Aldrabok: Rune Lore and Mysticism

You can find each symbol online on the Icelandic museum of sorcery website (yes that’s a thing….] along with the description of how it was prepared and such here

Galdrastafir from the galdrabok are here

(adapted from an 11th c. Anglo-Saxon metrical charm)

Cut a small block of sod from your garden (or, if there be no grass, pull up a plant with strong roots), and mark the spot whence you took it. Mix together equal parts olive oil, honey, cream, yeast, and holy water, and drip the mixture three times upon the roots of the sod. Say thereover nine times:

Crescite, crescite, wexe et multipilcamini gemænig fealda et replete, gefylle terre thas eordhan In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti  sit bene

(Grow, grow, grow and multiply become manyfold and replete, fill earth, the earth In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost be blessed)

Make of ash wood a small cross and inscribe at each end the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Go out to whence you pulled your sod and plant it back in its place and lay thereon the cross, saying thus:

Crux Matheus, crux Marc, crux Lucas, crux Sancto Iohannes

(cross Matthew, cross Mark, cross Luke, cross Saint John)

Turn then toward the east and say:

Eastweard ic stande,  arena ic me bidde bidde ic thone mæran. domine bidde dhone miclan drihten bidde ic dhone haligan heofonrices weard. eordhan ic bidde & upheofon & dha sothan sancta Marian, & heofones meaht. & Heahreced tht ic mote this gealdor mid gife drihtnes todhu ontynan thurh trumne ge thanc aweccan thas wæstmas us to woruld nytte gefyllan thas foldan mid fæste geleafan wlitigi.

(Eastward I stand, mercy for me I bid Bid I the mighty. Lord, bid then the great ruler bid I the holy heaven’s ward. Earth I bid, and heaven, and the true holy Mary, and Heaven’s might. And the high place that I may with this spell with gift of the ruler To us untie through firm thought awaken this bounty for us to world knit fullness to these fields with stout leafy beauty.)

Bow down and continue:

gan thas wancg turf swa se witega cwædh. Thæt se hæfde are on eorth rice se the ælmyssan dælde dom lice drihtnes thances.

(Go thee with the turf as the wise one said. He who has riches on earth gives alms dealing as his lordly ruler intends.)

Turn sunwise thrice, saying each time ‘sanctus’ (holy). Sing then the Canticle of Mary thus:

Magnificat anima mea Dominum; Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo, Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes. Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen ejus, Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum. Fecit potentiam in brachio suo; Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes. Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae, Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini ejus in saecula. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,: sicut erat in principio, Et nunc, et semper: et in Saecula saeculorum. Amen.

(My soul magifies the Lord; and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour, for he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden; behold henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he who has made me great is mighty, and holy is his name, and his mercy is on they who fear him for all generations. He has shown strength with his arm; He has dispersed the proud ones in the minds of their hearts. He has deposed the mighty from where they sat, and raised up the humble. The hungry he has filled with good things, and the rich he sent away empty. He has helped Israel, his servant, remembering his mercy, As is promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed in eternity. Glory to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,: as it was in the beginning, and now, and always: and in eternity. Amen.)

Now take a seed of a plant that has never been planted in your garden. Say:

Erce, erce, erce, eordhan modor geunne the se alwalda ece drihten æcera wexendra & wridendra, eacnien dra & elniendra sceafta henre scirra wæstma. & thæra bradan bere wæstma,  & thæra hwitan hwæte wæstma, & ealra eorthan wæstma. Geunne hi ece drihten & his halige theon heofonum synt thæt hys yrth si gefrithodwidh ealra feonda gehwæne & heo si gebor gen widh ealra bealwa ge hwylc thara lyblaca geond land sawen. Nu ic bidde dhone walden se dhe dhas woruld gesceop thæt ne synan to thæs cwi dol wif ne to thæs cræftig man thæt awendan ne mæge worud thus gecwedene.

(Erce, erce, erce, earth-mother give us, all-wielder, ever-ruler acres fruitful and flourishing, fertile and strong high shafts in bright abundance. And there, broad barley crops, and there, white wheat crops,  and all earth’s abundance.  Give all-ruler and his holy ones who art in heaven that this earth is strong against all fiends every one and armoured against all evils whatsoever, and every poison throughout the land sown. Now I bid that these fields themselves and this world that nothing created by the spell-casting wife nor by the crafty man may unravel words thus spoken.)

