Galdr: when magic had a voice
Before we start thinking of runes as signs, it is worth remembering another part of the old tradition — song. Galdr is voice, repetition, rhythm. The word itself comes from an old verb for singing, for crying out. And in the old texts such singing does something.
Odin in Hávamál names eighteen songs he knows. Gróa sings nine over her son before the road, in Grógaldr. Oddrún helps with her singing at a birth. Skírnir in Skírnismál compels Gerd by song. Beowulf mentions singing over the dragon hoard. So galdr was not simply a song.
The voice had power.
What galdr is
The old word galdr means a song or a spell carried by the voice. Its root outlived the tradition itself. From it come words in the Scandinavian languages tied to singing — and later to madness, as if a song could change a person’s state. Old Norse poetry even had a metre of its own — galdralag. Its lines repeat and echo one another, as though the words are said more than once on purpose.
The repetition itself becomes part of the act.
Were the runes sung?
Sometimes runes and singing really do meet. We know inscriptions where chants or spell texts were written in runes. One of them is the bronze plaque from Högstena, of the twelfth century. But there is an important boundary here. Those finds belong to a later time and to the Younger Futhark. We have no ancient source showing a person taking one of the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark and singing it to «activate» it.
That is already a modern practice. It can be a beautiful part of a personal ritual — it just should not be passed off as an exactly reconstructed custom of people two thousand years ago.
What do the rune poems say?
The rune poems say nothing about how to sing runes. They do something else: they give every rune an image. Wealth. Ice. The sun. A horse. Water. A human being.
So the old galdr and the rune poems can stand side by side, but not be mixed. One speaks of the power of the voice. The others keep the images of the runes themselves.