Full Listing
Academia
Mystic
Books
Internet
Unannotated

Add a Book or Resource

Welcome to the Kansas City Runological Society's Rigorous Annotated Reading List. This introduction to the reading list will discuss the shocking purposes of the list, how the list is organized, and the methods of obtaining the sources.

The Kansas City Runological Society does not exist, so don't try to find it. It is a ficitious organization created for a project for the LI804 Theory of Organization class in the School of Library & Information Management graduate program at Emporia State University. The assignment was to do an annotated bibliography on the topic of Pictures and Knowledge. Though the Society is fictitious, the resources listed are not. Every source listed is a real book, journal, Usenet discussion group, or web site. The Society was created so as to have an established client base from which to tailor a bibliography for. The only real rune organization that the researcher found was one mentioned in one of Thorsson's book's introductions. A letter was sent to the Dallas-based Rune Guild, but there was no reply.

As of February 1996, management of this site was assumed by Jennifer Smith at the request of the original researcher. If you have any comments or additions you would like to make, please feel free to contact Jennifer at . For questions about the original research project, you can contact Jameson Watkins at watkinsj@esuvm1.emporia.edu, or visit his web site at http://www.greatwebpages.com/watkins.

This list is organized in a number of different ways to allow access by a variety of people with differing motivations. The main division of this reading list reflects the separation of interests in the Society between Academic sources, i.e., those that discuss the historical and linguistic value of runes, and the Mystic sources, i.e., those that discuss runes on a metaphysical level.

There are also alphabetic listings of sources by type. For the techno-runologists, there is a listing of Internet sites. For the more traditional study of runes, there is also a listing of Books & Journals. A complete listing of all the titles maintained at this site is available, as well as a listing of non-annotated materials that potentially could have value but were unavailable for review.

The sources provided on this site were put together by an independent researcher, Jameson Watkins. Our researcher began by searching Dialog, the most comprehensive collection of databases available. He began his search rather broadly, starting with 'knowledge' and 'alphabets' to get an idea of what type of databases would have the necessary information. The three most useful databases he found were (hyperlinks go to the databases' blue sheets) Linguistic and Language Behavior Abstracts (file #36), ERIC (file #1), and Dissertation Abstracts Online (file #35). From there, he searched under 'rune' and 'runological.' The total number of hits that made it into the reading list was four from the three databases.

There were in fact many more hits, but as the researcher found out, the majority of modern research being done with runes are from the Scandavian countries and Germany, and are written in languages other than English. There is only one reference in the reading list to a source that is primarily written in another language, that being RuneType - The Project. The project's goals are written in English, but currently the details of the project are written in Norwegian. The rationale for including this site, other than the fact there are a few members that speak fluent Norwegian, is that the Society felt it should keep abreast of current developments in runology, and since the majority of research is being done overseas, there should be some monitoring of the projects that are taking place there. The small faction of the Society that speaks in languages beyond English are working on putting together a list of non-English speaking runology sources.

By far the most help in researching this list came from the Usenet discussion groups alt.mythology, alt.pagan, and alt.astrology. The groups were monitored for several weeks, and the discussions that took place there were enough to warrant their own places on the reading list. Their main importance, though, were as a source of bibliographic reference. There were reviews of books and constant threads about which were most appropriate for what activity. Though the discussion groups that were monitored were of the mystic persuasion, there were almost as many references to academic pursuits of runes as mystic ones. The linguistic-oriented discussion groups did not discuss runology.

The World Wide Web sites listed as sources presented a unique problem associated with the Internet. Several Web sites that were visited and found to contain useful information at the beginning of the search process were no longer active by the last stages of the assembly of this reading list. Other sites had radically changed their content within the span of several weeks, making alterations to their annotations a constant factor. A third frustration was that new sources appeared constantly - if one were to search the Internet on a Friday, one had better do another search by the following Wednesday to maintain a comprehensive list. As an example, four new sources were added to the list two days before the final completion date, whereas the anticipated final search process had ended three weeks beforehand.

The primary resource for searching the Internet, which included the World Wide Web, gopher, and Usenet, was InfoSeek. As a subscriber to their information services, the researcher had access to extended search capabilities over their free WWW search engine that is posted to Netscape's Net Search section. The words searched under were 'rune,' 'runes,' and 'runology.'

Another source of information were the Books in Print volumes. Because the topic was limited to a description of one or two words, looking for a title of a book on the topic was as simple as looking under 'rune.' This yielded an additional thirty possible sources that were unrecorded elsewhere due to their recent publication dates.

Once a list of possible printed entries had been compiled, the local libraries were bombarded with requests for interlibrary loan material from the researcher. Of the forty requested, only five were received back. Of the sources that could not be located, only those that received favorable review from the Usenet were included on the normal lists. Those that were not located were placed on a separate list alphabetically. There were a surprising number of books that were not available through interlibrary loan, particularly the mystical-oriented rune studies. Many of these sources were published within the last two years, which might account for libraries not having them. Another likely reason why they could not be located is their classification as 'specialty' type books of little value to the public (in the eyes of libraries with tight budgets). One would assume they could be found at bookstores that catered to metaphysical subjects.

Home: The Rune Reading List
Email:
More Things Runic: Runesmith's Home Page
Site last updated: April 23, 1997 - 1:33:42 AM