— Help — Permalinks

I am having some trouble getting permalinks to work with my blog. So after I enabled it, I added the following lines to my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archives/category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/? ([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/ /(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&feed=$5 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/ /trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [QSA]

After I did that my website got an HTTP 500 internal server error. I also read https://faq.wordpress.net/view.php?p=20, and tried some of the stuff mentioned there like adding

Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
and
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /YOURPATHHERE
</ifmodule>

But nothing seems to work. I am also not sure how I would check if my mod_rewrite is enabled or not. Any help would be appreciated, sorry Im not too familiar with these kind of things.