The Runic Tradition: Word, Sign, and Mystery

A dry block of ash wood rests in the palm with a familiar, dense heft. The steel blade touches

the wood, the fibers part with a dry, quiet crunch—and upon the pale surface emerges the first

straight line: the stave, the vertical trunk of the sign. Here there is no room for gentle curves or

idle flourishes. Only the austere geometry of the carving knife, strictly subordinate to the

structure of the wood grain. In the twilight of a Scandinavian longhouse smelling of hearth

smoke and pitch, or upon a damp, wind-scoured British coast, this gesture was repeated

hundreds and thousands of times over the course of a millennium and a half. Man took bone,

horn, yielding wood, or unyielding stone, carving upon them signs meant to outlast the breath,

voice, and mortal flesh of the carver himself.