As you make a hole in which to plant the seed, say:

Thon hal wes thu, folde, fira modor beo thu growende ongodes fæthme fodre gefylled firum to nytte.

(Then health to you,  field, the folk’s mother Be thou growing in the embrace of good food-filled for the people to enjoy.)

Now take two flours together, both of wheat and of barley, and bake a loaf kneaded with holy water and milk, as broad as your hand. Bury this loaf beneath your planting-bed and say thereover:

ful æcer fodres fira cinne, beorht, blowende, thu gebletsod weorth thæs haligan noman the dhas heofon gesceop  & dhas eorthan the we onlifiath se god se thas grundas ge worhte geunne us growende gife thæt us corna gehwylc cume to nytte.

(Fill fields with food for the folk, kind, bright, blooming, your blessed wort this sacred place, this that heaven shaped and this earth that we live on that the god that this ground wrought giving us growing gifts  that to us grain comes to benefit.)

Say then three times as you sprinkle holy water over the length and breadth of your garden:

Crescite, in nomine patris, sit benedicti. Sodhlice.

(Grow, in the name of the Father, be blessed. Amen.)

This has sat in my drafts for long enough that I should probably admit I’m not going to get around to doing it justice in a timely manner, so I’ll just do a quick, inadequate response.

Yes, Nordic pre-Christian religion included a heavy element of ancestor veneration, although reconstructing the details of their ancestor worship has proven very difficult, possibly because:

much of it may have been less “public” or “official” than worship of certain gods, and we have considerably fewer sources for the influence of religion on the day-to-day activities of medieval heathens and

it probably varied widely by place and time, so the bits of evidence that we do have should not be assumed to compatible parts of a single, cohesive whole. Even Snorri himself, who has a strong tendency toward cohesiveness and homogenization of varied beliefs and practices, recognized an important religious division between heathens who buried their dead and heathens who cremated their dead. Variation in mortuary practices like this is somewhat likely to be related to other differences in the way people viewed the dead and their continued existence.

As a result most of what we know and can describe does not pertain to household worship, but please do see the paper by Luke John Murphy that I link below.

As you read and learn more, be careful not to fall into this trap: This discussion is difficult, confusing, sometimes self-contradictory. You will surely find many heathen descriptions that attempt to systematize and define things, such as to say that álfar (elves) are male ancestors and dísir are female ancestors. This is a severe oversimplification and outdated view that does not reflect contemporary scholarship.

It might be better to use a more neutral term like “recognition” than “veneration.” There is not necessarily evidence for a religious imperative to felial piety – it doesn’t seem the dead were all worshiped in the same manner and the Icelandic sagas are full of examples of dead who overstayed their welcome (not just draugar, but also in Eyrbyggja saga one interpretation of an event that occurs is that the fylgja of Þorgunna appears after her death to wreak havoc because her last wishes were not carried out).

On the other hand some people were worshiped like gods after their death. Vita Anskarii describes a certain King Erik whom the gods apparently agreed to welcome into the pantheon (we are getting this through non-Norse Christians so some degree of misunderstanding is likely but this is typically taken as evidence of worship of the dead king). Ólafr Geirstaðaálfr is another king who was worshiped, apparently as an elf, after his death. It would seem that his worship still had influence in the time of Saint Ólafr whose followers may or may not have tried to usurp reverence for Ólafr Geirstaðaálfr by promoting an idea that Saint Ólafr was his reincarnation.

There seems to have been some kind of tradition of descent from divine or semi-divine rulers. We see an early reflex of this idea in Tacitus who says that three primary divisions in the Germanic tribes into the Ingvaeones, Irminones, and Istaevones each answer to one of three brothers who served as their progenitors, each the son of Mannus, the son of Tuisto, a god. This myth has no direct parallel among the Norse but similar, transformed ideas of divine descent do occur especially in the “histories” of certain royal dynasties. Thus we find sagas and poems like Ynglinga tal, Háleygja tal, Rígsþula, Skjǫldunga saga, Hversu Noregr byggðisk, etc. describing royal houses that were formed by gods. The differences between this later tradition and the earlier one by Tacitus should be explained as having undergone a major change in social structure from one based on the gens to one based on a sort of proto-nationalistic conception of kingship that begins before conversion but doesn’t complete itself until after (and which is rejected by some, such as the settlers of Iceland); and as influenced by continental traditions of descent of royal houses from progenitor gods, especially but not only Óðinn/Wōden/Wōdan among the Anglo-Saxons, Langobards, Goths (in Jordanes), etc.

