitarian reasons.

Runes that don’t follow this aesthetic – which is most actual runes – will not even be recognized as runes by most people.



The rest is long and full of images so I will save your dash but the punchline is that if you want to save the runes from Nazis the first step is knowing them – not as the Nazis conceived of them but as they exist in the wild, because then you realize that what was taken was nothing compared to what we rob ourselves of by falling for imposter “tradition.”

If runes had been used continuously they would probably be about as different from Latin letters as Greek and Cyrillic scripts – that is, no inherent stylistic differences, just different inherited underlying shapes. I mean, look at early Latin script:

(Lapis niger)



(Duenos inscripion)

(Lapis Santricanus)

This beautiful text here is Gothic, the precious lovechild of runes and the Greek alphabet. The result of adapting to new contexts and new challenges.



The reason runes aren’t as diverse in appearance as Latin is because there just isn’t as much of them. If they were used for writing long texts they’ve probably have developed minuscules and all sorts of other variants. But even within the much more limited corpus we see that runes can be:

soft



(Tune stone)

(Möjbro stone)

regular and professional



(Vadstena bracteate, this btw is typical of bracteates which by numbers are most of the elder futhark corpus)

curvy:



(Björketorp runestone – notice even the m (#6 on 3rd line), d (there’s a bunch of them), and k (#7 on second-to-last line) runes have curves).



minimalist

(HS 12, staveless runes)

stylized

(Kragehul spearshaft; we can file the Gallehus horn underst “stylized” as well, the goldsmith was trying to be fancy and fucked up so he had to squeeze the last bit in)

(Bramham Moor ring, drawing by Georg Stephens)

chaotic

(Ribe skull… yeah, literally a piece of skull… with what’s believed to be a charm for a headache)

tiny

(Saltfleetby spindle whorl… an invocation of Óðinn, Heimdallr, and Þjálfi(?))

There is a huge amount of variation of each rune



(From Texts and Contexts of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions by Tineke Looijenga)



they even borrow from other futharks

(Stentoften stone; the circled runes are both reflexes of *jērą (at this point, *ār) but the second is an ideograph for ‘harvest’ that is not contemporary to the stone)

(Ög 43, that’s an elder futhark d-rune in a younger futhark inscription (1st on second line); image manipulated to make it more legible)

I mean look at this badass

(Rök stone… standard early short-twig and then BAM! Elder goð damn futhark in the 800′s (bottom and leftmost line)! I mean the carver doesn’t know how to use it properly but damn. And then that’s not enough so then the cheeky bastard breaks out MULTIPLE PATTERNS OF CIPHER RUNES (top and third line of tunes from the top. )



they can have serifs

(Malton dress pin)

they keep up with the times

(AM 748 I b 4to, The Third Grammatical Treatise from c. 1300-1325… an essay by Snorri’s nephew that talks about how to write in runes, by the way, I’ve been shoving this down people’s throats for years and can’t get anyone to care)

or go their own way

(Codex Runicus, from about the same time as the previous, this doesn’t look very out of time to us now but everyone was writing like in the image immediately above at the time)



I mean, guys. And don’t not click the links, please. I’m begging you



(Lbs 1349 4to)

(Lbs 636 4to)

(Huld, ÍB 383 4to)

and like not to toot my own horn or anything but

nobody is seeing this and thinking “white nationalist.”



ek iafnuel skrifa i litlum stǫfum sem ek bio til

ek jafnvel skrifa í litlum stǫfum sem ek bjó til

‘I even write in minuscules that I invented.’ Can you tell I really love Gothic script? Would love to see what others would come up with, what would pick up and spread, what variants would coexist.



Also I mean it’s not like you even need to use runes to write in runes

(Ciphers in AM 687 d 4to, the earliest copy of the Icelandic Rune Poem. Along the bottom are villuletur, a substitution cipher. Conveying information but preventing most people from accessing it was always an important part of runes)

Here’s the thing. Nazis are idealist essentialists, they believe in the “original” “unpolluted” archetypal proto-form of things. Runes have never been any of those things. Runes have always been artists trying to one-up each other, nerds trying to push the boundaries of weirdness, young punks scrawling graffiti, and at least later on also moms carving shopping lists so dad doesn’t forget that little Sigríðr needs new gloves. Stop holding yourself to a standard that doesn’t exist because you found it in a book by some crypto-fascist masquerading as a runologist. From the second person to carve runes on, there were no prototypical runic forms – carvers saw a variety of related symbols standing for the same thing, formulated their own idea of their own prototype of it and how to use it, and deployed it in combination with context plus willingness to put in time and effort. The beauty of runes is – like all writing – is their infinite potential for creative expression.



This post makes heavy use of resources from Arild Hauges Runer, which goes uncited above because Arild mostly collects sources from elsewhere, but it would be wrong not to credit him for all his work.

