How to Make Wooden and Stone Runes: A Complete Crafting Guide

Learning how to make wooden runes connects you to one of the most richly documented craft traditions of the Norse world. Archaeology has given us a precise picture: over 670 runic inscriptions on wooden sticks and bone fragments excavated at Bryggen, the medieval wharf district of Bergen, Norway, since 1955 — the largest single runic find of the twentieth century. These objects were carved by ordinary people in pine and birch, using simple iron knives, for everyday purposes: messages, property markers, and personal amulets. The Bryggen inscriptions demolished the scholarly assumption that runes were exclusively the domain of monument carvers and specialists. They reveal a living tradition of wood-carving practiced by merchants, craftsmen, and sailors who knew how to cut a clean rune into a soft plank and hand it to a neighbor. This guide covers individual Elder Futhark characters and, for those interested in combining multiple runes into a single symbol, bind rune carving — the practice of merging two or more runic forms onto a shared stave. It draws on the archaeological record — on the woodworking evidence from the Oseberg ship burial, the tool assemblages from the Mästermyr chest, the runic poems and the Eddic corpus — to give you a complete, historically grounded approach to making your own wooden runes and rune stones. You will learn which wood species were used and why, which tools belong in a rune carver's kit, how to approach stone, how Viking Age carvers understood their relationship to the materials they worked, and how to preserve your finished runes for decades of use.

Choosing Your Wood: Oak, Ash, Birch, and Yew

Learning how to make wooden runes begins with a foundational decision that Viking Age craftsmen did not take lightly: the selection of species. Wood was not a neutral substrate in the Norse world. Each species carried its own understood properties — ecological, practical, and symbolic — and the choice of material was part of the meaning-making of the finished object.

The archaeological record gives us clear guidance on what was actually used. The Bryggen rune sticks from Bergen are predominantly fashioned from pine (Pinus sylvestris) and birch (Betula pendula), with a smaller number in oak, ash, and other hardwoods. The prevalence of pine and birch reflects practical reality: both grow abundantly across Scandinavia, both produce straight-grained sticks suitable for carving, and birch in particular has a notably uniform, fine-grained flesh that takes incised lines cleanly without splitting. For everyday use objects — the runic equivalent of a notepad — these softwoods were entirely appropriate.

For more permanent or ritually significant rune sets, however, the tradition consistently points toward the three species most closely tied to the Norse cosmological and poetic record: oak, ash, and birch. Each has distinct physical properties and distinct symbolic weight.

When sourcing wood, seasoned lumber cut from fallen branches or ethically harvested deadfall is preferable to freshly felled timber. Green wood shrinks and cracks as it dries, and a rune set cut from unseasoned wood will likely develop splits across the carved channels within the first year. Kiln-dried timber from a specialist woodworking supplier is a reliable alternative. If you are cutting your own blanks from a fallen tree, split the rounds along the grain rather than sawing across it — the resulting pieces will be more stable.

Tools for Rune Carving: The Sax, Chisels, and Technique

The primary carving instrument of the Viking Age was the sax (also rendered as seax or sax in the scholarship) — a single-edged blade of iron or steel with a blade length ranging from roughly 10 cm for a personal knife to 30 cm or more for a larger working tool. Archaeological finds across Scandinavia, Britain, and the Frankish territories demonstrate that every adult male carried a sax as a general-purpose implement: it served for food preparation, woodworking, rope-cutting, and a range of craft tasks. The Mästermyr chest, a waterlogged find from Gotland dated to approximately 1000 CE and now held at the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, contained an extraordinary assemblage of iron tools: hammers, chisels, files, locks, and blades — including sax-form knives suitable for fine woodwork.

For rune carving specifically, the sax was typically used in a push-cutting technique along the stave (the central vertical stroke of the rune) and a draw-cutting technique on the diagonal branches. Modern carvers working without the years of practice that Viking Age craftsmen accumulated typically find it helpful to supplement the sax with dedicated carving knives: a straight carving knife for stave lines, a hook knife or spoon carving knife for cross-grain cuts on hardwoods, and a narrow V-gouge for maintaining consistent channel depth.