The state of research on the complex of beings like dísir, álfar, fylgjur, hamingjur, etc, all of which have been implicated in the study of pre-Christian ancestor veneration, is a lot of conflicting ideas and theories and difficult to describe succinctly. I’d recommend reading chapter XI “Guardian spirits” of Myths and Religion of the North by E.O.G. Turville-Petre to get caught up on the sort of status quo of research on the way into more up-to-date research and theory. Turville-Petre is outdated but it will give you an idea of what more recent scholars have been working with.

I very highly recommend reading “Familial Religion in Pre-Christian Scandinavia? Ancestor-Worship, Mother-Priestesses, and Offerings for the Elves“ by Luke John Murphy. It isn’t specifically about ancestor worship although it does touch on it. It’s also a much better reflection of up-to-date thought on the study of Old Norse religion, and is full of useful references for further reading.

Sorry for the delay.

Without actually seeing it, it can be hard to tell. It’s possible that she designed it without any systematic method. On the other hand, it’s not unlikely that it was a bindrune, in which case I am able to explain a bit about it.

A bindrune (or bandrune, Ice. bandrún) is a single symbol composed of parts of multiple runes. The most simple ones are basic ligatures of two runes, the same way that “æ” is a ligature of “a” and “e.” These are probably for space-saving or stylistic reasons. You can see a few of them on the Kragehul I spearshaft:

͡er in the upper left, m͡u on the right. The famous g͡ag͡ag͡a is right in the middle of the image.

Here’s one with a few, this is BR BARNES2 from the Maeshowe cairn (I edited to make it easier to see):

Another type are samstafsrúnir (same-stave-runes). This is where the twigs of the rune are distinct but are arranged vertically on a single, very long stave:

This is the Sønder Kirkeby stone (DR 220). The samstafsrúnir are the horizontal band across the top, turned 90 degrees, originally (before damage to the stone) reading þ=u=r : u=i=k=i : r=u=n=a=ʀ Þórr vígi rúnar ‘Thor hallow (the) runes.’

Some later Icelandic magical staves such as the following have been interpreted as samstafsrúnir that have been highly stylized until they are no longer directly analyzable by their original individual runes:

These are from manuscript Lbs 5472 I 4to.

A third type is usually called a “rune cross.” This consists of a spoked shape with runes on the extremities:

This is the back of a fibula found in a grave in Soest, image from here. Interpretations differ, the primary dispute being whether or not to read the cross shape itself as a g rune and therefore whether it should be read atano or gatano. These are relatively rare in the runic corpus, but have become popular in contemporary usage because of their similarity to early modern Icelandic magical symbols found in black books such as ægishjálmur and vegvísir.

Holy shit. That’s awesome.

I don’t think I’ve heard that before. I have heard the theory that it was meant to make teaching and learning it easier, which almost sounds like the opposite but actually kind of corresponds to theories of speaker- and listener-based sound change, basically the idea that there can be conflict between the speaker’s tendency toward sounds that are easier to say and the speaker’s need to produce sounds that are easier for another person to distinguish. So yeah, in this case something that’s easier to write (or to memorize, or whatever) does reduce clarity for the reader. There also are very clear examples of inscriptions that are meant to push the boundaries of readability (while showing off the skill of the rune-carver, I’m looking at you, Rök stone), and also later on where the runes are written along complex twisting serpents and stuff where it can be hard to tell what order you’re supposed to read it in (that of course is way after the reduction to 16 runes though, and after the expansion via dotting). There are also examples of magic wherein the spell has to be broken by correctly deciphering the runes, in which case it does have to be theoretically decipherable (the most famous being the þmkiiissstttiiilll þistill mistill kistill thing, and runestones beginning with the command ráð þú! ‘interpret!’

I know some people have argued that it’s about reducing the runes to ones that are drawn with a single stave, but that doesn’t make sense to me since early younger futhark still had elder shapes for hagall ᚺ and maðr ᛗ, and it’s not like they didn’t have opportunities to use an o, d, or g rune (uþin Óðinn and tuirk dverg on the Ribe skull).

It is interesting that some knowledge of these lost runes (or at least their shapes) must have persisted in some way for the carver of the Rök stone to use them, but they used them very poorly in a way that makes it clear they’re still using a 16-rune framework, and they’re only using them to make things even more complicated, rather than clarifying anything.