Footnotes

Revival of the Runes: The Modern Rediscovery and Reinvention of the Germanic Runes - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2021


Footnotes

*1. The term “Odian” refers to someone who strives to emulate the mythic actions—for example, the quest for runic knowledge—of the god Óðinn (Odin), as opposed to simply worshipping the deity in a religious sense. For a more detailed explanation of the implications of the term, see Thorsson, The Nine Doors of Midgard, ix—xi.

*2. The letter known as “thorn,” þ, which ultimately derives from the Germanic runestave ?, corresponds to the phoneme now represented in English by the digraph th.

*3. This office, now officially referred to as Riksantikvarieämbetet, the National Heritage Board, remains an active part of the Swedish government to this day.

*4. This is an example of folk-etymologizing on Bureus’s part; there is, in fact, no historical relation between these words.

*5. Bure’s etymology is insightful here: as with Old Norse rún, “rune,” and raun, “experience” (the latter word being formed through ablaut from the same stem, run-, that underlies the former), the modern Swedish words runa and rön are etymologically related.

*6. The year 1648 marks the end of the Thirty Years’ War with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. Many scholars of the history of ideas consider this to be a turning point in which the Enlightenment period begins.

*7. The ongoing attempt to link Christ with Odin is further illuminated in studies such as G. Ronald Murphy’s The Saxon Savior (1989).

*8. As a weird footnote, we may mention that in the stories of the early twentieth- century American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, Wormius is cited as the translator of a Latin version of the fictional grimoire of magic known as the Kitab al-Azif or Necronomicon. Perhaps Lovecraft got Wormius and Bure confused?

*9. It is interesting to note that Werner von Bülow, the editor of Hagal, the official organ of the Edda Society (and a publication to which Wiligut himself had contributed), continued to publish the journal until 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War. In general, however, it was the case for alternative “neo-Germanic” groups like this to be suppressed far earlier, as we outlined in the previous chapter with the story of F. B. Marby.

*10. Through his terminology Jossé is evoking the sense of a rune as a “whisper” (cf. Ger. raunen, and the archaic English verb to round, both meaning “to whisper”).

*11. Published under my pen name, Edred Thorsson.

*12. In Blum’s interpretative system, reversed runes are taken as a sign of blockage and represent a “call for caution in the runic vocabulary” (cf. Blum 1983, 37).

*13. A third revised and expanded edition was published in 2018 by Inner Traditions.

*14. This was The Book of Ogham (1992), which I have since let another author, Michael Kelly from the Isle of Man, rework into a revised and expanded edition, issued under his name in 2010.

*15. Both the Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic rune poems contain a half dozen clearly recognizable references to material from the Saga of the Volsungs. There may be further such references that are too obscure to identify easily.

*16. This concept is further discussed in my article “The Command to Look” (Flowers 2019b); for its original explication, see William Mortensen and George Dunham, The Command to Look: A Master Photographer’s Method for Controlling the Human Gaze (Feral House, 2014).