Revival of the Runes: The Modern Rediscovery and Reinvention of the Germanic Runes - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2021

Preface

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Jan Reimer, who supplied me with some of the materials that made this work possible, and to Peter Andersson for his corrections to some Swedish material. For various kinds of help in the process of writing the present book, a note of gratitude also goes to Mikael W. Gejel, Alice Karlsdottir, Thomas Karlsson, Michael Moynihan, Ralph Tegtmeier, and Don Webb.

Abbreviations

BCE Before the Common Era (= BC)

CE Common Era (= AD)

Gk. Ancient Greek Ger. German

OE Old English

OHG Old High German

ON Old Norse

pl. plural

pron. pronounced

sg. singular

Sw. Swedish

IK Hauck, Karl, et al. Die Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit.

Note: Words that are directly preceded by an asterisk—for example, the noun *rūnō or the name *Wōðanaz—represent forms that have been reconstructed based on the principles of historical linguistics but which are unattested in the literary or epigraphical record.

Preface

STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

This book has roots that go back to a certain summer day in 1974 when I was suddenly inspired to seek the mysteries of the runes. At the time, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin with little motivation or direction, but I was interested in all things esoteric. This day changed everything and set me on a lifelong path. I was lucky enough to be enrolled at a university with the resources, teachers, and reference materials to make the scientific element of my journey possible, and ten years later I received a Ph.D. degree with a dissertation titled “Runes and Magic.”

From its very beginnings, the study of the runes has been entwined with both the scientific and esoteric adventures of our culture, and this is all the more evident today. But academics do not like to be saddled with the baggage of modern-day would-be “rune magicians,” and the average current “rune mystic” chafes under the rigor and historical accuracy demanded by the academic. To my thinking, however, these two impulses are not necessarily antagonistic. Indeed, my own experience was born of a synthesis of these two runological trends. This synthesis is also reflected in the contents of this book, which is an investigation of how the two trends have manifested historically and interacted culturally over the past half century.

Revival of the Runes constitutes the second book in a series of three thematically related works that I have been researching and writing over many years. The overarching goal of this project is to chronicle the most historically significant rune-using groups and individuals over the past two millennia. The first book in the series is a forthcoming study of the intertribal network—perhaps better described as gild—of runemasters that arose in ancient Germania (the latter term, which was originally used by ancient Roman writers such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus, refers to the areas of Europe traditionally and predominantly inhabited by Germanic-speaking peoples at the beginning of the first millennium of the Common Era). The second book in the series is the present volume, Revival of the Runes, which traces the general demise of ancient runic traditions during the latter Middle Ages in the wake of Christianization and also documents the resurgence of interest in the runes and the revival of their usage in the early modern and modern periods. The third and final book, written under my pen name, Edred Thorsson, is History of the Rune-Gild: The Reawakening of the Gild 1980—2018 (Thorsson 2019), which documents the development of the modern Rune-Gild, an international confraternity dedicated to seeking out and prying into the runic mysteries—as expressed both esoterically and exoterically—for personal and cultural development, using the most rigorous intellectual and practical tools.

Revival of the Runes looks at the long struggle that took place on many levels to reawaken this particular aspect of ancient Germanic culture, myth, and intellectual life over five hundred years, from the outset of the sixteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Those who today engage in inner or outer work with these mysterious signs from our collective past will benefit greatly from a deeper understanding of the scope and heroic dimension of our predecessors’ efforts at reawakening the study of the runes. One will learn that indeed we do stand on the shoulders of giants—poets, magicians, warriors, scholars, mystics, and the occasional scoundrel—who were the rune-users of the past.

Although the present book begins its in-depth coverage at approximately 1500, I will first provide a brief consideration of the earlier period before 1500. The further back one goes in this study, the sparser the evidence becomes. But the runic inscriptions themselves stand as stark proof of the existence of such a gild of runemasters in various parts of Germania for approximately fifteen hundred years. Since those carving runes during this span of time were otherwise illiterate—and information about how to write in runes, and the lore of the system itself, was categorically a matter of oral tradition passed from master to pupil—they thus constituted the “gild.”

For many reasons a book of this sort should be read and studied in conjunction with another multivolume project of mine called The Northern Dawn, which explores the general process of reawakening Germanic cultural values. For the reader who seeks to most fully understand the content of Revival of the Runes, it would also be of great benefit to absorb some general works on the histories of the various cultures we discuss—the Scandinavian, Icelandic, English, and German. Runes should always be seen as exponents of a much larger cultural base, of which they are weird and strange outcroppings of light and insight. For without a general grasp of the cultural matrix out of which these signs of light emerge, the information they can convey may become an instrument of delusion and unbridled mania.

STEPHEN E. FLOWERS,

WOODHARROW