Elder Futhark rune meanings

Roughly three quarters. A rune's meaning is considered solid when linguists can reconstruct its name confidently and a surviving rune poem addresses it — Fehu as cattle, Uruz as the aurochs, Sowilo as the sun. Others are thinner: nobody knows for certain what Perthro's name meant, and Eihwaz and Ingwaz are argued over. Each page here grades its own evidence rather than presenting everything as equally certain.

Older than the poems, but not as old as the alphabet. The Elder Futhark is attested from roughly the 2nd to 8th centuries in inscriptions. The rune poems that give us meanings are much later — Old English from the 8th to 10th centuries, Old Norwegian from the 13th, Old Icelandic from the 15th — and they describe the Younger Futhark or the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rather than the Elder Futhark directly.

Tacitus describes Germanic tribes casting marked strips of wood and reading them, writing in the first century AD, and there are later scattered references. But no source describes a system resembling modern rune casting, with reversals and spreads. That system is a twentieth-century construction, largely built after Ralph Blum's 1982 book, and the honest position is that it is modern practice using ancient letters.

Because nine of the twenty-four are symmetrical: turned upside down they look identical. Gebo, Hagalaz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz cannot be reversed, and Wunjo depends on the carving. Readers who work with reversals treat those as having a merkstave or shadow reading drawn from context rather than orientation.

The twenty-four runes are traditionally divided into three groups of eight, called aettir, conventionally named for Freyr, Heimdall and Tyr. The division itself is genuinely old and appears on inscriptions. The god names attached to each group are a later convention rather than something the sources state.