Sources
Where our meanings come from.
Fehu writes all its own text and art. Here's the reading behind it, and how we label what's historical and what's modern.
How we label things. Historical: rune names, shapes, sounds, the order of the futhark and what the rune poems say. Modern practice: merkstave readings, correspondences, bindrunes as personal sigils, the eight-festival Wheel of the Year. Both are valuable; we just won't pretend one is the other.
Primary sources
- The Old English Rune Poem (Anglo-Saxon; the manuscript burned in 1731 and the text survives in George Hickes's 1705 printed edition).
- The Old Norwegian Rune Rhyme (13th century, Younger Futhark).
- The Old Icelandic Rune Poem (15th-century manuscripts, Younger Futhark).
- The Poetic Edda, especially Hávamál stanzas 138–165 on Odin winning the runes. Translations by Jackson Crawford (Hackett, 2015) and Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, rev. 2014).
- Snorri Sturluson, Edda, translated by Anthony Faulkes (Everyman, 1987).
- Bede, The Reckoning of Time (725), the only early source naming Eostre.
Scholarship
- R. I. Page, Runes (British Museum Press, 1987), and An Introduction to English Runes (Boydell, 2nd ed. 1999).
- Ralph W. V. Elliott, Runes: An Introduction (Manchester University Press, 1959; 2nd ed. 1989).
- Terje Spurkland, Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (Boydell, 2005).
- Tineke Looijenga, Texts and Contexts of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions (Brill, 2003).
- John McKinnell and Rudolf Simek, with Klaus Düwel, Runes, Magic and Religion: A Sourcebook (Fassbaender, 2004).
- Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996), on the modern Wheel of the Year.
Living practice and ethics
- Inclusive heathen organisations such as The Troth, and Declaration 127 (2016), a public rejection of racism in heathenry.
- Practitioner-authors from Haitian Vodou and African American Hoodoo communities, for anyone learning about those traditions.
- The ADL's Hate on Display database, for how runes are misused as hate symbols.
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