Old Norse. The Elder Futhark. Etymology and the words that outlived their world.
Language is the vessel myth travels in — and these words still carry weight.
The Norse gods have names with meanings. The runes are not decorative symbols — they are letters of an alphabet that carries a cosmological framework inside it. Old Norse is a living ancestor of the languages spoken across northern Europe today, and understanding even fragments of it changes how you read the sources.
This wing covers the language itself, the runic writing systems, the etymology of divine names and key terms, and the kennings — compound poetic expressions — that skaldic poets used to speak about the gods without speaking plainly. Language in the Norse world was not neutral. Words had weight. Names had power. The runes were carved, not written.
Runic and linguistic material here draws from academic runology and Old Norse scholarship. The meanings given for rune names come from the Runic Poems (Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian, Icelandic) where they exist, and from comparative Germanic linguistics where the poems are silent. Modern "intuitive" rune meanings not grounded in historical sources are noted as such.
Writing systems carved in stone, bone, and wood across a thousand years of use.
The oldest runic alphabet — 24 runes, used across the Germanic world from roughly 150 to 800 CE. Every rune has a name, a sound, and a meaning rooted in the world the Norse inhabited. This is the full encyclopedia.
The Viking Age runic alphabet — 16 runes, streamlined from the Elder Futhark. More signs were dropped as the language became more complex. The runes most Norse people actually used for carving inscriptions.
Over 6,000 runic inscriptions survive. Most are memorial stones. Some are curses, love messages, ownership marks, or magical formulas. What the actual carved record tells us — not what modern rune books claim.
The language the gods were named in — and how much of it survived.
What Old Norse was, where it fits in the Germanic language family, how it sounded, and why it matters for reading the Eddas in anything close to the original. No fluency required — recognition is the goal.
What every god's name means — tracing Óðinn, Þórr, Freyja, Týr, and the others back through Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European to the root concepts they encode. Names are not arbitrary in this mythology.
Sky. Window. Knife. Husband. Law. Die. Anger. Ugly. Hundreds of everyday English words are Old Norse — borrowed during the Danelaw period. The language of the Norse is still in your mouth every day.
Norse poetry was not decoration. It was the primary vessel for myth, history, and theological thought.
The compound poetic expressions that defined skaldic verse. "Odin's mead" for poetry. "The whale-road" for the sea. "Wound-dew" for blood. Kennings encode entire mythological frameworks in two words — once you learn them, the poetry opens.
Völuspá. Hávamál. Lokasenna. The poems of the Poetic Edda — what they are, when they were composed, how to read them. Primary sources, not summaries. This is where to start if you want to read the mythology in its oldest surviving form.