Disclaimer: This book was published last fall, but as my mom’s been going through health challenges and transitioning to hospice I’ve been struggling to find words for most things—apologies for a late review!
Siri Vincent-Plouff’s Queering the Runes showed up on my virtual doorstep with a certain synchronicity—I haven’t been reading a lot in the last year, but I’d actually pulled out my runes recently for the first time in a while when the publisher reached out to me, and so it seemed like the right timing to dig into this book and get some inspiration for my own practice.
Like Siri, I’m queer, non-binary, and a tarot reader. It was kind of funny for me to encounter their perspective on queer, anti-racist heathenry as a more fringe, recent take—in my limited reading on Norse practice, I must have naturally filtered to this perspective! My understanding of the Norse pantheon and modern practice was already richly queer, non-binary, playful, and naturally compatible with chosen family models.
On the other hand, the one specific book on runes I read a year or two ago was much more mainstream, with a narrower approach to interpretation, so I appreciate having a perspective to work with that’s generally more aligned with my cosmology and open to adaptation. Siri emphasises personal context and interweaves themes such as chosen family, gender fluidity, and community resistance through the interpretations of specific runes, taking inspiration from their own experience as well as Norse mythology and related history and folklore. They ground the reader not only in the tales of the Aesir and Vanir, but also in the histories of the region and how the lives of average people in this part of the world can inform interpretations of the runes beyond a limited understanding of “Viking values.” In this way, they also explicitly confront racist perversions of the runes and Norse heathenry more broadly, inviting the reader to connect their own values, context, and relationship with land and community to the symbols of the Elder Futhark and to resist white supremacist appropriation of this system.
Siri’s interwoven approach can make it a little easier to memorize specific runes through connecting to stories and concepts, and I personally appreciated the way they shared examples in some cases of how one meaning might particularly be drawn out by another rune that shows up in a reading. In some cases I got a little mixed up between what was meant as a specific meaning for a rune and what was provided as thematically similar context, but I think this less structured approach makes the book more accessible to read all at once, rather than using as a reference text. I liked the way this approach allowed them to bring in snippets of different topics a reader might want to explore further, from queer theory to linguistics to Norse practices and history. Interdisciplinary nerd alert, I’m here for it!
In most cases I didn’t find the journal prompts provided to dive deeper, or the little section on queering or radically relating to the rune at the end, to add much extra to the main text, but I think readers who are less immersed in queer theory and community and/or less familiar with generating personal reflection questions on their own from this kind of material will benefit more.
Outside of the rune-by-rune coverage that forms the bulk of the book, Siri provides some introductory material on their own background, Norse heathenry in general, and in particular the queer and anti-racist lens they apply to the work. They also offer material after discussing each rune that gets to how you might use them in divinatory or magical practice. The text as a whole is digestible, and doesn’t go too deep into any one topic, but does provide references that an interested reader can dive into to go further, and certainly inspires personal reflection and encourages working with the runes to develop a personal relationship with the tool.
If you already use another system, especially tarot, you might be wondering what the runes can add, particularly if you don’t have a specific ancestral connection, as Siri does. I especially found their take on the symbology of runes interesting, as they discuss the advantage of using a system with more abstract, less representative symbols that invite one’s own interpretation and don’t depict particular hierarchies or suggest a worldview with artwork. While I think I’ll always gravitate to cards as my most familiar tool, I’ve been playing with this advantage to the runes since reading the book and considering how to blend the interpretive guidance Siri and other authors offer, grounded in the likely original understanding of the symbols, with my own relationship with these broad concepts (ice, lake, torch, and so on.) As Siri points out, queering practice isn’t just about interpretations that apply to the obviously queer aspects of our lives, but about destabilizing binaries and singular understandings in favor of multiplicities.
…I can practically feel Loki winking over my shoulder. A recommended read!
ARC provided by Weiser Books. Purchases using the above link support me, as well as local bookstores!