Cast the lots
Throw wooden slips onto a white cloth: the way Tacitus describes lots being cast (all 24, then pick up three without seeing them), or in one of two modern styles, the Norns (pick three blind, one for each Norn) or a handful (read by which side lands up). Every throw is random. What each rune is said to mean is labelled by where it comes from: the medieval rune poems, or rune reading today.
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All 24 lots land marked side down. Throw them, then pick up three without seeing their marks.
What the history says
The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 98 CE, describes how the Germanic peoples cast lots. A branch of a fruit-bearing tree is cut into slips, each marked with a sign, and thrown onto a white cloth. After a prayer, and looking up at the sky, a priest (for public questions) or the head of the household (for private ones) picks them up and reads them by their marks.
Translations differ on how they are picked up. Church and Brodribb (1877) have him take up each piece three times; Benario's translation has him pick up three, one at a time. This page follows the second reading: you pick up three.
He picks them up while looking up at the sky, so the choice is not made by looking at the marks; they are read once picked up. That is why, in the Tacitus-style cast here, every slip lands marked side down and you pick without seeing.
Tacitus gives no number for how many slips were cut or thrown. This page's Tacitus-style cast uses one slip for each of the 24 runes; that is a choice, not something the sources say.
Tacitus calls the marks only "certain marks." He does not say they were runes, and whether they were is debated.
Tacitus wrote around 98 CE. The oldest inscription on this site, the Vimose comb, is dated to about 140–160 CE, decades later.
In Tacitus's account, an unfavourable answer ends the matter for that day; a favourable one still has to be confirmed by augury, reading omens.
Where today's rune readings come from
Drawing runes to answer questions about your own life, with a set meaning for each rune, goes back to Ralph Blum's The Book of Runes (1982), sold with a bag of tiles. Its readings drew heavily on books about the I Ching. The "modern reading" shown for each rune here comes from Blum.
Modern rune readers use different methods: drawing three runes, laying out five in a cross, or tossing a handful onto a cloth (one guide uses nine) and reading where they land and which side is up. The handful style here follows that, letting you throw 3, 5, 6, or 9.
Esoteric rune systems are modern too. Guido von List said his Armanen runes were revealed to him in 1902, and others in early-20th-century Germanic mysticism used them for magic.
Wyrd, the Norns, and the blank rune
Wyrd is an Old English word. The standard Old English dictionary gives its meanings as what happens, fate, fortune, or chance; "the otherwise than humanly appointed order of things"; and one of the Fates. It is where modern English "weird" comes from.
Wyrd is often called a Norse word, but it is Old English. Its Old Norse cousin is Urðr, the name of one of the three Norns. Both go back to Proto-Germanic *wurdiz, from the root of the verb "to become": roughly, what has come to be. In the Prose Edda, the Norns Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld come out of a hall by the well beneath the World Tree, and "these maids determine the period of men's lives."
The Norns' names are usually explained from Old Norse verbs: Urðr and Verðandi from verða, "to become", and Skuld from skulu, "shall" or "ought to be". Roughly: what has come to be, what is coming to be, and what shall be. The well beneath the World Tree where they live is named for Urðr.
The Norns spread is modern: three runes drawn, one for each Norn, and read as past, present, and future. That reading of the Norns is common, but scholars dispute it; the words don't by themselves name times in Old Norse. So here each rune is labelled with what the Norn's name means, not with past, present, or future.
The blank tile is modern. It first appears in print in The Book of Runes (1982) by Ralph Blum, who said the idea came from a set of tiles he bought in England and who tied it to Odin. The Elder Futhark has 24 runes and no blank one, so this page's casts use the 24 unless you add the blank tile yourself.
Today the blank tile is sometimes called the Wyrd rune, and some call it Odin's rune. We have not found who first gave it the name Wyrd. The name borrows the Old English word for fate; no rune of the Elder Futhark was ever called that.
Readers disagree about what it means. Blum called it the rune of total trust. Others read it as something unexpected on its way, as a turn of fortune like the Wheel of Fortune in tarot, or as a sign that the question can't be answered yet.
More old words still used in practice, like ørlög, galdr, and seiðr: Practice today.