In the pre-Christian Germanic worldview, the spoken word was believed to possess incredibly potent creative powers. When words were spoken aloud, they were thought to have a tangible and unalterable impact on reality. This concept is similar to the philosophy of language proposed by the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his essay "Language." Heidegger argued that language is an essential framework that structures our perception and understanding of the world. Words don't merely describe our perception of reality; they actively shape and define our experience of the world. In this worldview, language possesses godlike creative powers.
Each runic symbol represents a phoneme, which is the smallest unit of sound in a language, such as "t," "s," or "r." These phonemes are transcribed into visual forms, creating the runes. While most modern linguists argue that the relationship between the sounds of a word (the signifier) and its meaning (the signified) is arbitrary, some linguists adhere to the theory of phonosemantics. Phonosemantics suggests that there is a meaningful connection between the sounds that compose a word and the word's meaning. In other words, the phonemes themselves carry inherent meaning.
This phonosemantic view of language aligns with the traditional Germanic perspective, where words are believed to create and shape reality. The runes, as visual representations of phonemes, bring the creative power of spoken language into a visual medium. The word "rune" itself primarily means "secret" or "mystery," highlighting the mystical power contained within each phoneme. The myth of Odin's ordeal to discover the runes further underscores their significance, as no one would undergo such a strenuous and sacrificial process for arbitrary symbols; instead, the runes were seen as carriers of deep and meaningful power.
With the runes, the phonosemantic perspective takes on an additional layer of significance. Not only is the relationship between the definition of a word and the phonemes that comprise it inherently meaningful – the relationship between a phoneme and its graphic representation is inherently meaningful as well.
Thus, the runes were not only a means of fostering communication between two or more humans. Being intrinsically meaningful symbols that could be read and understood by at least some nonhuman beings, they could facilitate communication between humankind and the invisible powers who animate the visible world, providing the basis for a plethora of magical acts.
In the verses from the Völuspá quoted above, we see that the carving of runes is one of the primary means by which the Norns establish the fate of all beings (the other most often-noted method being weaving). Given that the ability to alter the course of fate is one of the central concerns of traditional Germanic magic, it should come as no surprise that the runes, as an extremely potent means of redirecting fate, and as inherently meaningful symbols, were thereby inherently magical by their very nature. This is a controversial statement to make nowadays, since some scholars insist that, while the runes may have sometimes been used for magical purposes, they were not, in and of themselves, magical.
But consider the following episode from Egil’s Saga. While traveling, Egil eats a meal with a farmer whose house is on the Viking’s route. The farmer’s daughter is dangerously ill, and he asks Egil for help. When Egil examines the girl’s bed, he finds a whalebone with runes carved on it. The farmer explains to Egil that these runes were carved by the son of a local farmer – presumably an ignorant, illiterate person whose knowledge of the runes could have only been flimsy at best. Egil, being a master of runic lore, readily discerns that this inscription is the cause of the girl’s woes. After destroying the inscription by scraping the runes off into the fire and burning the whalebone itself (!), Egil carves a different message in different runes so as to counteract the malignancy of the earlier writing. After this has been accomplished, the girl recovers.
We can see from this incident that the heathen northern Europeans made a sharp distinction between the powers of the runes themselves, and the uses to which they were put. While the body of surviving runic inscriptions and literary descriptions of their use definitely suggest that the runes were sometimes put to profane, silly, and/or ignorant purposes, the Eddas and sagas make it abundantly clear that the signs themselves do possess immanent magical attributes that work in particular ways regardless of the intended uses to which they’re put by humans.