I’m frustrated with people who want “their” cultural symbols handed to them on a silver platter. They want to “reclaim” things that were never anything except Nazi symbols, like the 12-spoked black sun or the symbol of a Nazi volunteer militia, yet they can’t be bothered to figure out what runes Vikings used. Nazis say “here are the symbols of our ancestral heritage (that are a bunch of crap we made up) and you all go “give it back!” When it comes to the runes they took 1,500 years of tradition and steamrolled it. It could never have been any other way. Nationalism is the enemy of culture. They cannot coexist in harmony. Nationalism is piss on the graves of our ancestors.
I keep seeing people say that they want to reclaim the runes, but you can’t reclaim something that was never yours. And if your conception of the runes is coterminous with Nazi use of them, then it is shallow, superficial, not worth saving, the death of tradition with a few half-rotten specimens preserved pinned under glass.
I know it’s hard when you don’t know who you can trust. We wouldn’t be in this situation without wolves in sheep’s clothing sneaking lies between a handful of facts to distract you (Thorsson/Flowers). We have a lot of work to do uprooting the deceit that lies at the core of modern heathen reception of the runes. Now’s a good time to start. Since the part of the problem that’s most active on everyone’s mind regards visual perception of symbols of Norse and Germanic culture this is gonna focus on that, with lots of pictures.
~ Get excited, kids, it’s runology time ~
Nazis didn’t take “runes,” they took an aesthetic more or less from the Gallehus horn.
This one particular object has runes that happen to appeal to their sense of aesthetics and as a result became “the” runes, and all of you people fell for it. They’re into straight lines because there were Nazi philologists who thought runes were the original writing system that the Mediterranean alphabets ripped off (echoing Johan Bure in the 16th century). The straight lines reminded of their origin in ancient rock carvings (rather than the truth, that their origin is in the (Semitic) Phoenician alphabet via something else like Latin, Greek, another Italic alphabet, or perhaps even with direct influence from a Semitic source). They were considered a symbolic mystical system first, that later achieved some utility as a writing system. The pristine geometric shapes reflect their archetypal mystical nature (specifically within the “Ariosophical” (racist) Armanen system of runes based on a “hexagonal crystal structure”). And I guess these blocky slabs are “manly” or something.
So yeah, it relates to an actual inscription but it’s just an aesthetic. I know this because I can do this:
These are Latin letters that “look like runes.” The only problem is, they don’t. They look like one inscription that reads “I, Hlewagastiʀ Holtijaʀ, am a huge fucking bigshot who drinks out of gold.” The non-runologist part of me is glad his shit got stolen and melted down.
Most of this goes for the other widely-visible variant – the same thing but with thin lines (like tawido at the end above). Those are somewhat better represented in the runic corpus but it’s not because that’s what runes “are,” it’s because it’s easier and not everyone is a professional. I’m still gonna attack the idea that these are in any way prototypical. In fact I believe that for most (but not all) rune-carvers rounded runes were the prototype, and when this wasn’t adhered to it was for stylistic or utilitarian reasons.
Runes that don’t follow this aesthetic – which is most actual runes – will not even be recognized as runes by most people.
The rest is long and full of images so I will save your dash but the punchline is that if you want to save the runes from Nazis the first step is knowing them – not as the Nazis conceived of them but as they exist in the wild, because then you realize that what was taken was nothing compared to what we rob ourselves of by falling for imposter “tradition.”
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