Rhaunen is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Birkenfeld district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It was the seat of the former Verbandsgemeinde Rhaunen.

The municipality lies at the Idar Forest in the Hunsrück in a sprawling, well watered hollow. The hollow separates the Idar Forest massif from the Soonwald massif. Within the village itself, the Lingenbach empties into the Rhaunelbach, which itself, along with the Näßbach, the Macherbach and the Büdenbach, empties into the Idarbach.

The nearest major centres are Idar-Oberstein, Simmern, Morbach and Kirn.

Also belonging to Rhaunen are the outlying centre of Neuzenbrunnen and the homesteads of Hochwälderhof and Königstein.

The solid rock in Rhaunen, Hunsrück slate, comes down from the Devonian. The hollow in which Rhaunen lies was formed by the many brooks that flow together here and that shaped various alluvial fans, which have very loamy subsoil. The Hunsrück slate can be found on the slopes overlooking the hollow, whereas the floodplains down in the dale are characterized by loaminess. While the slopes are mostly covered with mixed forests, meadowland is to be found in the dales, and on the higher-lying terraces and hills, cropraising. The slate was once intensively used as a building material, both for roofing and building walls. Even the many public buildings built in Rhaunen about the turn of the 20th century have unplastered walls made of slate quarrystone. Of the many slate quarries that were once to be found in the dales around Rhaunen, none is still in business. Here and there, though, tailing heaps can still be seen. The biggest operation in the slatemining business was the “Abenstern” quarry on the Wartenberg, going towards Hausen. It was quarrying slate until the late 1950s. The high ridges, of the Idar Forest massif for example, are formed of the most extremely weathering-resistant Taunus quartzite, whose effect on the land is to leave it rather useless for agriculture, although not altogether unusable in forestry. This Taunus quartzite harbours bog iron deposits, which until about the middle of the 19th century were mined and smelted. This was done at the Weitersbacher Hütte (ironworks) near Rhaunen.

Yearly precipitation in Rhaunen amounts to 744 mm, which falls into the middle third of the precipitation chart for all Germany. At 50% of the German Weather Service's weather stations lower figures are recorded. The driest month is April. The most rainfall comes in November. In that month, precipitation is 1.4 times what it is in April. Precipitation varies only slightly and is spread quite evenly throughout the year. Only at 1% of the weather stations are lower seasonal swings recorded.

Given the central location, the place now called Rhaunen was already settled in Roman times, as witnessed by the sandstone blocks in the Evangelical church's north wall, which were formerly walled up. Rhunanu, first named in a record from Lorch Abbey (not to be confused with Lorsch Abbey) in the late 8th century, crops up again in 841 as Rhuna in a donation to Fulda Abbey. Rhaunen became the seat of the like-named high court district. Until the 14th century, the Waldgraves were the unqualified owners of the court and the places that it governed. Besides Rhaunen itself, these were Bollenbach, Bruschied, Bundenbach, Gösenroth, Hausen, Krummenau, Laufersweiler, Lindenschied, Oberkirn, Schwerbach, Stipshausen, Sulzbach, Weitersbach and Woppenroth. Also under the court's sway was the Schmidtburg. With this Waldgravial castle’s loss to Archbishop Baldwin of Trier in 1330, however, part of the court’s territory in the form of three villages also passed to the Electorate of Trier. Baldwin also managed at the same stroke to relieve the Waldgraves of one fourth of the high court. Territorial relations remained so until an end was put to the Old Empire in the late 18th century and the old mediaeval governmental body, the court, was likewise swept away.

In the course of the French occupation of the lands on the Rhine’s left bank in the wake of the Treaty of Lunéville, Rhaunen was grouped into the Department of Sarre, the arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the canton of Rhaunen. After the French withdrew in 1814, Rhaunen found itself in Prussia’s new Rhine Province, also becoming the seat of a Bürgermeisterei (“mayoralty”) in the Bernkastel-Kues district. Parts of the old high court district, however – Bundenbach, for instance – now belonged to the Principality of Birkenfeld, an exclave of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, most of whose territory was in what is now northwest Germany, with a coastline on the North Sea. Even after the First World War, through the Weimar Republic and on through the time of the Third Reich, Rhaunen was the administrative seat for the surrounding villages. In the course of administrative restructuring in the 1960s, the Amt of Rhaunen became the Verbandsgemeinde of Rhaunen in the Birkenfeld district. This arrangement still stands.