Cast the runes

What you’ll need

A choice of spread.

What you’ll get

The 24 Elder Futhark staves, drawn from a cryptographic random source, upright only and with the reason given.

Upright only, and read against what the three surviving rune poems say instead of a modern gloss laid over them.

Drawn with your browser’s 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.

Turn a rune upside down and, for 9 of the 24, nothing happens. ᚷ Gebo, ᚺ Hagalaz, ᚾ Nauthiz, ᛁ Isa, ᛃ Jera, ᛇ Eihwaz, ᛊ Sowilo, ᛜ Ingwaz and ᛞ 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 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.

AsterNym explores these as cultural and metaphysical traditions, not scientific predictions.