Rune Priest

This article is about the Space Wolves unit. For the Dungeons & Dragons class, see Runepriest.

Rune Priest are Librarians of the Space Wolves who use shamanic rituals to avoid being sucked into the Warp. Totems and runes allow the Rune Priests to exercise caution and precision with their powers. The Thousand Sons are reckless and self-indulgent with their powers, consorted with daemons even before Magnus singlehandedly shattered the Emperor's design to utilize the (much safer) Webway. The Wolves don't hate the Thousand Sons because they're psykers; they hate them because the Vlka Fenryka had been fighting monsters and uncontrolled psykers since Russ was found.

Like the Librarians of Codex Chapters, Rune Priests are combatant psykers, using their psychic abilities to aid their brothers on the battlefield; off the battlefield, they are the keepers of the chapter's librarium and store of knowledge. The major difference is that Rune Priests do not believe their psychic abilities are derived from the Warp, but rather from the animistic spirits of their homeworld, Fenris; which is channeled through totems and runes on their armour.

Chapter Role

Rune Priests preserve their Chapter's entire history not in written form, but memorize it in great sagas. A Rune Priest who begins his training as a Skald is usually assigned to a single Great Company where he is taught its tales. With every new Great Year he joins another Company until he has learned the Chapter's full history and can be sent to whichever Rune Priest needs an apprentice.

The basic weapons of the Rune Priests are their psychically charged Runic Weapons. A common power among Rune Priests is the ability to summon storms across the battlefield which can cover the army's advance. Furthermore, they can cast runes which predict the ebb and flow of future events. These runes are usually carved from the bones or teeth of totem animals.

Many Rune Priests are psyker-linked to cyber-ravens, which are known as "Choosers of the Slain" to the Space Wolves. Their link enables them to see through the ravens, eyes and control them, thus allowing them to use them as scouts and messengers.

Warp vs Fenris

The major difference between Rune Priests and most other Librarians is that they do not believe their psychic abilities are derived from the Warp, but rather from the animistic spirits of their homeworld, Fenris; which is channeled through totems and runes on their armour.

There does seem to be an element of in-universe discrepancy on this: In Thousand Sons Ohthere Wyrdmake and Leman Russ say repeatedly that the Rune Priests did not use the power of the warp, even while accusing the Thousand Sons of corruption at the Council of Nikaea. However, in Prospero Burns Helwintr and Russ don't even mention this bullshit. The Space Wolves are not the savage ignoramuses that they want everyone to believe they are and seem to have a perfect grasp of the situation and can clearly differentiate between psyker and sorcerer, which is conveniently compatible with what will happen after the heresy. But the Thousands Sons seem to fall for it, so in their eyes, that fact that the Wolves would utter this kind of stupid nonsense is somewhat believable. None of which changes the fact the Space Wolves have either deluded themselves or are lying to everyone else about where their own psychic powers come from, making them either idiots or hypocrites respectively.

The discrepancy between the depictions of "ignorant savage" vs "lying hypocrite" is addressed somewhat in Wolfsblade. The Rune Priest traditions were descended from the shamanistic rituals of Fenris's native tribes, and have remained unchanged for countless centuries. Russ claims that his Rune Seers do not draw on the warp; that they (along with the Stormseers of the White Scars) use "older traditions" which shield themselves from corruption from the warp by limiting the power they can draw from it directly; they acknowledge both the power of Fenris and the Warp side-by-side, essentially making their culture a lens through which the Warp can be viewed comparatively safely. They seem to just be using Fenris as a totem for channeling the Warp.

Because of Russ' stance on his Rune Priests, he is flat out called a hypocrite by Rogal Dorn (who coincidentally was the only Primarch who still adhered to the Edict of Nikaea at that point) who points out that there are no limits on power, no matter how you slice it. Later Russ begins to wonder if he really was a hypocrite, and privately resolves to examine his Rune Priests' relationship with the warp on another day. Whether he actually did this or not is anyone's guess.

Underverse

Russ himself takes a jaunt into the Underverse (essentially a sanitised version of the Warp) to entreat with the Wights to provide a means for wounding Horus. He succeeded because he understood and respected the symbolism of the realm. One might say that the Underverse is exactly the same as the Warp, but the Underverse comes with rules and conditions to prevent travelers from wandering astray ("Drink, but don't eat the meat" etc) and the wights left him alone at least until he addressed them. It is not the first non-Chaos sub-realm to appear. In the alternative, if he had travelled directly into the warp he would have been subject to all of the crazed logic of Chaos and likely would have had a considerably more violent experience; while his exposure to the Underverse was fraught with threat and difficulty, he passed through relatively unmolested.