“Do you know how to cut? Do you know how to read?” Havamal stanza 144.

At the 2010 Mercian Gathering I went to a talk on runes given by Peter Jenkins. He is mainly interested in the Elder Futhork but it was an interesting talk and one of the points he made set me thinking. Peter made the point that in a mainly illiterate society anyone who could take a piece of wood, cut runes on it and send it to another rune meister so the message would be understood many miles away would seem like a magician. This could be seen as an application of Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that any technology that is sufficiently advanced seems like magic to those who don't understand it.

Even if you know that communication is nothing magical but can't read the language you can feel pretty inadequate, I get that feeling every time I go to Germany.

So, runes are a means of communication and have always been used for this purpose in one form or another. They are often regarded as a kind of 'proto-writing' which later evolved into 'proper' modern writing. The problem with this idea is that runes only seem to occur in the period after the fall of the Roman empire and particularly flourished in the period we used to call the dark ages, eg about 400 to 1000 CE. The Romans certainly knew how to write and in fact writing in various forms pre-dates the Romans by thousands of years. So did the people of the north really invent writing from scratch (forgive the pun) during the dark ages?

Think more about the effects of changing technology. Is texting on mobile phones an indication of a newly literate society or just a sensible way of composing what have to be very short messages? The development of runes may not be a sign of a newly literate society but a continuation of literacy using a new medium. If I found myself in a position of having to communicate by cutting characters onto pieces of wood because paper and pen was no longer available then I would find it much more efficient to use runes rather than trying to scratch cursive script onto wood. I need to do some more research on it but I am beginning to think that runes are most likely a cursive script modified to cut into wood when paper or parchment and ink were no longer available.

Knowing how to cut definitely has two meanings, how to cut wood which means knowing how to see the grain of the timber and how to use a knife so that you work with the grain. This is the most direct way to learn to see the lines of the web and we will return to that theme later. You also need to know what to cut in order to communicate your intent correctly. There is a story in Egil's Saga where incorrectly cut runes almost kill an unfortunate young woman. So whether your intent is simply to write a shopping list correctly or attempt to bring healing or some other major change you need to know what each rune means. Then you need to develop the skill and focus to actually engrave it into hard wood and in doing this the runes will teach you how to work with the web.

How would you learn how to cut and read? Well the necessary information is readily available, you can download a pdf of the names, meanings and associations of the runes here http://www.stavcamp.org/pdf/16runes.pdf and a list of correspondences for writing here http://www.stavcamp.org/pdf/runewriting.pdf , then, as with all the basics of Stav, remember and practice. Oh, and this is one of the things we will do at the 2011 summer camp,

http://www.stavcamp.org/

Regards,

Graham