Runes in Stone: Runestones, Bind Runes and the Misuse of Runic Signs

Most of what we know about the runes comes from objects: combs, brooches, spearheads, sticks and above all stones. The poems and sagas tell us what later people believed about the runes, but the inscriptions show how they were actually used. This article looks at three of the most important stones, at the joined signs known as bind runes, and at the darker chapter in which some runic shapes were taken from their history and given a new and ugly meaning.

What a runestone is

A runestone is a raised stone with a runic inscription, and Scandinavia has thousands of them, most from the tenth and eleventh centuries. They were memorials. Their formula is simple and moving: someone raised this stone in memory of someone, their father, brother, wife or partner. Many add a prayer, and many are raised by women. The text often runs inside the body of a carved serpent or band, and the stones were originally painted, so that the runes stood out in colour against the rock.

Runestones are public writing. They stood by roads, bridges and assembly places, where people would pass and read them. They record inheritance, family ties, journeys to England, to Greece and to the east, and the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity. They are the largest body of writing that survives from the Viking age in the Norse language itself.

The Kylver stone

The Kylver stone is not a runestone in that sense. It is a slab from a grave on Gotland, carved around AD 400, and it carries one of the oldest complete rows of the Elder Futhark, all twenty-four runes in order, followed by a tree-like sign that no one has explained.

It was placed in a grave, apparently not meant to be read by the living. Why write the whole row there? Perhaps as a charm, perhaps as a sign of the power of writing itself. Whatever the reason, it is one of the best witnesses we have to the order of the Elder runes, and it shows that the row was already fixed as a sequence some sixteen centuries ago.

The Rök stone

The Rök stone in Östergötland, Sweden, raised in the ninth century, carries the longest runic inscription in the world, more than seven hundred runes covering every face. A father, Varin, raised it for his dead son Væmod, and filled it with riddles, allusions to heroic legend and a mention of Theodoric, king of the Goths. Parts are written in cipher runes, and long-branch and short-twig runes appear side by side.

Scholars have argued about its meaning for more than a century. It has been read as a record of heroic deeds, as a series of riddles meant to test the reader, and as a reflection on time and the end of the world. It shows what runes could do in the hands of a learned carver: not only record a name, but hold a whole web of memory and poetry.

The Jelling stones

The Jelling stones in Denmark mark a turning point. The smaller was raised by King Gorm for his queen Thyra. The larger was raised by their son Harald Bluetooth around 965, “who won for himself all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian”, and one of its faces carries the oldest image of Christ in Scandinavia. It is often called Denmark’s baptismal certificate.

Together the three show the runes’ long life: a complete row hidden in a grave, a riddling father’s grief, and a king’s announcement of a new faith. They also show that the runes were never confined to one religion. The same script served the old gods and the new one.

Bind runes

A bind rune is two or more runes written as one sign, sharing a vertical stave. On runestones they are common and mostly practical: carvers joined letters to save space or to make a line fit, the way a scribe might join letters on parchment. The Icelandic word bandrún is used for them today.

Some early inscriptions use them in ways that look deliberate. The Kragehul spear shaft from Denmark, from around AD 500, repeats a sign that is usually read as a bind rune of Gebo and Ansuz, “ga ga ga”, in a line that has been read as a battle cry or a charm. What it meant to its carver is not certain.

Bind runes in modern practice

Modern practitioners make bind runes as personal signs. They choose runes for an intention, perhaps Algiz for protection and Fehu for prosperity, and look for a way to join their shapes into a single figure. That is a modern practice and should be understood as one. It has roots in real runic writing, but the idea of combining the meanings of runes into one charm is not something the old sources describe.

If you make one, make it with care. The best bind runes are simple and legible, share their strokes honestly, and do not accidentally form a sign you did not intend. Joined strokes can produce extra runes nobody chose, and some combinations have meanings in modern history that the old carvers could never have imagined. That is the subject of the last part of this article.

Runes and their misuse

The runes are older than any modern ideology by well over a thousand years. They belonged to farmers, poets, smiths, kings and grieving parents across the whole Germanic world. But in the twentieth century some of them were taken up by movements that had nothing to do with that world, and it would be dishonest to leave that out of any account of the runes.

In the early 1900s an Austrian occultist, Guido von List, invented a new rune row of his own, with invented meanings, and presented it as ancient. It fed directly into the racial mysticism that Nazism later absorbed. The SS took the Sowilo rune, doubled it, and made it the badge of its organisation. It used Othala with added feet, sometimes called “wings”, on uniforms, and used Algiz upright and reversed as signs of birth and death on announcements and graves. After the war these forms were taken up again by neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups, and they are still used that way.

Telling the historical runes from the altered forms

For a reader of runes the practical point is this. The plain historical shapes are the runes as they appear on stones and objects from the second to the eleventh century. They are not the altered forms. Othala without feet is a rune; Othala with feet, in the wrong context, is a hate symbol. Two Sowilo runes set side by side as lightning bolts are the SS badge, not a spell. Anyone designing a bind rune, a tattoo or an emblem should check that the result does not reproduce one of these signs.

A tradition without borders

The rune poems, the sagas and the stones show a tradition that crossed borders freely. The English, the Danes, the Swedes, the Frisians and the Goths all used runes, and so did Christians: the Jelling stone and the Ruthwell Cross are as runic as the Kylver slab. Nothing in the tradition belongs to one people or one politics. Read in that spirit, the runes reject every attempt to use them to divide people.

Sources: Runic inscriptions; the Kragehul spear shaft; Swedish and Danish national records of runestones; the historical record of 20th-century symbol use.