Almost everything anyone claims to know about what an individual rune meant rests on three texts, and it is worth knowing how thin and how late they are.
The three rune poems
- The Old English Rune Poem, twenty-nine stanzas covering the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, probably tenth-century. Its manuscript, Cotton Otho B.x, burned in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731. The text survives only because George Hickes had printed it in 1705.
- The Norwegian Rune Poem, sixteen stanzas for the Younger Futhark, thirteenth-century, likewise surviving through early modern copies.
- The Icelandic Rune Poem, sixteen stanzas, fifteenth-century.
That is the entire near-contemporary evidence for rune meanings. Two of the three cover the sixteen-character Younger Futhark rather than the twenty-four of the Elder Futhark, so for eight Elder runes there is no rune-poem stanza at all, only the reconstructed name.
What they are actually for
They are mnemonic verses, alphabet poems, of a genre found across medieval Europe for the Latin and Hebrew alphabets too. Each stanza names a letter and says something memorable about the thing the letter is named after.
The Fehu stanza is a fair sample. The Old English poem says that wealth is a comfort to every man, but that a man must share it freely if he wishes to be judged well before the Lord. That is a proverb about generosity attached to a letter called cattle. It is not an oracle entry, and the Christian framing of the second half is not an intrusion into the poem, it is the poem.
What they are not
They do not describe drawing lots. They do not give reversed meanings. They do not assign runes to gods, elements or planets. Every correspondence of that kind in circulation today, and this atlas records those correspondences, because they are what practitioners use, was supplied later, mostly much later.
The rune poems are the floor. What is built above the floor is a modern structure, and the two should not be confused.