Cross-grain cutting: the critical technique

All but three runes of the Elder Futhark (Isa, Nauthiz, and Isa-variant forms) contain diagonal or horizontal strokes that cut across the wood grain rather than along it. This is where most beginners encounter their first real difficulty. A knife cutting across grain on softwood tends to tear the fibers rather than slice them, producing a ragged channel rather than a clean incision. The solution documented in traditional woodcarving is a two-pass technique:

1. Score the outline first. Using the knife tip held at approximately 45 degrees to the wood surface, score both edges of the intended stroke lightly but cleanly. These scoring cuts sever the surface fibers and define the boundary of the channel.
2. Excavate toward the center. With the blade held at a lower angle (30–40 degrees), make a series of thin slicing passes from each scored edge toward the center of the channel, removing material in thin layers rather than attempting a single deep cut.
3. Clean the channel base. Use the flat of a narrow chisel or the tip of the knife to level the channel floor, removing any torn fibers. The finished channel should be a clean V-section or flat-bottomed U-section, with crisp, defined edges.
4. Test the depth. Hold the piece at a low angle to a light source. Shadows falling into the channel will reveal any unevenness. A rune carved at consistent depth across all its strokes has a visual coherence that shallower or uneven channels cannot achieve.

The diagonal branches of runes like Fehu (ᚠ), Algiz (ᛉ), and Tiwaz (ᛏ) all require this cross-grain technique on the angled strokes. The vertical stave, by contrast, runs parallel to the grain and can typically be cut in a single clean push-cut or draw-cut along the grain's natural direction. Learning to feel the difference between the grain-parallel and cross-grain resistance of the wood is the core tactile skill of rune carving, and it comes only through practice on scrap pieces before committing to your finished blanks.

Working with Stone: Finding Your Stone and Engraving Techniques

Making rune stones — palm-sized stones bearing individual Elder Futhark characters — is the form of DIY rune making that most closely echoes the runestone tradition of Scandinavia, where over 2,500 inscribed stones survive from the Viking Age and Migration Period, the majority in Sweden. The monumental runestones of Sweden, raised on roadsides and at assembly sites, were carved by professional craftsmen using iron tools and considerable technical skill. But personal rune stones, intended for divination or portable use, operate at a much more intimate scale.

Selecting the right stone for personal rune-making is both a practical and intuitive decision. Practically, you are looking for stones that are: flat-faced enough to provide a carving surface; of consistent hardness (avoid stones with obvious layering or inclusions that may crack along hidden faults); and of a manageable size — roughly 3–6 cm along the longest dimension for a palm-held divination set. River-tumbled stones have the advantage of naturally smooth faces worn by water action; their surfaces require less preparation before carving.

Stone species for rune carving

Not all stones carve equally well. In approximate order of workability:

• Soapstone (steatite) — the softest and most forgiving stone for carving. Used extensively in the Viking Age for molds, gaming pieces, and decorative objects; extensively present in Norwegian and Scandinavian archaeological assemblages. Cuts with a steel knife without a chisel.
• Sandstone — medium hardness; carves well with a chisel. The open grain structure can produce rough edges in the channel; work slowly and smooth with a metal tool or folded sandpaper after carving.
• Slate — fine-grained and cleaves into smooth faces; carves well in the direction of the cleavage planes but can split unexpectedly if struck against the grain. Produces crisp, dark-on-light channels.
• Serpentine — medium-hard metamorphic stone, typically greenish; carves well and has a distinctive appearance. Found in Norwegian and Icelandic river deposits.
• Granite — hard and durable; the material of most Viking Age memorial runestones. Requires steel or carbide-tipped tools and significantly more effort. The result is the most permanent rune stone a craftsperson can make by hand.

