I’ve been studying the runes for almost 20 years now. I was in my freshman year of high school when I first stumbled across these mysterious symbols as I was doing research for a chemistry paper: a picture of a Viking-era sword whose blade was etched with a combination of “Isa”, “Nauthiz”, and “Tiwaz”. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. All I knew was that they called to me. Reached out to me from that CD-ROM and dared me to understand what it meant. I’ve done what I could over the past 20 years to answer that dare.

During that period of time I’ve seen many ebbs and flows in the direction of the studies of the masses into runes and rune-lore. I’ve tried some of them on, and dismissed others out-of-hand. From those chintzy pewter necklaces based on the Blum book in the eighties, to the quasi-neo-nazi symbolistic revival of Asatru as the “true religion”, to the scholarly advances of Edred Thorsson and everything in between. While I wouldn’t say that every attempt has been without merit, not one attempt has contained enough real truth for my satisfaction.

If you’re reading this and are close to the study of rune-lore, this is where you will point out that since we have so few primary source materials about the original study of runes, we will never come close to the truth. Maybe you’ll say that what we have is a good enough approximation that we can get by with it. I won’t disagree with you outright. I will challenge, however, that out of all of those attempts, little has been done to relate our studies of runes to the daily culture of the originators. That’s not to say we haven’t accounted for differences in semantic meanings, but I believe we’ve not come very far in understanding and then transposing original meanings into contemporary culture.

For example, fehu’s meaning as money, mobile wealth, cattle is certain. We have reference to as much within the runic poems, the etymology of the word “fee” can be traced back to “feoh” which is a derivative of the proto-Germanic “fehu”. Good. However, what we haven’t done is a good enough job of interpreting the originating culture’s concept of money for our contemporary age. Instead, we’ve tried to glom some quasi-supported esoteric “creative energy in the multiverse” meaning to fehu which doesn’t make any sense. That’s the equivalent of saying that the concept of mobile property, money, cattle, etc. brought to mind the creative energy of the multiverse to a 7th century godi. Seriously? Since when does the power to barter bring to mind a mythological creation of time?

What I’m advocating is not a cease and desist on meditative practices or individual understanding of runes. I’m advocating an increase in intensity the anthropological/sociological research into the cultures who used the runes in order to understand how they applied to them. By doing so, we can then use our meditative practices to interpret their meaning to us in the 21st century.

I’m referring specifically to Edred Thorsson’s book “Futhark” and the website runesecrets.com. I have a copy of Thorsson’s book and have perused RuneSecrets. While I don’t hold any ill will towards either site — there is good information within both — I tend to have more faith in the approach of the Rune Net group. A tempered and historically-driven search for evidence of mystical meaning that is then backed by the meditative findings of the individual. That’s all I ask.