Rune cast
Twenty-four stones in a pouch, one cloth, and a question if you have one. Shuffled with real randomness, the kind your browser uses for passwords. The runes are older than that.
The pouch is tied.
Pick a spread, ask a question or don't, and cast. The stones fall where they fall.
All twenty-four, waiting.
0 RUNES NORNS POUCH TIED
The twenty-four
How the cast works
The pouch holds the twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic row, and the blank stone if you add it. The page shuffles them with a Fisher-Yates shuffle fed by crypto.getRandomValues, the same source your browser uses for keys and passwords, and deals the top of the pouch onto the cloth. Each stone that can land reversed does so on a fair coin flip. Nine of the runes are the same mark upside down, so they never reverse: Gebo, Hagalaz, Nauthiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Sowilo, Ingwaz and Dagaz.
What the positions mean
One rune answers a plain question plainly. The three Norns are the three sisters who tend the well under the world tree: Urd, what was, Verdandi, what is coming to be, and Skuld, what shall be. Read them left to right as past, present and future. The five-rune cross puts where you stand in the middle, what came before on the left, what comes next on the right, what stands against you below, and where it all leads on top.
Reversed stones
A reversed rune, sometimes called merkstave, is the same rune with its energy blocked, delayed or pointed the wrong way, not the opposite of the upright meaning. If you would rather read every rune upright, turn the reversal off before you cast. The blank stone is a modern addition from a 1980s rune kit and is not part of the historical row; it is off by default and says so when it turns up.
What stays here
Everything on this page is plain JavaScript in your browser. There is no server doing the shuffle, so there is no record of what you asked or what you drew, anywhere but on this cloth. The only thing this page records is that a cast happened and which spread it was. The meanings were written for this page; the lore lines paraphrase the Old English and Norse rune poems, which are a thousand years out of copyright.