The basic technique for stone engraving follows a similar principle to wood cross-grain cutting: score the outline of each rune stroke before deepening the channel. Use a carbide-tipped scribe or a hardened steel punch to mark the lines, then deepen with a cold chisel (a narrow, flat-headed chisel of hardened steel) struck with a hammer or mallet. Work in short, controlled taps rather than heavy blows. The goal is to remove small amounts of material with each strike, maintaining control of the channel's direction and depth. After carving, the stone surface can be smoothed with wet-dry sandpaper (400 grit, then 600 grit) to remove tool marks while preserving the carved channels.

"The runic inscriptions on stone were the work of named craftsmen — the carver signed his work. The formula X reist rúnar (X carved the runes) appears on hundreds of runestones, identifying the ristir as a practitioner whose skill was worth claiming publicly." — R. I. Page, An Introduction to English Runes, Methuen, 1973

The Ethics of the Ristir: Communicating with the Spirit of the Tree

In Norse and broader Germanic tradition, the term for the rune carver was ristir, derived from the Old Norse verb rista — to cut, to incise, to carve. This word appears in the Eddic poem Hávamál in Odin's account of how he received the runes: the god hung nine nights on Yggdrasil, the world-tree (itself an ash, askr), without food or water, before perceiving the runes and cutting them into the wood. The act of rista was therefore mythologically framed as something requiring sacrifice, intentionality, and a specific relationship between the carver and the material being cut.

What does this mean in practical terms for how to make wooden runes? The Norse worldview, attested across the Eddas, the sagas, and the skaldic corpus, was animistic in the sense that it attributed agency and presence to natural forms — trees, stones, rivers, and weather were not inert matter but participants in a shared world. The Old Norse term vörðr (warden, guardian spirit) appears in relation to specific places and objects. Cutting into a tree — taking its material for human use — was an act that carried ethical weight.

This is not merely a romantic or esoteric overlay on the historical evidence. It has a direct practical parallel in Norse and Germanic legal and social custom: the Landnámabók (Book of Settlements) and the saga literature consistently record acknowledgment, offering, and permission-seeking as part of the settlement of new land. Taking a tree's wood for a purpose as focused as rune-carving amplifies this principle. The tradition that many modern runic craftspeople follow — and that is consistent with the general Norse world-view — is to identify the tree from which you will take wood, spend time in its presence before cutting, acknowledge what you are taking and what you intend to make, and offer something in return: water poured at the roots, a small portion of your first meal, or simply a spoken word of gratitude and explanation. This same ethic of intentional relationship with material is shared by practitioners who carry runic symbolism on their bodies permanently — the tradition of bind rune tattoos connects carved wood and marked skin through a single underlying understanding: that runic forms carry meaning precisely because they were received through sacrifice and care.

This is not magic in a theatrical sense. It is a relational stance toward material — the same stance that serious craftspeople across many traditions have maintained as a discipline that keeps them attentive to the quality of their materials and the purpose of their work. A carver who has spent time with the tree from which their rune set comes is also more likely to have observed its grain carefully, noted the texture of its bark, and made choices about which sections of the branch or trunk will yield the best blanks. The practical and the intentional are, in this craft tradition, inseparable.

The Complete Carving Process: Step by Step

The following process applies to wooden runes cut from branch sections — the form most directly descended from the Bryggen rune sticks, and the most accessible starting point for DIY rune making. Adapt the material and tool choices to stone carving as described in the preceding section.

