Do runes actually work? An honest answer
No poem contains a reading, and no old text can answer this for you. What a rune says to a person who draws it today is modern: most of it is less than a hundred years old, and the version on this site was written here. Every reading is marked for what it is: it starts from the lines above and goes where they do not.
Where this comes from
no source no text before the twentieth century reads a rune for a person
The third layer of every rune page is the reading: what the rune says to a person who draws it today. No poem contains a reading. This layer is modern, most of it is less than a hundred years old, and the version on this site was written here.
What the poems say
The poems say what each rune is: cattle, hail, ice, day. They promise nothing and predict nothing. Where a stanza says that wealth causes strife among kinsmen, the reading starts there and goes where the stanza does not, and the stanza itself is printed on every rune page.