Runes
Rune reading works with the 24 symbols of the Elder Futhark: a rune is drawn from a pouch and its meaning is read, sometimes taking a reversed position into account. The calculator below draws a rune at random and gives you a link to its interpretation right away.
How Rune Reading Works
The classic way: the runes are placed in an opaque pouch, you formulate a question and draw one or more tiles without looking. The order and orientation as they are laid out are noted — they are part of the interpretation.
The main spreads:
- One Rune — an answer to a specific question, or a rune of the day. The most common method.
- Three Runes — situation, action, outcome. The positions set the meaning of each rune.
- Five-rune cross — an extended version of the three-rune spread, adding the past and an obstacle.
Large spreads of 9 and 24 runes do exist, but they are hard to interpret and of little use in an online format.
Upright and Reversed Positions
Eight runes of the Futhark have symmetrical shapes — they look the same either way up and have no reversed meaning: Gebo, Hagalaz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz, Dagaz. The other sixteen can land reversed. Our calculator takes this into account: it never gives a reversed position for the symmetrical runes.
Strictly speaking, the rune Nauthiz doesn’t change when turned either, so some runologists also read it only upright. Like many modern runologists, we give a reversed meaning for Nauthiz as well.
Some practitioners don’t work with reversed runes at all — in that case the meaning is read as weakened or delayed.
How Runes Differ from Tarot
There are 24 runes and 78 Tarot cards, and that changes everything. A rune answer is shorter and blunter: one rune sets a theme, not a storyline. Tarot is better at describing how events unfold and relationships between people; runes, the state of affairs and the appropriate action.
The second difference is origin. The Futhark is a real writing system of the Germanic peoples from the 2nd to the 8th century, and inscriptions on stones and objects survive. The divination system built on it, however, is a 20th-century construction: the surviving sources (such as the rune poems) describe the meanings of the signs, but not any technique for spreads.
What's in this section
Meanings of the 24 runes — for each, the upright meaning (sixteen also have a reversed one), love, work and the rune’s advice.
Calculators: one rune and three runes. Both run in your browser: the result goes to our server only if you ask for an AI reading.
An Honest Look at the Method
The ancient Germanic peoples used runes as a script; Tacitus, in his “Germania,” describes lots cast with carved signs, but which signs they were and how they were interpreted is unknown. Modern rune meanings rely on the Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian, and Icelandic rune poems — that is, on the names of the signs, not on a divination tradition.
The method has no verifiable ability to predict events: the result of each draw is random. A rune is useful as a prompt to put into words what you already understand about your situation.