1. Prepare your blanks. Cut seasoned branch sections into uniform discs or rectangular tablets using a fine-toothed saw. For disc runes, a branch of 3–5 cm diameter sawn into sections of 8–12 mm thickness is the traditional form. For rectangular rune staves (more closely following the Bryggen stick format), split or saw billets of 15–20 mm width and 80–100 mm length from straight-grained sections. Sand all faces to 150 grit, then 220 grit, to create a clean, even carving surface.
2. Mark your rune design in pencil. Lightly sketch the rune on the prepared surface. Pay attention to proportions: the stave (vertical axis) should extend from near the top to near the bottom of the face, and the branches should emerge at consistent angles. The Elder Futhark rune forms are angular by design — they were developed for cutting into wood and stone, not for flowing brushwork, and their straight-line geometry is part of their functional identity.
3. Score the outline of each stroke. Using your carving knife, score along both edges of every pencil line, cutting to a depth of 1–1.5 mm. Keep the blade perpendicular to the surface for the scoring cuts. This step defines the boundaries of your channels and prevents tear-out on cross-grain strokes.
4. Remove material between the score lines. Working from each scored edge toward the center of the channel, make angled cuts at 30–40 degrees to excavate the channel. Remove thin slices of material with each pass. For the stave on softwood, a single clean push-cut along the grain will often suffice; for branches on hardwood, the two-pass technique from the cross-grain section above is essential.
5. Clean and deepen the channels. Use a narrow chisel or the knife tip to level the channel floor and remove any torn fibers. Check depth consistency by holding the piece at a low angle to a directional light source. Aim for a uniform depth of 2–3 mm across all strokes.
6. Optional: add colorant. The historical record includes evidence of painted runestones — Swedish inscriptions document stones being painted red with ochre, and the practice of filling carved rune channels with red pigment (red ochre, or later, blood in ritual contexts) is attested in the Eddic literature. Modern alternatives include red iron oxide pigment mixed with a small amount of linseed oil, or simple acrylic paint. Apply to the channels, allow to dry, then sand the surface lightly to remove any pigment that has spread beyond the channel edges.
7. Apply finishing oil and wax. See the finishing section below for the complete treatment protocol. Once the physical work is done, many practitioners also consecrate their finished runes through elemental ritual — for the full process, see the guide on how to cleanse and charge runes after carving.

Finishing: Linseed Oil, Beeswax, and Preserving the Work

The finishing of wooden runes serves two distinct purposes: physical preservation of the wood against moisture, handling oils, and atmospheric changes; and the completion of the object as a finished craft. Both matter.

Raw linseed oil (Linum usitatissimum) is the most historically appropriate finishing oil for wooden objects in the Norse and Germanic tradition. Flax — the plant from which linseed oil is pressed — was cultivated across Viking Age Scandinavia, documented in pollen records and agricultural site excavations from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Linseed oil was used to treat wood, leather, and fiber. The oil penetrates deeply into the wood cells, polymerizing over time into a hard resin that consolidates the fibers and provides long-lasting moisture resistance. It does not form a surface film like varnish, but works from within the wood structure.

The practical application process for wooden runes is straightforward. Apply raw linseed oil generously to all surfaces of the finished, carved piece. Allow it to soak in for several hours, then wipe off the surface excess with a clean cloth. Repeat this application two to three times over successive days. The oil will darken the wood slightly and enhance the contrast between the carved channels and the flat surfaces. Allow the final application to cure for a minimum of two weeks before handling extensively — raw linseed oil cures slowly through oxidative polymerization, and premature handling can transfer uncured oil.

A note on boiled linseed oil: commercially available "boiled" linseed oil contains metallic siccative driers (compounds of cobalt, manganese, and lead in older formulations) that accelerate drying but introduce additives inconsistent with a historically grounded practice and potentially harmful to skin contact over repeated handling. For runes that will be touched regularly, raw linseed oil is the appropriate choice despite its slower drying time.

Once the linseed oil treatment has fully cured, a final application of beeswax paste provides a surface-protective layer that buffs to a matte, tactile finish. Beeswax is water-resistant, skin-safe, and requires no solvents or additives. Warm a small amount of solid beeswax gently (or use a commercially prepared beeswax paste), apply a thin coat to all surfaces, allow to set for 30 minutes, and buff with a soft cloth. The finished surface should have a smooth, slightly warm sheen — neither glassy nor dull — that makes the piece a pleasure to handle and protects the carved channels from dirt accumulation.

For stone runes, finishing is simpler: the stone itself requires no oil treatment. After carving and sanding, a thin application of beeswax to the carved channels can deepen the contrast between the incised lines and the stone surface. Some carvers apply a wash of diluted red ochre pigment to the channels before waxing, echoing the painted runestone tradition. Leave the stone surfaces unwaxed if you prefer the natural matte texture of the stone — it will remain stable and handle well without any treatment.