‘Runes’ by Tom Birkett review

Runes: A Concise History by Tom Birkett looks beyond the mythical baggage to find a writing system no less remarkable and mysterious.

Danny Bate | Published in History Today Volume 76 Issue 2 February 2026

Harald Faith-Ell and Elias Wessén fill in the Sigurd carving with paint, August 1928. Swedish National Heritage Board. Public Domain.

What links the Hagia Sophia, a leonine statue in Venice, the Mines of Moria, and Nazi occultism? This has not, to my knowledge, been set as a sequence to solve on Only Connect, but if it were, a correct answer might be: runes.

Runes are ancient symbols, associated with Scandinavia and characterised by sharp lines and angles, suited for carving into rock, metal, and bone. Today they may conjure images of warriors, magic, seafaring longships, and bearded gods, and additionally fantastical realms such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Khazad-dûm. Runes are suffused with meaning. Be it carved into jewellery or inked into skin, a single rune can imbue its bearer with impressions of subarctic fortitude, primeval power, gruff masculinity, or even reactionary contempt. In 20th- and 21st-century history such associations have made runes into emblems for unsavoury movements on the political right, who have read into them a racially perfect past. Strata of recent uses and abuses have for many people today obscured runes’ original purpose: to write down sounds.

Tom Birkett’s Runes: A Concise History breaks off these later accretions and unearths their long history. Runes’ primary function as an alphabetic writing system is underlined throughout, as part of the ‘uphill battle’ against persistent misconceptions. This rebuttal gives Runes a mission, and it marshals many sources of evidence to form a solid shield-wall against tireless assaults of mistruth.

The study of runes is filled with lacunae: a partial and at times cryptic record leaves gaps in our current knowledge, none greater than their ultimate origin: they first appear in short inscriptions from the first and second centuries AD in what is now northern Germany, Denmark, and southern Norway. What came before these is murky prehistory. Is there a connection between the runes of northern Europe and the continent’s other writing systems? Can they somehow be grafted onto the same family tree as Roman letters? Our Roman branch, via a Greek and Phoenician stem, has its deepest roots in Egypt. If runes are an offshoot script, where can we locate the nexus?

The answer to the first rhetorical question is ‘most likely, yes’, but the second and third evade simple responses. The characters themselves tease scholars with complicated evidence; for every rune that looks and functions like a Roman equivalent (e.g. ᛒ, ᚱ, ᛏ = B, R, T) there is one that shares no obvious similarity in appearance with its counterpart in sound (e.g. ᛞ, ᚷ, ᛈ = D, G, P). To recognise them as a cousin script, we can allow runes some divergent shapes, but we might at least expect them to have preserved the ABCDEF order that is as old as the letters themselves. But no: the arrangement of runes taught to Nordic learners began ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ (FUÞARK), hence the name for the collection of letters: the futhark, the equivalent of our alphabet.

This ongoing argument is a lively battle of facts and inferences; experts have built their grand cases on micro-features of letters’ shapes and sound values, as well as a scattering of archaeological finds that could represent intermediate stages between Mediterranean scripts and northern runic writing. As outlandish ideas fall away (runes are neither Hebrew nor Turkic in origin), over the past century a consensus has consolidated around an Italian departure point. The Roman rendition of the letters is an established candidate for the forefather of runes, but other Italian contenders include Etruscan letters and ancient Alpine versions of the same alphabet, all of which were eventually superseded by Roman writing. The debate runs so deep that it might threaten to derail a book about runes at the outset. However, true to the titular promise of concision, Birkett’s book avoids sinking into the quagmire through a deft two-page overview.

Another thorny topic, given more attention, is a later ‘apparently counterintuitive’ change to the amount of runes in use. In eighth-century Scandinavia the earlier system of runes (known as the ‘elder futhark’) gave way to a new version (the ‘younger futhark’). The latter is what the Vikings would have known. The most notable feature of the change was a reduction of the overall number of runes by a third. For example, ᛖ, ᛈ, and ᚹ (E, P, and W) were culled, and the survivors had to step up to spell more sounds. This seems an irrational step away from the original ratio of letter to sound; the elder futhark was a good fit for the spoken Norse language, which in fact went on to develop even more sounds within its words. The birth of the younger futhark out of the elder therefore seems to fly in the face of sensibly phonemic spelling.

The puzzle as to why this happened is again handled skilfully by Birkett, who wisely forgoes a definitive explanation. Yet he does venture the intriguing suggestion that fewer runes, and therefore less phonemically accurate spelling, may have helpfully smoothed over differences in speech. That is, shrinking their alphabet may have helped Vikings to communicate better. As spoken Norse dialectally diversified (a situation that would produce today’s North Germanic languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic), a more rudimentary futhark might have spelled only that which was necessary and common to all speakers. A parallel can be drawn with modern English spelling, a clapped-out contraption that nonetheless manages to keep a global array of accents and dialects satisfied and unified under one linguistic banner.

Coming close to a runic travel guide, the book also reaches beyond Scandinavia. The distinctive story of runes in England is granted its own chapter; runes’ role in the writing of English may be a revelation for some readers. Arriving with the Angles and Saxons in the fifth century AD, the English edition of runes was employed for centuries, and was distinct enough to acquire the alternative title of futhorc. Runes can even claim the accolade of spelling arguably the oldest known English word: ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ (RAÏHAN), meaning ‘roe deer’, scratched onto a fifth-century deer bone dug up in Norfolk. Further afield, the reader is invited to admire a rune-bearing lion outside the Venetian arsenal, and makes the acquaintance of Halfdan and Arni, two members of the Norse-speaking Varangian Guard in ninth- or tenth-century Constantinople. ‘Bored by whatever proceeding was taking place’ in the mighty Hagia Sophia, they graffitied its marble parapets with their names – they survive today, safely behind Perspex sheets.

Runes therefore examines literary depth and geographical breadth, a combination that serves the book’s subtle purpose. Armed with such rich medieval evidence, the reader is well prepared to do battle, in the sixth and final chapter, with modern misconceptions. Birkett begins his examination of post-medieval history with the first runologists, at work in the 16th and 17th centuries. Their academic ‘rediscovery’ of an ancient writing system may have been innocent enough, but Birkett shows how readily it was welcomed into the realms of politics and national identity. From that point on he tracks this revivalism and the appropriation of runes for political aims, through the horrors of the previous century and up to the horrors of our own. Runes were beloved by Heinrich Himmler and adorned the uniforms of his SS. Today they are flown on the flags of white supremacist gangs. These modern uses of runes exemplify the ‘fallacy of linking runes to ethnicity’ – demonstrably fallacious when the usage and geography of runes clearly do not bear witness to one homogeneous ancestral people, but to a changing and broadening population of writers. Things are not all bad in this chapter; Tolkien comes out favourably, through his ‘burning private grudge’ against Hitler and his misappropriation of history, although Tolkien too has contributed to the pervasive ‘preconception that runes are something exotic and magical’.

Birkett does make space for magic and mysticism, but the point is that the simple, marvellous encoding of speech is primary. It is hard to finish Runes: A Concise History without sharing the runologist’s frustrations. They must be so regularly confronted with deep-rooted nonsense, while knowing how interesting the facts and the real mysteries actually are.