Richard yanked on the strings that were attached to the basement’s two functional light bulbs. He placed the sword on a mission-style oak desk, a remnant from the house in Gravesend, and pulled up a rusty steel chair. It was still too dark for him to make out whatever might be written on the hilt, so he rummaged for a flashlight in the desk’s drawer. He found three flashlights of various sizes, only one of which had juiced batteries, and a penlight he sometimes used while reading paperbacks with scrawny text. He traced the hilt of the sword with the penlight’s concentrated beam, and his eyes grew wide. Jim was right. Most of the runic characters were barely discernible under the flaky gold paint and enforced aging, though none had been erased. The inscription seemed to run from the left arm of the crossbar down the hand-grip to the pommel, and then continue up the right side.

Richard copied the inscription onto a stray leaf of notebook paper and bolted upstairs to the study/guest room that sheltered his computer—a sputtery, wheezy 2008 Dell Dimension desktop. Unsure of where to begin, Richard typed “runes” into Google. Over 34 million sites. Narrowing his search to “Germanic runes,” which is how Jim had described them, returned over 163,000 sites. Discouraged, he clicked the top-ranked site, a home page called, remarkably enough, “The Germanic Runes.” The page was sparse and plain, with a light gray background, black Times Roman text, and no images. A handful of blue hyperlinks hung in the upper-left corner. Richard clicked on all of them. They took him to grainy photographs of medieval churches and Amazon pages for books about runecasting and fortune-telling—interesting but not particularly helpful.

A link called “Introduction” stood alone in the upper right. He clicked it and was directed to an essay entitled “A Brief History of the Germanic Runes” by someone named Justin J. Johnson. At first glance, it appeared to be exactly what he wanted: a conspectus about European runes and runic mysticism. The essay itself was crammed with hyperlinks. He dragged the pointer over several blue-underscored words and phrases. Some of the links led to other rune-related sites, but most went to Wikipedia. This was troubling. Had Justin J. Johnson conducted most of his research through Wikipedia? If so, how credible could he be?

Johnson’s essay began with a one-paragraph précis of the runes’ origins and how they were used:

"The alphabet of the Northern European peoples who lived from the third to the thirteenth centuries, what we now broadly term “runes,” were not only letters that combined to form written language but also signifiers of these societies’ ideas, ideals, values, and principles, sacred symbols that linked the human world to the natural world and the natural world to that of the gods. It was believed that certain written combinations of runes could predict the future, heal the sick, and summon bountiful harvests. The runes were also a vital component of pagan fertility rituals. The earliest runic engravings were done on wood (the word “book” derives from a root for “beech tree”) and later appear as furtive charms embedded in love letters and drawn on everyday objects as humble blessings. The Norse peoples inscribed runes on almost everything they owned: coins, crosses, jewelry, armor, swords, clothing, boundary stones, tablets, pottery, even dishes and combs. In fact, for all their token mysteriousness, runes were used as mundane decorations as often as they were treated as diviners of cosmic secrets."

Richard skimmed the remainder of the Introduction, which had little to say about specific runes or their meanings.

The next subsection, “A Brief History of the Runes,” began as follows:

"Before the emergence of runes as characters used in writing, Europe’s Stone Age peoples were carving Neolithic glyphs into rock formations to symbolize men, animals, and deities. These runes likely derived from the Etruscan alphabet and migrated to Britain in the fifth century from lands along the North Sea, possibly from Frisia, the kingdom that extended from western Germany into Denmark.

"Germanic, Norse, and Saxon runic traditions were circulating widely by the first century but may have emerged much earlier, possibly as early as 200 B.C.E (the Meldorf brooch, on which is written the oldest known runic inscription, has been dated to around 50 C.E.). Across the centuries, different traditions added to or subtracted from their alphabets, reconfiguring the order of these early runes.

"After the Roman Empire toppled in the fifth century, woodland clans rebranded the Etruscan letters and began to incorporate runes into the mystical folklore and belief systems that had survived the Romans. It was around this time that runes began to appear on everyday items, most notably on implements of war such as sword hilts and blades, armor, and shields. It was believed that by inscribing sacred sayings in the old language onto their weapons, warriors would be granted heightened, even supernatural, abilities.

"The most recent and comprehensive runic tradition is the Anglo-Saxon futhorc alphabet, which was used throughout the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain, beginning in the sixth century and vanishing after the Conquest. Ranging from 26 to 33 characters, the Anglo-Saxon futhorc is preserved in the Cotton Domitian A.ix manuscript, which dates to the reign of King Alfred at the end of the ninth century. As the Anglo-Saxon futhorc began to mingle with, and be replaced by, the Latin alphabet, each rune came to correspond, more or less, with a Latin character (the futhorc is so named because the values of the first six runes are equivalent to Latin F-U-TH-O-R-C). When the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity in the seventh century, Britain’s runic tradition was not so much absorbed as displaced. In isolated communities throughout Wales and Northumbria, runic practices continued to thrive for another two hundred years as the runes took on more secular functions, the most important of which was the transcription of Latin liturgical texts into the native language." 

Richard stopped reading and searched within the article for other occurrences of “hilt,” “sword,” and “blade.” There were none. It seemed that the above reference to war gear was all Johnson had to say about the practice of engraving weaponry with runic charms.

He ran another search for another word that had caught his eye, the one that most accurately described his own predicament: “supernatural.” But Johnson had nothing more to say about that, either.

