Casting the Runes: Merkstave & the Marked Stone
A note on what is old and what is new
Honesty first, as everywhere on this site: casting lots is anciently attested — Tacitus, writing of the Germanic tribes in the first century, describes marked slips of wood cast onto a white cloth and read by a priest or the father of the household (Germania, ch. 10) — but he does not tell us the marks were runes, and no medieval source hands us a divinatory meaning-table. What we have from the old world are three rune poems — Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian, and Icelandic — medieval verses that name each rune and gesture at what its name meant to the people who wrote it. The upright and merkstave meanings used in modern rune-reading are a reconstruction built on those poems, on the runes’ names, and on the lore. That does not make the practice hollow — a living tradition is allowed to grow — but you should know which stones in the wall are original and which are newer masonry. Each rune entry on this site tells you plainly which poems attest it.
Merkstave
Merkstave — “dark stave” — is the modern term for a rune that falls reversed: its shadow reading. Not an opposite so much as the same force obstructed, overturned, or turned inward. Fehu upright is wealth flowing; Fehu merkstave is wealth clutched or lost.
The nine that cannot reverse
Nine runes are symmetrical: turn Gebo (ᚷ), Hagalaz (ᚺ), Nauthiz (ᚾ), Isa (ᛁ), Jera (ᛃ), Eihwaz (ᛇ), Sowilo (ᛊ), Ingwaz (ᛜ), or Dagaz (ᛞ) upside down and you hold the same shape. By form alone, they have no reversed position.
The marked stone
There is a simple remedy, borrowed from the same logic that puts a dot or underline beneath the 6 and the 9 on gaming dice: mark each stone’s bottom. A small dot, a scratched line, a touch of paint at the foot of the stave — now every rune in the set has an up and a down, and even the symmetrical nine can fall merkstave. Whether you adopt this is a choice about your practice, not a rule from the sources. Some readers prefer the nine to stand always upright — fixed points the cast cannot overturn, and there is a certain theology in that, too. Choose deliberately, mark your set (or don’t) accordingly, and read consistently.
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