Runes in the Old Texts: Rúnatal, Ljóðatal, Sigrdrífa and Egil

The runic inscriptions tell us how runes were used. The poems and sagas of medieval Iceland tell us what people believed about them. These texts were written down in the thirteenth century and later, long after the conversion to Christianity, and they are literature, not ritual manuals. But they preserve older poetry and older ideas, and they are the main source for the belief that runes were more than letters: that they were won by a god, taught by a valkyrie, and could heal, protect or harm. This article walks through the key passages and says plainly what each one does and does not tell us.

The runes as a gift handed down

The poems give the runes a divine origin, but Odin is not the only giver. The Hávamál, the long poem of Odin’s sayings, lists Odin as the one who carved runes for the gods, Dáin for the elves, Dvalin for the dwarfs and Ásvid for the giants. In another poem the valkyrie Sigrdrífa teaches runes to the hero Sigurd, and in the Völuspá the Norns “scored on the wood” the fates of men. The runes belong to the gods, but they are handed down, taught and learned.

Rúnatal: Odin on the tree

In the Hávamál there is a short passage in which the god speaks of his own ordeal. Paper manuscripts give it a title, “Othin’s Tale of the Runes”, and it is known today as Rúnatal. In the translation of Henry Adams Bellows (1923) it begins:

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.

And then:

None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.

The windy tree is Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Odin is both the sacrifice and the one sacrificed to, and that is the heart of the passage: he gives himself to himself. He has no food, no drink, no help, and at the end of nine nights he looks down and takes up the runes.

The poem goes on to say what followed: “Then began I to thrive, and wisdom to get”, and “each word led me on to another word, each deed to another deed.” Then it turns to the runes themselves, “fateful signs” that the gods made, and asks a series of questions that sound like a test: do you know how to write, how to read, how to colour, how to try, how to ask, how to offer, how to send, how to sacrifice?

Bellows notes that this part of the Hávamál is confused, stitched together from several older pieces, and the stanza numbers differ between editions: the tree stanza is 139 in his numbering and 138 in many others. But the core of it is clear and very old. The runes are not invented. They are found, at great cost, by a god who hangs between the worlds.

Ljóðatal: the eighteen charms

Right after Rúnatal, the Hávamál gives a list of eighteen songs, or charms, that Odin knows. The passage is called Ljóðatal, “the counting of songs”. It is a list of what magic was for, as the poet saw it. Here they are in short, in Bellows’s numbering:

1. Help, “in sorrow and pain and sickness.”
2. A charm for those who would be healers; the lines that explain it are lost.
3. To blunt an enemy’s blade, so that neither sword nor staff bites.
4. To make fetters spring from the feet and bonds break from the hands.
5. To stop an arrow in flight, if his eyes can see it.
6. To turn harm sent by a sapling’s roots back on the one who sent it.
7. To quench fire in a hall where his comrades sit.
8. To set right hatred that grows between heroes’ sons.
9. To calm the wind and put the sea to sleep, to save a ship.
10. To send the “house-riders”, witches flying on high, astray and home again in their true shapes.
11. Sung into the shields, so that friends go whole to battle and come whole home.
12. To make a hanged man speak: “So do I write and color the runes that forth he fares, and to me talks.”
13. To sprinkle a young warrior with water so that he will not fall in battle.
14. To name the gods and the elves to men.
15. The song the dwarf Thjóðrerir sang before the doors of Delling, bringing might to the gods, glory to the elves and wisdom to Odin.
16. To turn the mind of a maiden he desires.
17. So that a young maiden will seldom leave him; the rest is lost.
18. A song he will never tell, except to the woman in whose arms he lies, or to his sister.

Only one of the eighteen, the twelfth, says that runes are written. The others are songs, and that is worth noticing: in the old sources, much of what we now call rune magic was sung. The list is also strikingly practical. Most of the charms deal with sickness, battle, fire, storms, quarrels and love, the dangers and desires of ordinary life in the north. The last charm is kept secret on purpose: “The best is what none but one’s self doth know.”

Sigrdrífa teaches the runes

When the hero Sigurd rides through a wall of flame on the mountain, he finds a woman in armour asleep. Odin had pricked her with a sleep-thorn for giving victory to the wrong king. In the Völsunga saga she is Brynhild; in the Eddic poem that tells the same scene she is called Sigrdrífa, “victory-driver”. Sigurd wakes her and asks her to teach him “the lore of mighty matters”. She brings him a cup of beer “mingled with fame” and teaches him runes.