He rummaged the desk’s drawers, traversing hillocks of photo albums, empty picture frames, and old tax returns, reaching as far down and back as his fingers could stretch, until he found a pen. He didn’t need to look as hard for paper, for there was a loose-leaf notebook on top of the printer. Richard tore out a blank leaf and scrawled the words “SUPERNATURAL POWERS” across the top. Beneath this heading he made the following notations:

—Runes on hilts—blades—warriors—post-imperial English/British peoples (Angles, Saxons, Britons, Celts)

—Runes a language in own right but also used in divination, mysticism, rituals, war (spiritual/metaphysical codification and interpersonal communication? transcended language?)

He returned to the essay, prepared to take copious notes. However, his page remained mostly blank as he continued reading. After spouting off long scads of historical data that was not very enlightening, and an anomalous aside on how to make your own rune-stones using a rock polisher, stencils, and oil paints, Justin J. Johnson hastened to a cautionary conclusion:

"Despite the existence of the Rune Poem and other scattered runelore, there is still much to be learned about the medieval runic languages. A novice would do well to keep in mind that the runes are paradoxically similar to and quite different from contemporary modes of speech and writing. Although the runes share linguistic values with the Latin alphabet, they are not a language per se, but more a hyper-language embedded with symbolic meanings that natural languages lack. Thus, when translating a runic text or prophesying with runestones, understand that the accuracy of one-to-one correspondences—this rune to that letter, word, or denotation—cannot be relied upon."

Richard was curious about what the “Rune Poem” was, so he clicked on the “Rune Poem” hyperlink, which took him to a Wikipedia entry. He skimmed the atrocious Wiki-prose and clicked on a few sites that Google spat out. Siphoning out conflicting and overlapping information, he learned that the example of Anglo-Saxon light verse commonly referred to as the Rune Poem (there were also Icelandic and Norwegian versions) was copied onto a piece of vellum around the year 1000. Based on oral-formulaic tradition, the poem assigned a short descriptive passage to each of the twenty-nine runes in the futhorc sequence.

He was about to go back to Google and continue with the #2-ranked web page about runes when he noticed another link at the bottom of Johnson’s essay: “Appendix.” He clicked on it and was taken to a section of Johnson’s site that was simply entitled “The Runes.” The page was a list of the twenty-nine futhorc runes documented in the Rune Poem, with English definitions, German etymologies, and short descriptions of how they might have been interpreted in pagan rituals. Richard scrolled to Johnson’s complementary illustrations and re-examined the hilt of his sword. Yes, now we’re getting somewhere, he thought. Several of the characters on the screen were identical to those on the hilt! His pulse accelerated. The first Google-link among thousands, and it had led Richard to the very tool he needed to decipher the inscription.

He tapped his finger against his temple, remembering Johnson’s warning about the runes not functioning the way modern Indo-European languages function, with letters forming words, words sentences, sentences complete thoughts, and complete thoughts complex ideas. With runes there were layers of meaning, and one needed to inhabit the proper mindspace to “read” them as a pagan mystic-healer-priest would have done. Blindly replacing each rune with a member of the alphabet without developing a cursory understanding of the orthography, pronunciation, mythology, and culture that lay behind the runes might prove unsound.

Of course, Richard realized that even if it were translated accurately, the message itself could be bunkum, gibberish, or, worse, a flaccid injunction, like in A Christmas Story (one of Richard’s top five films), after Ralphie locks himself in the bathroom to decode the super-secret message with his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin—“BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE. Ovaltine? A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!”

Logic informed him that all of this would lead to nowhere. Yet there he was, squinting into a too-bright monitor, ass already starting to tingle and lower back to tenderize, committed to the assignment of learning Johnson’s list of twenty-nine futhorc runes and their definitions before he would allow himself to attempt a translation of the hilt-passage, which was what all this was about in the first place.

As he read, Richard sensed some of the power within these simple shapes. Having heard his father recite poetry, sometimes to himself, Richard learned early on that words are more than just the inventions of over-evolved beasts to convey that which grunts and snarls cannot; every syllable contained a cosmos.

Goosebumped and trembling, Richard printed out the futhorc list. Time to translate. Consulting Johnson’s appendix, he pulled the two snaking lines of runes from the hilt into a phonetic approximation:

HWÆRCWOMEHWÆRCWOMMHWÆRCWOMMAÞÞUMG HWÆRCWOMSYMBLAGESETUHWÆRCWOMSELEW

This was it. The next bend in the road.

What these lines said, or even where they divided into words, was beyond Richard. But looking closer, he saw that “HWÆRCWOM” appeared four times, which suggested a refrain, which in turn suggested a song or incantation. He stared at the groupings of characters for several minutes, stumped, then decided to switch tactics. Perhaps if he rested his eyes on each of the letters and sounded them out one by one, unhurriedly, they would yield their meanings in a Eureka! moment. But nothing so simple happened. And yet the letters bristled with potential energy that was waiting to be tapped. How they hummed!

He copied the double-string of letters into Google and clicked Go. Nothing. He then tried “HWÆRCWOM.” A single site was returned—in a language he did not recognize. Polish? Hungarian? No matter. This was actually a good thing—in a way the best thing, a vindication. Google had located it. The phrase was not gibberish; it had come from somewhere and someone had bothered to write it down.

Richard rose so quickly and forcefully that his chair flew backward, hit the wall, and collapsed onto its side.

He knew what he had to do next.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter VIII