Rune meanings
Every rune has a name, and those names are real words. The step from "this rune is called hail" to "this rune means sudden disruption in your life" is where the evidence stops and interpretation begins.
This is the question that brings most people to runes, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a chart. The honest version has three layers, and most sources present all three as if they were one.
Layer one: the names
The rune names are the solid ground, and they are ordinary words: hail, ice, birch, need, sun, day, wealth, water. For the Younger Futhark the rune poems record them directly. For the futhorc they come from manuscript futhorc rows, with the Old English Rune Poem describing 29 of them, and the four late Northumbrian additions described by no poem at all.
For the Elder Futhark the situation is weaker. No contemporary source records those names. They are reconstructed by working backwards from the later Gothic, English and Norse traditions, which is why this site writes them with an asterisk: fehu, algiz, *perþrō. The reconstruction is often good. It is not the same as attestation.
Layer two: what the poems say about them
The rune poems do more than list names: they describe each one in a few lines of verse. That description is medieval evidence for how the name was understood, and it is where the more defensible modern meanings come from.
Hail is the whitest of grains; it whirls down out of the sky, gusts of wind toss it about, and afterwards it turns to water.– The Old English Rune Poem on hægl, our translation
Reading hagalaz as "sudden destructive force that nonetheless passes" is a reasonable extension of that stanza. It is interpretation, but it is interpretation with something under it.
The poems are not a decoder ring
Layer three: the modern divinatory system
The detailed divinatory meanings in circulation today (keywords, upright and reversed readings, spreads, correspondences) are twentieth-century. The most influential single source is Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes (1982), which shaped the popular system substantially.
Blum's book also put two things into wide circulation that have no historical basis whatever: a blank rune, and a rune order of his own that abandons the futhark sequence entirely: by his own account he had never seen a runic text when he devised it, and did not realise he was departing from the traditional ættir. His readings draw on then-current books about the I Ching rather than on Norse material. Both are still widespread in commercial rune sets.
How to tell the layers apart
| Claim | Which layer | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| "ᚦ is called þurs, meaning giant" | Attested | Both Norse rune poems say so |
| "ᚦ is associated with danger and hostility" | Reasonable interpretation | Follows from the poems, which link it to harm |
| "ᚦ reversed means a warning you are ignoring" | Modern | No historical source describes reversed readings |
| "ᛉ means protection" | Modern | The Old English poem describes a marsh plant that cuts you |
| "ᛇ represents Yggdrasil" | Modern | No source connects this rune to the world tree |
| "ᛃ relates to harvest and cycles" | Attested name, reasonable extension | All three poems name it "year, harvest" |
The case of algiz
Algiz is the clearest example of a modern meaning completely eclipsing the historical record. It is universally sold as the protection rune. The Old English poem calls it eolh-secg, elk-sedge, and describes a marsh plant that wounds anyone who grasps it. The reconstructed name *algiz may mean "elk" or may mean "protection"; the argument has run for a century without resolution.
No inscription uses a lone algiz rune protectively. The protection reading rests on an uncertain etymology and on the shape looking like splayed antlers or raised arms. That does not make it a bad symbol to use. It makes it a modern one.
What this site does
Every dictionary entry separates these layers explicitly. The etymology and historical use carry an evidence label. The modern meaning is in its own clearly marked section, with a note saying where the reading came from and how old it is. You are not asked to take any of it on trust: the sources are listed on each page.
Questions this guide answers
- Are rune meanings historically attested?
- The names are, for the Younger Futhark and the futhorc. The rune poems describe them. The detailed divinatory meanings (keywords, reversed readings, spreads) are twentieth-century developments.
- What is the most powerful rune?
- No historical source ranks runes by power. Runes are letters. Any ranking you encounter is a modern system's ranking, not a historical one.
- Which rune means protection?
- Modern practice says algiz. Historically that is not supported: the Old English poem describes a cutting marsh plant, and no inscription uses the rune as a protective charm on its own.
- Why do different websites give different meanings?
- Because they are drawing on different modern systems, and because the historical evidence underdetermines the answer. Where the rune poems disagree with each other, as they do for úr and kaun, every source has to pick one, and they pick differently.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.