Are the Runes in God of War Real?

God of War is coming to television. Prime Video's series, with Ronald D. Moore as showrunner and two seasons ordered, started filming in Vancouver on 25 February 2026. A new audience is about to meet Kratos and Atreus, and some of them will pick up the 2018 game, walk into the woods of Midgard, see a wall cut with straight, angular letters and ask whether those are real runes.

Yes, mostly. The runes in God of War are real Elder Futhark letters, from an alphabet the Vikings had already retired. Most of what you see carved in the Nine Realms is the genuine 24-letter Germanic rune row.

That makes God of War rare in this series. Valheim is the only other game here built on the real futhark. Most games invent their signs; Santa Monica Studio borrowed the real ones and then reached back too far. The Elder Futhark was already old when the first longships reached England, and the Vikings wrote with something smaller. God of War tells a Viking saga in the runes of the Vikings' great-grandparents.

What is a rune in God of War?

In God of War a rune is two things: writing on the world, and power in a weapon. The walls, shrines, chests and SteelBook carry readable runic letters. Separately, Runic Attacks are special moves slotted into the Leviathan Axe, the Blades of Chaos and the Draupnir Spear. Only the first kind is real writing.

The writing is everywhere. The 2018 game is set in Midgard and lets you explore six of the nine realms; God of War Ragnarök, released on 9 November 2022, visits all nine. Inscriptions run along temple doors, ruins and the 11 Jötnar shrines, wooden triptychs that tell the giants' version of the myths. Nornir chests lock their apples and mead behind three rune seals you have to find and break.

Atreus does the reading. Director Cory Barlog said that without the boy, everyone would talk in Old Norse and the player would understand no one. Kratos is a Greek god in a foreign land; his son is the one who can read the walls.

Which runic alphabet does God of War use?

Mostly the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet: 24 letters in use from roughly 150 to 800 CE. The God of War fan wiki lists the game's rune row letter by letter, and it is the futhark, from ᚠ f to ᛞ d. Screen Rant reached the same verdict in 2021: most of what players see is Elder Futhark.

You can test it outside the game. The Special Edition SteelBook for the 2018 release is covered in runes, and a Reddit user transliterated them within two days of launch. Bleeding Cool printed the opening on 22 April 2018: "This is the story of a bear and a wolf, who wandered the realms nine to fulfill a promise of one before." The letters are real Elder Futhark. The language underneath is English, the same trick Valheim plays on its runestones.

Inside the fiction the language is Old Norse, and the runes have local accents. The fan wiki describes Dwarvish and Elvish as their own styles of the same runes, and the fire giants of Muspelheim and the frost giants of Niflheim as having scripts of their own. More on those below.

Why would a Viking find God of War's runes old-fashioned?

Because the Vikings did not use them. Around 800 CE, just as the Viking Age began, Scandinavian carvers cut the 24-letter Elder Futhark down to the 16-letter Younger Futhark. Nearly every runestone raised by Vikings is carved in that shorter row. God of War's runes are the older, longer set.

Here is the difference in one table.

The Younger Futhark did not drop letters because sounds disappeared. It kept fewer signs and let each one cover several sounds, so a single rune stood for both k and g, another for both t and d. Readers had to guess from context. That is the real alphabet of the sagas' heroes, and it is harder to read than the one in the game.

So God of War gets the letters right and the century wrong. It is a fair trade for a game: the Elder Futhark has one sign per sound and reads more easily, and the myths it illustrates are older than the Viking Age anyway. The Eddas were written down in the 13th century from poems far older than the parchment. But if a Viking walked into Kratos' house, the writing on the walls would look the way Old English looks to us.

Are the Muspelheim and Niflheim ciphers real?

The ciphers are invented, but the idea is real. In the 2018 game you open Muspelheim and Niflheim by finding four Language Cipher pieces for each realm, in purple chests with a face-shaped lock. The fan wiki shows each giant script as a substitution cipher: every sign maps back to an ordinary rune.

