The runic revival: antiquaries, Romantics and twentieth-century uses

In early seventeenth-century Sweden, a court scholar spent his days copying inscriptions from stones in the countryside. His name was Johannes Bureus; he had been tutor to the future King Gustavus Adolphus, and in 1630 he received the title of the realm's first antiquary. With him begins the modern study of the runes, but also a long tradition of mystical and national readings that would accompany these letters into the twentieth century.

The antiquaries of the seventeenth century

Bureus collected and published drawings of rune stones and wrote grammars and catalogues. Alongside this documentary work, however, he cultivated a personal system, called Adulruna, in which the runes became keys to a secret wisdom, interwoven with the Kabbalah and the Christian Hermeticism of the time. In Denmark the physician Ole Worm published in 1643 the Danicorum Monumentorum libri sex, a great catalogue of Danish inscriptions, and corresponded with scholars across Europe.

In Sweden that century also saw the rise of Gothicism, an ideology that exalted the ancient Goths as the glorious ancestors of the Swedes. Its boldest exponent, Olof Rudbeck, in his Atlantica, published from 1679 onwards, went so far as to claim that Sweden was Plato's Atlantis. In this climate the runes were often dated to extremely remote ages, long before their real origins.

Romanticism

Between the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century the Nordic past became a central theme for poets, painters and musicians. In Denmark the theft of the golden horns of Gallehus in 1802 inspired a famous poem by Adam Oehlenschläger. In Sweden the Geatish Society was founded in 1811, bringing together writers such as Erik Gustaf Geijer and Esaias Tegnér. Runes appeared on book covers, on monuments and in illustrations of the sagas.

In Germany Richard Wagner brought Norse myth to the stage with his cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, first performed complete at Bayreuth in 1876. In his version Wotan's spear bears the carved runes of the treaties that uphold the world. It is a dramatic invention, not an ancient source, but it helped fix in the European imagination the idea of runes as signs of power.

Caution about the twentieth century

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Austrian occultist Guido von List published The Secret of the Runes, in 1908, presenting a system of eighteen runes called Armanen, which he claimed to have received by intuition during a period of temporary blindness. The system corresponds to no historical row and was tied to völkisch nationalism, a movement with strong racist components. From this milieu some runes passed into the symbolism of National Socialism, which used them for its own organisations.

For this reason the history of the runes in the twentieth century must be told with caution, distinguishing authentic inscriptions from the ideological reinterpretations that misused them. Even the divinatory practices that spread from the 1980s, with runes carved on pebbles or tiles, are modern creations: the ancient sources describe no method of reading runes like those sold today.

The runic revival, in short, is a story of scholarly passion, national pride, art and also grave abuse. Knowing it helps us look at the original inscriptions with freer eyes: as the testimony of real peoples, with their languages, their trade and their mourning, before they became symbols loaded with meanings they never had.