Make Your Own Set of Elder Futhark Runes for Divination
While you can purchase ready-made, mass produced, rune sets you can’t beat a set of runes you’ve made with your own hands. Here’s a quick guide to making a simple but effective set of runes of your own.
Today, runes are primarily used for divination, much like tarot cards or other oracular tools. When casting or drawing runes, the symbols that appear are interpreted to reveal insights into a person’s life, choices, and challenges.
Runes have long been a powerful symbol of both communication and magic. Used for centuries by the Germanic and Norse peoples, runes are more than an ancient alphabet—they are symbols rich with history, mythology, and divinatory power, a power which is increased many times over when the set is one you have hand made yourself from natural materials.
Here are the quick and easy instructions to make your own set of Runes:
1. Choose air drying clay to make your runes. It’s cheap, clean and easy to use.
2. Pull a small piece off the main block of clay weighing 4g (you can choose more or less than 4g if you want larger or smaller runes). You want the runes to be roughly the same size so do your best to measure each piece of clay to ensure they’re all as similar to each other as possible.
Don’t worry, they don’t need to be identical. Feel free to suppress your inner perfectionist, just have fun! The positive feelings you experience while making the runes will ensure your finished rune stones will be imbued with that same positivity.
3. Roll each piece of clay into a neat ball in the palms of your hands. The image below shows a 4g piece of clay beside a 1p coin to give an idea of scale.
4. Shape each ball into a rough (but not too rough) rounded rectangle shape. This will be your final rune. You can make the shape as neat or as rustic as you prefer. Remember, this is going to be your rune set.
5. Lightly push each rectangle to spread it out slightly to give more flat space on which to mark your runes, this step will also make each rune stone a slightly unique shape to the others in the set.
6. Make at least 24 or 25 rune stones all roughly the same weight and size. There are usually 24 runes in the Elder Futhark Rune set, sometimes 25 including one blank rune stone (known as the “Wyrd” or “Odin” rune). However, this blank rune stone is a modern innovation, and its legitimacy is debated among practitioners. You can decide whether 24 or 25 stones feels right to you when you come to use your finished stones.
As clay runes may be damaged you should produce quite a few spares to replace damaged or lost runes in the future.
To be continued once the runes are thoroughly dry…
7. Once the rune stones are completely dry, paint them with a water-proof base colour using an eco-friendly paint of your choice.
8. The dry runes are then painted in a contrasting colour with the required symbol. Remember, they don’t have to be perfect – any imperfections makes this set uniquely your own.
Once the symbols are fully dry, several coats of varnish may be applied to protect all surfaces, if you wish.
There you Have it you have your own personal and unique set of runes.
For Reference: The symbols to paint onto your Elder Futhark Rune Set
© Colin Lawson Books