Real carvers did the same thing. The Rök runestone in Östergötland, Sweden, carved around 800 CE, carries about 760 characters, the longest runic inscription in stone. Most of it is in the Younger Futhark. Part way through, the carver switches to cipher runes and to the old 24-letter Elder Futhark, and scholars take the switch as deliberate: the hidden lines concern old legends tied to the carver's own tribe.

That is the nicest irony in the games. On the Rök stone the Elder Futhark is the secret script, the old one a Viking would bring out to look ancient and hard to read. God of War uses it for street signs. The script one Viking kept for secrets is the everyday writing of Midgard. The giants' ciphers are an extra lock on a door the real Vikings already treated as locked.

Are Runic Attacks real runes?

No. A Runic Attack is a special move on a cooldown, slotted into a weapon. Each weapon has two runic slots, one light and one heavy. In 2018 the Leviathan Axe has eight of each; in Ragnarök the axe and the Blades of Chaos have ten each and the Draupnir Spear eight. None of them writes anything.

The names are good Norse, though. Njörd's Tempest, Hel's Touch, Ivaldi's Anvil and Breath of Thamur all point at figures from the myths or from the games' own lore, and Ragnarök adds Skaði's Edge and Winter's Bite. Atreus gets Runic Summons instead: spectral wolves, falcons and an irritable squirrel. This is the same gear sense of "rune" that we traced through six other games in why so many games call their gear runes.

There is one real rune hiding in the weapons. In the Valhalla epilogue, released on 12 December 2023, Wikipedia notes that all of Týr's weapons bear the Tiwaz rune, even the ones he picked up in other lands. Tiwaz is the T-rune and carries the war god's own name. The Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál tells a warrior to cut victory runes on his sword-hilt and call twice on Tyr. Santa Monica put the right letter on the right god.

God of War runes vs. the Elder Futhark

The real runes, briefly

The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet: 24 letters in three rows of eight, used by Germanic peoples from roughly 150 to 800 CE. Each letter has a sound, a name and a meaning. Fehu is f and means cattle and wealth, Uruz is u and the wild ox, Tiwaz is t and the god Týr. The name futhark comes from its first six letters.

The magic grew on top of the writing. In Norse tradition, Odin wins the runes by hanging nine nights on the world-tree Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear, and gives an eye for a drink from the well of Mimir, the same Mimir whose head Kratos carries on his belt. The runes then served as charms and protections, were joined into bindrunes and sigils, and are read for guidance today.

Why the Nine Realms got the real runes

Because God of War's Norse world is borrowed, not invented. Midgard, Jötunheim, Yggdrasil, Odin, Thor, Freya and Mimir all come from the Eddas, and the writing team read the Prose Edda to see how the myths were told. A borrowed mythology called for a borrowed alphabet, and the Elder Futhark is the one most people recognise.

Compare the settings around it on the runes in games hub. Skyrim's Nords look Norse and write in a dragon alphabet, because Tamriel is Bethesda's own world. Ragnarok Online shares the end-of-the-world name, takes real rune names and gives them invented powers. God of War is the series' most faithful Norse setting after Valheim, and its one mistake is a scholar's mistake: it chose the more famous alphabet over the right one.

Want runes you can actually read?

God of War is a good teacher. Learn the 24 letters and the walls of Midgard start to talk, and so does the SteelBook. Those same 24 letters are the ones people read for guidance today, each with a name and a meaning older than any Viking.

The easiest way in is to draw one. You can cast a free rune reading in your browser right now, using the genuine Elder Futhark and their traditional meanings, with a quick single draw for a fast question or a fuller spread for something weightier. If you would rather build the habit slowly, pull a rune of the day each morning and learn the futhark one sign at a time, or read how online rune readings work first.

Kratos needed his son to read the runes for him. You only need the alphabet. Try a real rune reading with Way of the Runes, free on iOS, Android, and the web, in English and Russian.