α α’α¦α¨α±α² Β· Elder Futhark
Cast the runes
Twenty-four staves, drawn without replacement from a cryptographic random source. Upright only, for a reason given below rather than by default, and read against what the three surviving rune poems actually say instead of a modern gloss laid over them.
The common modern spread. Note that Tacitus has three marks lifted, which is probably why this one settled on three rather than any older authority.
Drawn with your browserβs cryptographic random source and nothing else. Nothing here comes from your birth details, so casting twice gives two different draws. That is what a casting is; if it were repeatable it would be a lookup.
Why there are no reversed runes here
Turn a rune upside down and, for 9 of the 24, nothing happens. α· Gebo, αΊ Hagalaz, αΎ Nauthiz, α Isa, α Jera, α Eihwaz, α Sowilo, α Ingwaz and α Dagaz are the same shape either way. A system that uses reversals therefore gives those nine a single meaning and the other fifteen two, which is not a system with a rule, it is a rule with exceptions nobody chose.
The practice is also recent. It enters rune reading through twentieth-century books, largely by analogy with reversed tarot cards, and there is nothing in the inscriptions or the poems to say the people cutting these staves read an inverted one as the negative of the same idea. We would rather draw fewer distinctions and be able to say where each one came from.
- Reversals
- Not used. In their standard forms nine of the twenty-four staves are unchanged by turning them upside down, so a reversed reading gives those nine one meaning and the other fifteen two. Mannaz is the borderline case and depends on which manuscript form you draw. The practice is also a twentieth-century import by analogy with tarot rather than anything in the historical record
- Randomness
- crypto.getRandomValues, the same source the I Ching casting uses. Nothing here is derived from your birth details, so casting twice gives two different draws, which is what a casting is
- The names
- Rune names are reconstructed. Only the Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems survive, all of them later than the Elder Futhark, so the Proto-Germanic names below are scholarly reconstructions and are marked with an asterisk in the literature
- Not included
- Bindrunes, galdrastafir, the Younger Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, all of which are different alphabets rather than variants of this one
The twenty-four, in three aettir
The row divides into three groups of eight. The division is real, it appears on the inscriptions themselves, and the names given to the three groups are later than the division is.
Freyr's aett
The first eight, from Fehu to Wunjo. Read as the material world: wealth, strength, craft, and what people owe each other.
Heimdall's aett
The second eight, from Hagalaz to Sowilo. The difficult one: hail, need, ice, and then the year turning, the yew, and the sun.
Tyr's aett
The last eight, from Tiwaz to Othala. Justice, growth, people and the ground they belong to.
AsterNym explores these as cultural and metaphysical traditions, not scientific predictions.