#futhark

Völva

Posted by Kamil Krzemiński

This set is named the Pyramid Runes because of the shape.

For the record, tetrahedral bag = hella awkward to sew, but it was a design choice that was entirely self-inflicted so really I have no right to complain. It's partially machine-sewn, partially hand-sewn. Exterior is green velvet; interior is a sort of burgundy microsuede-ish stuff. The blue nylon cord threads through six grommets to close the bag, is adorned with a beaded charm thing and cinched with a cylindrical red glass bead. Each pair of grommets is adorned with a beaded drop/pendant/charm thingy.

The stones are green glass, roughly tetrahedron-shaped. Runes were engraved into all four sides and filled in with metallic silver-white paint and baked in the oven to fuse the paint to the glass.

Prayer Poem to Odin and the Blessings of Algiz For protection, wisdom, and the sacred way

Allfather Odin, wanderer wise, One-eyed seer of the storm-swept skies, I call to You with heart held high— Grant me strength and inner sight.

You who drank from Mimir’s well, You who hung from Yggdrasil— In pain, in sacrifice, You found The runes that pulse through root and crown.

Today I raise the elder stave, Algiz—bright and antler-brave. Protector’s mark, of shield and wing, Guardian glyph of sacred things.

Let this rune be hedge and flame, A ward that speaks in Your great name. Let it rise like elk horn proud, Between me and the shadowed shroud.

Odin, guide me through the mist, With raven’s voice and runic twist. Let the path unfold in truth, With wisdom drawn from ancient roots.

Bless me with the second sight, The silent knowing born of night. Where fear would cling and doubt would stay, Let Algiz lead the safer way.

In stillness, may I hear Your call, In chaos, may I never fall. May courage be the breath I keep— With Algiz carved in soul so deep.

That tiny moment completely derailed my afternoon. I dropped straight into amateur cryptography mode and spent the next few hours meticulously translating every symbol on the cover. I flipped back and forth between every example of the script across the book, the map with the moon runes, and the cover itself, piecing together words from the symbols I had already confirmed and making guesses based on the ones I had half decoded. I didn’t know anything about orthographic conventions or Tolkien’s linguistic habits, I was just following the lines, matching what I knew, and building an alphabet like I had uncovered a lost code.

When I finally finished, feeling triumphant and way too proud of myself for discovering all but two of the symbols that matched the modern alphabet, I flipped to the preface and learned that Tolkien had already explained the entire system. He walked through how he adapted the futhark into his Dwarven script and laid out the transliterations in plain English. My breakthrough was basically me reinventing what he had already placed in front of every reader.

But the feeling stuck with me. Something about the shapes, the sharp deliberate lines, the sense that they weren’t just written but carved, stayed lodged in my mind. The next day I spent all my free moments doodling runes in the margins of my school worksheets, on the backs of finished tests, and anywhere I could get away with it. It wasn’t about magic or fantasy then, it was the satisfaction of holding a set of symbols that felt older and more meaningful than regular letters.

It didn’t fully hit me how much I had absorbed until years later, when I stumbled across a photo of an actual rune stone. Just a random image online of a tall weathered slab covered in the curling patterns of elder runes. Without thinking about it, my brain started transliterating it. Not translating, I couldn’t read the language, which was Icelandic or some older Scandinavian tongue, but I could render the shapes into Latin letters instantly, like it was the most natural thing in the world. It felt surreal, like this childhood side quest had been waiting quietly under the surface.

That moment cracked something open again. It revived my long standing interest in Norse mythology, which had always been there in the background. Following the runes pulled me back into the stories behind them. I ended up rereading the myths with a different sense of attention, seeing how each rune wasn’t just a letter but a concept, a belief, a fragment of how the Norse understood the world.

Eventually I came across the story of Odin learning the runes, the version where he hangs for nine nights on the world tree, pierced and alone, sacrificing himself to himself in order to pull knowledge from the deep places of existence. The imagery struck me, not as divine melodrama but as a myth built around the idea that understanding, real understanding, asks something of you. It asks for cost, intention, and endurance. It asks you to sit with the unknown long enough for it to reshape you.

And learning more about the runes began to reshape things in me too. They changed how I thought about language, symbolism, and the way meaning sits beneath the surface of things. Once I understood that each rune carried layers of cultural memory and metaphor, even everyday symbols felt heavier. A name. A sign. A carved line. Patterns in the world became visible the way constellations do once someone points them out. Simple marks felt like anchors to older ideas, older fears, older hopes.

What fascinated me most wasn’t just the myth of Odin or the discovery of the runes themselves, it was the way the Norse treated language as something inherently powerful. Not just communication, but influence. A force. The belief that words shape reality, or at the very least shape the person who carries them. The more I sat with that idea, the more it made sense. Humans are the only creatures who think in symbols, who build internal worlds out of marks and sounds and meanings we agree to share. There is something quietly magical about that, something that hums beneath every conversation and story and decision.

Encountering this through runes made it feel personal. It reframed how I understood my own thoughts. Language stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a landscape. I saw connections between things I had never linked before. The way a concept can change a room. The way a single true word can alter the shape of a memory. The quiet courage of naming something you have carried in silence.

One of the first concrete moments where I realized how much this had changed me was when I recognized the Bluetooth symbol as a bind rune made from Hagall and Bjarkan. I had seen it thousands of times and never looked twice at it, but now I could spot ancient symbols hidden inside a modern tech logo. Other shapes started jumping out too. The angular forms in street signs. Other logos that unintentionally echoed the structure of runes. Even the alphabet itself felt different once I noticed how many of its early forms echoed older runic shapes.

The more I learned, the more it felt like all these pieces from childhood lined up. The book cover. The decoding. The rune stone. The mythology. The quiet thrill of seeing meaning in shapes that do not reveal themselves to everyone. It felt like discovering a language beneath the language I already knew, something that made the world feel wider and more layered than I had ever realized.

The Futhork letters here do translate to English, with the letters spelling OBI-WAN and CORUSCANT at the bottom of the right hand screen, but it's really hard to make out what the other planets on this screen are. Some letters can be discerned, but the only ones I can say with confidence are Coruscant, Tatooine, and Geonosis.

This planet, third from left, seems to be _ O _ H _ _

This planet, fourth from left, might read "YAVIN".

The last planet on the screen is very difficult to make out since it is so blurry.

If anyone has any ideas of which planets these might be, feel free to comment. Here is the cipher for Futhork to our Latin alphabet.