Lady of the Northern Light: A Feminist Guide to the Runes

by Susan Gitlin-Emmer

A feminist guide to the runes.

125 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

Reviews

[Marleigh Amanda Marx · Rating 2 out of 5]

The chapter of each rune contains bits and pieces of stories that are only very tangentially related to the runes themselves. There are so many disjointed and unrelated facts that you’ll have literally no clue what you read from paragraph to paragraph. The meanings the author does give to each rune at the back of the book are at least partially made up by her to serve the purpose of making the runes “goddess oriented” and “more feminist.” Anything that is footnoted is usually a random fact that makes no sense in context of what she’s talking about.

[Marie Judson]

A fascinating effort to use language to uncover some of the meanings of runes that have been overlooked due to assumptions privileging masculine or god interpretations. Since much of Celtic and Nordic history was not written down, archaeology of language provides another form of evidence. Sometimes the only one.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this book overall. I appreciate the Goddess-oriented descriptions of the rune mythology, but I was expecting lots more information on rune-casting and interpretation. There was almost nothing on actually using the runes, just descriptions of the mythology behind them.

[Kendra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-Read Dec 2014