The three aettir

The Kylver stone, carved in Gotland around AD 400, carries the earliest known complete Elder Futhark, all twenty four runes set down in a single unbroken line, Fehu through Othala, with no grouping marked at all. The division into three aettir, three families of eight, first appears later, on the Vadstena and Grumpan bracteates, gold pendants from the Migration Period that break the futhark into its now familiar thirds. Tradition came to call these Freyr's aett (Fehu to Wunjo), Heimdall's or Hagal's aett (Hagalaz to Sowilo) and Tyr's aett (Tiwaz to Othala), tying each family to a god whose nature seemed to echo through its runes. When the Younger Futhark pared the alphabet down to sixteen runes, the old habit of grouping held on, now reshaped into aettir of six, five and five.

Reading by aett

In modern rune practice, many of us still reach for the aettir when we want to read a casting in layers rather than rune by rune. Freyr's aett is felt as the family of beginnings, fruitfulness, wealth and the forces that shape daily life. Heimdall's or Hagal's aett is felt as the family of challenge, disruption and the hard turns that force growth. Tyr's aett is felt as the family of order, justice, human bonds and the structures that hold a life together. Some practitioners draw a single rune to ask which aett is speaking loudest in a situation, using the three families almost like three chapters of a story, while others simply let the aett a rune belongs to color and deepen whatever that rune reveals.

How runes came to be cast

In 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus described in his Germania a method of divination practiced among the Germanic peoples: slips cut from a fruit bearing tree, each marked with a sign, scattered onto a white cloth and drawn one at a time while the diviner looked to the sky, with meaning read from whichever marks came up. He did not call these marks runes, and the rune poems that later gave each letter of the futhark its own voice and meaning were composed much afterward, between the 9th and 15th centuries. Even so, Tacitus's account stands as the earliest glimpse we have of lots being cast for guidance among these peoples, and it is the thread from which the story of rune casting as we know it was woven.

Drawing and reading runes

In modern rune practice, casting is how we let the runes answer when words alone are not enough. Many of us keep a small bag or pouch of rune stones or tiles, and when a question sits heavy, we draw one rune for a quick read, three for a fuller story of past, present and future, or we scatter the whole set across a cloth and read the ones that land face up, or closest to hand, as the message meant for us. Whether a rune falls upright or reversed, whether it lands near the center of the cloth or at its edge, all of it becomes part of the reading. We trust the pull of the hand into the bag, the fall of the stones onto the cloth, as a way of listening past the noise of the day to something steadier and older underneath.

Keep exploring

• Ogham, the Irish tree letters
• Tarot Card Meanings