runevættir
Liveable
Runelore
Making ancient runelore actionable through direct personal relationship
I know that I hung
on a high windy tree
for nine long nights
pierced by a spear—Odin’s pledge—
given myself to myself.
No one can tell about that tree,
from what deep roots it rises.
They brought me no bread,
no horn to drink from,
gazed toward the ground.
Crying aloud, I caught up runes;
finally I fell.
Hávamál (146)
Patricia Terry translation
Liveable runelore?
For so long, we didn’t have access to credible resources on the Elder Futhark. The Internet has opened literally a world of information about their history and cultural context, and how to work with them as an oracle. My approach to the runes brings that rich heritage forward in a way that helps us not just receive the guidance of the runes, but to live it. By working with seasonality, timing, and place through runic calendars, my work centers the Elder Futhark’s animistic roots, which are all about relationship. As I say in my soul tending practice, if something isn’t relatable in personal context, it isn’t very useful. What’s wonderful about the runes is that they aren’t just relatable to us today, their wisdom and guidance is liveable. It has stood the test of time.
As animists, runelore is not just representative of concepts we can live with, but ways of being we can live through. This distinction with the runes is the difference between nouns and verbs: the runes don’t just demonstrate a quality, but through intentional relationship with them they impart guidance on how to embody them as an experience. This is wyrdweaving at its deepest potential.
My challenge to you in learning your personal relationship with the runes is to find the places where they are already in you and make them active in your life by engaging them. Throughout season 6 of my podcast, What in the Wyrd, we explore the runes as verbs, and pages will be added below.
Runic date and elemental correlations are from Nigel Pennick’s Runes and Astrology. Rune poem translations are from Runic and Heroic Poems, by Bruce Dickins.
We don't heal in isolation
but in communityGift of the Dreamtime Reader's Companion
~S. Kelley Harrell
Mini Runes Class
Deepen relationship with the runes with Reawakening with the Runes. If intuition is our inner north star, the runes are our reminder to look up. That’s why this course is called “Reawakening” with the Runes. The underlying awareness of being connected with All Things is already in you. Learn to engage that awareness and orient to it in direct relationship through an ancient oracle–that’s what’s available between you and the runes. That’s what this course teaches.