Runes and divination: what Tacitus tells us in the Germania
Chapter 10 of Tacitus's Germania on Germanic lot-casting, the debate over its «notae» and how it relates to the earliest runic inscriptions of the 2nd century.
When people speak of divinatory runes today, they picture stones carved with the signs of the futhark. But what does this association rest on? The ancient text most often cited is a passage from the Germania of Tacitus, written around AD 98. Reading it carefully allows us to separate what we truly know about Germanic lot-casting from what was added in modern times.
Chapter 10 of the Germania
Tacitus writes that the Germanic peoples observe «auspicia sortesque», auspices and lots, more than any other people. The method he describes is simple. A branch is cut from a fruit-bearing tree, divided into slips and marked with certain signs, «notis quibusdam». The slips are then scattered at random on a white cloth.
If the consultation concerns the community, the task falls to the priest of the civitas; if it is private, to the head of the household. After praying to the gods and looking up at the sky, he picks up three slips, one at a time, and interprets them according to the signs marked on them. If the response is unfavourable, the same matter is not consulted again on the same day.
Were the «notae» runes?
The delicate point is precisely the nature of those notae. Tacitus does not describe them and uses no word meaning «letter». Many scholars believe they were simple marks or symbols, not necessarily alphabetic characters. Others have suggested a link with runes, but the question remains open and is still discussed.
The chronology calls for caution. The oldest known runic inscriptions, such as the one on the Vimose comb in Denmark, date to the second half of the second century AD, that is, some decades after the Germania. Runic writing may already have been taking shape, but Tacitus offers no proof of it.
What we know about runes
The Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, had twenty-four signs and was used mainly for short inscriptions on weapons, jewellery, combs and, later, memorial stones. Its name comes from its first six signs. Some medieval Norse texts attribute magical power to runes, and the Eddic poem Hávamál tells how Odin, according to the myth, won them while hanging from a tree.
These sources, however, are much later than Tacitus and belong to the medieval Scandinavian world. None describes a system of divination with twenty-four runes drawn from a bag: that form is a twentieth-century elaboration. The links between individual runes and divinatory meanings, widespread today, rest largely on the names handed down by the medieval rune poems, short texts in Old English, Old Norse and Icelandic that described the letters in mnemonic stanzas.
Between philology and imagination
Tacitus's chapter thus has a double value. It is a precious witness to a lot-casting rite among peoples who left no writings of their own, and it is also an example of how a classical text can be loaded with new meanings by later ages. As early as the Romantic nineteenth century, the Germania was read as a portrait of idealised ancestors.
Reading the Germania without forcing it means recognising the sobriety of the practice it describes: a branch, a white cloth, three slips and a priest looking at the sky. The link with runes remains a suggestive hypothesis, not a certainty of history, and that very uncertainty deserves to be told honestly.