Her lesson is a list of runes for different needs, and it is practical: where to cut them, and what for. In the translation of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (1888):

Runes of war know thou,
If great thou wilt be!
Cut them on hilt of hardened sword,
Some on the brand’s back,
Some on its shining side,
Twice name Tyr therein.

Sea-runes are cut on the stern and the rudder-blade to bring a ship home through high seas. Word-runes are woven about you at the Thing, the assembly, so that no one repays your words with grief. Ale-runes protect you from a drink mixed with harm: cut them on the horn and the back of the hand, and “nick an N upon thy nail”. Help-runes ease a child from its mother. Bough-runes, cut on the bark of trees whose boughs face east, are for the healer. Thought-runes are for whoever would be wisest of men.

Two runes are named outright. The runes of war call on Tyr, whose rune is Tiwaz, and the ale-runes call for an N, the rune Nauthiz, need. Everything else is described by purpose, not by name, and nobody knows which signs she meant. Modern lists that assign particular runes to each of Sigrdrífa’s purposes are interpretations, however reasonable.

Egil and the runes

Egil Skallagrímsson, poet, warrior and troublemaker, is the most famous rune-carver in the sagas. Two scenes in Egil’s Saga show how the saga-writers imagined runes being used.

In the first, Egil is a guest at a feast in Norway where his hosts plan to kill him. They hand him a horn of ale that has been poisoned. Egil takes his knife, stabs his palm, carves runes on the horn and reddens them with his blood, and speaks a verse over it. The horn bursts apart and the drink spills on the straw. The scene echoes Sigrdrífa’s ale-runes almost exactly.

In the second, years later, Egil stays with a farmer in Sweden whose daughter has long been sick. He finds that a young man of the district, who wanted to win her, had carved runes on a whalebone and put it in her bed, and that he had carved them wrongly. Egil scrapes the runes off, burns the bone, carves new runes and lays them under her pillow, and she recovers. His verse on it has become a proverb: no man should carve runes unless he knows how to read them.

The saga was written down in the thirteenth century, three hundred years after Egil lived, so these are stories rather than records. But they show what an Icelandic audience believed: that runes had power, that carving them was a skill that could go wrong, and that knowledge mattered more than intention. It is a good warning for anyone who works with runes today. Know what you are carving.

Galdr and seiðr: two kinds of magic

Old Norse had two main words for magic, and they were not the same thing.

Galdr, the sung charm

Galdr comes from the verb gala, “to crow” or “to chant”. A galdr was a charm spoken or sung in a special metre, and it is the magic of words. The eighteen charms of the Hávamál are galdrar, and runes and galdr often go together: runes were cut and a verse was spoken over them, exactly as Egil does with the poisoned horn.

Seiðr, the seeress’s trance

Seiðr was something else: a practice of trance, used to learn the future or to change it, done by a seeress on a high seat, often with helpers who sang for her. The fullest account is in the Saga of Erik the Red, where a seeress called Thorbjörg comes to a Greenland farm in a hard winter, dressed in a blue cloak and catskin gloves. She needs someone to sing the warding songs, and a young Christian woman, Gudrid, reluctantly sings them so beautifully that the spirits gather and the seeress can see the future.

The Ynglinga saga says that Freyja taught seiðr to the Æsir and that Odin practised it, but that it brought such weakness and shame that men were reluctant to do it, and it was taught to women. In the Eddic poem Lokasenna, Loki taunts Odin for having practised it.

Old practice and modern reconstruction

What the modern practices called galdr and seiðr are is a reconstruction, built on these few sources and much imagination. A simple modern practice, chanting a rune’s name slowly in rhythm with the breath, does not claim to be the old galdr. It only takes its idea: that a rune can be spoken as well as read.

What the texts add up to

Taken together, the poems and sagas give a consistent picture. Runes were believed to come from the gods, at a price. They were cut, coloured and spoken over. They were used for very concrete ends: to heal, to protect a ship, to detect poison, to win a case at the assembly. And they were dangerous in unskilled hands. What the texts do not give is a system of divination with a meaning for each rune. That came later, built partly from these sources and partly from the rune poems.

Sources: Hávamál 139–165, tr. H. A. Bellows (1923); The Story of the Volsungs, tr. W. Morris and E. Magnússon (1888); Egil’s Saga, tr. W. C. Green (1893); Saga of Erik the Red; Heimskringla, Ynglinga saga, tr. S. Laing (1844).