The Armanen runes
Eighteen runes devised by an Austrian occultist in 1902, presented ever since as an ancient Germanic alphabet. It is not one, and the number eighteen is the clearest proof.
If you have met a rune chart with eighteen characters, or a book that assigns runes to the eighteen charms at the end of a Norse poem, you have met the Armanen system. It is not a runic alphabet in the sense the rest of this site uses the word. It is a system devised by one man in 1902, and knowing that explains a great deal of what circulates about runes today.
The Armanen row is not a historical runic alphabet. It is not attested in any inscription, manuscript or rune poem, and no runologist treats it as one. It was constructed in the twentieth century and presented as a recovery of something ancient.
Where it came from
Guido von List (1848–1919) was an Austrian writer on Germanic antiquity and occultism. In 1902 he had cataract surgery and spent eleven months blind. He said afterwards that during that period his inner sight had opened and the true meaning of the runes had been revealed to him. That is the origin story the system gives for itself, and it is set out plainly here rather than paraphrased away, because it is the whole of the evidential basis.
The Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna declined to publish the resulting manuscript. It appeared as a periodical article in 1906 and as a book, Das Geheimnis der Runen ("The Secret of the Runes") in 1908, with a second edition in 1914. The Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft was founded to promote his work in the same year, and List added an inner esoteric order, the High Armanen Order, in 1911.
Why eighteen is the giveaway
No historical runic alphabet has eighteen characters. The Elder Futhark has 24, the Younger Futhark 16, the futhorc 29 extended to 33. Eighteen matches none of them, and the reason it is eighteen has nothing to do with any alphabet.
It comes from a poem. The closing section of Hávamál, the ljóðatal, lists eighteen charms that the speaker claims to know. List took the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, added two more, and mapped the resulting row onto those eighteen charms, so that each rune could be said to carry one of them. The alphabet was fitted to the poem, not recovered from the record.
And the poem is not about runes. Of the eighteen charms, exactly one, the twelfth, mentions runes at all; the other seventeen are songs, with no alphabet attached to them anywhere in the text. So the number eighteen is not merely borrowed from a source that has nothing to do with the futhark. It is borrowed from a list that is not describing writing. See runes in Old Norse literature.
What that inverts
How it differs from the real alphabets
| Historical futharks | Armanen row | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of characters | 24, 16, or 29–33 depending on the alphabet | Eighteen, always |
| Where the number comes from | The sounds the language needed writing | The eighteen charms of the ljóðatal in Hávamál, only one of which mentions runes |
| Evidence | Inscriptions, manuscript rows, rune poems | One author's account of a vision in 1902 |
| Rune names | Attested for the Younger Futhark and futhorc; reconstructed for the Elder | Reworked, with meanings assigned to fit the system |
| Purpose | Writing words down | Esoteric and, later, racial-nationalist doctrine |
| Age | From roughly AD 150 | From 1902 |
The political afterlife
This is why the Armanen system matters beyond the history of a fringe idea. List's work was not a private eccentricity: the List Society drew members from Austrian and German middle- and upper-class society, and its ideas fed the Reichshammerbund, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, which connect in turn to early Nazi circles. Runic symbolism reached the SS through this lineage rather than from any Scandinavian source.
The route by which runes acquired far-right associations runs through List and the Ariosophists, not through the historical record of the script. Goodrick-Clarke's study of the Ariosophists is the standard scholarly account, and it is the reason this can be described from history rather than from the fringe material that otherwise dominates the subject.
The practical consequence is set out on our page about runes, extremism and context. The short version is that the runes with political baggage (othala, sowilo, tiwaz, algiz) acquired it in about two decades in the early twentieth century, and that this is recent damage to very old letters rather than anything intrinsic to them.
Why it is still around
The system did not die with its political context. It was carried into post-war esoteric rune practice, and an English translation of Das Geheimnis der Runen in 1988 brought it to an American audience with no memory of where it came from. A good deal of what is sold today as traditional rune lore (assigned magical functions, rune yoga, rune postures) descends from this line rather than from anything medieval.
How to spot it
Questions this guide answers
- What is the Armanen futhark?
- An eighteen-rune system invented by the Austrian occultist Guido von List around 1902 and published in 1908. It is not a historical runic alphabet, though it is frequently presented as one.
- Why does the Armanen row have eighteen runes?
- Because the closing section of Hávamál lists eighteen charms. List built the row to match that number, starting from the sixteen Younger Futhark runes and adding two. No attested runic alphabet has eighteen characters, and the list he matched is not about runes either: only one of the eighteen charms mentions them.
- Are Armanen runes real runes?
- The shapes are mostly borrowed from real runes, so individual characters may look familiar. The row, the names, the assigned meanings and the number are all modern constructions.
- Is using Armanen runes far-right?
- Not necessarily: the system circulates in esoteric contexts with no political intent. But it originated in völkisch racial mysticism and fed directly into Nazi symbolism, and know that history before adopting it.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.