Advice for life! Ask Allie for psychic advice through tarot, rune, numerology, spells and sachets. Advice column, newsletter, email. An interesting insight into the traditions and beliefs of ancient peoples, and a valuable service for believers.

The runic alphabet appeared in the Germanic world around the year 300 of our era; it is thought that it developed near the limits of the Roma Empire, as runes have some resemblance to simplified Latin characters. This particular form of writing evolved in order to take advantage of what means were available in order to write anything: rocks, wood chunks, bone and metal.

So runes have no shapes that would make them difficult to be carved. This difficulty means that most runic messages tend to be short and supplemented by drawings, carvings or graphical depictions that help to tell the story without writing too much.

This alphabet evolved over time, and different versions appeared; arguably the two most common are the Norwegian Futhark and the Danish Futhark, used by the Vikings before their conversion to Christianity. The name of the alphabet comes from the first of its sixteen letters (f-u-th-a-r-k-h-n-i-a-s-t-b-m-l-r), which soon enough proved incomplete to handle all sounds and phonetic expressions of the Germanic languages, so new characters were added, but were seldom used.

The most probable reason for this lies in the fact that carving ins relatively hard, especially in stone, so adding more letters would mean just to add more work to do to achieve the same, because writing runes was akin to what we do now whenever we want to abbreviate: we use acronyms and write incomplete words. This means now that some runes are ambiguous and hard to interpret; some of these are spells written as such on purpose, but it is thought that most ambiguous runes are just texts that yet have to be correctly interpreted.

Spells were often written over human bones, perhaps in order to associate each spell to a given part of the body whenever they were meant to cause harm or cure. I its unknown how many Vikings knew how to read and write runes, but it was in fact, a very practical system of recording events because it allowed them to use practically anything to write on, very quickly.

Additionally, things carved ins tone tend to be very durable so Viking explorers left monuments commemorating their conquests and exploratory voyages by carving. Interestingly, it seems that Futhark was supplemented in expression by the use of colours instead of periods, colons and so, and these colours were used in a variety of ways, even to correct misspells in carvings.

But most coloured runes have been damaged over many centuries, so there is little to work on about this peculiar aspect of Norse culture. In most places where Vikings have been there are runes left, including Hagia Sofia, but no authentic runes were found yet in the American continent; there have been a number of forgeries related to this, but in every case they were proven to be just hoaxes.

All sorts of monuments have been erected using runes, but with an odd and still unexplained distribution about the Norse civilisation.One which called our attention is found carved over rocks polished by glaciers in Ramsund, Sweden; it tells how Sigurd killed the beast Fafnir and was beautifully carved by Sigrid to the memory of Holmger, her husband.

It is not known if it was the woman who actually made the carvings, but it is a true work of art, beautifully executed. And this runic inscription shows yet another characteristic of the technique: it is non-linear. The whole text of this monument is written inside the body of the dragon Fafnir.

This characteristic was obviously developed to take advantage of the available space and the shape of the base material on which the writings were actually being carved. Many details have been lost; colours can be found only at very well preserved stones which for the most part, were kept inside buildings, so there is relatively little to interpret these works of art, monuments and writings.

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