| From: [email protected] (Steinar Bang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Runes: Magic Letters, "Post-It" stickers and Graffiti
Date: 2 Jun 91 14:00:24 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim, Norway
I guess the picture most people has of runes, is that they were a form
of writing used my shamans/magicans for communicating with the gods,
and honoring the dead. This is of course the image one gets from
reading the best preserved runic inscriptions, which are "raised
stones" with runic inscriptions. (I wonder what picture one would get
of the Latin alphabet, if the only preserved writings were inscriptions
on gravestones and monuments).
There was a popular scientific program about the runic inscriptions on
NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.) television this morning, I am going
to try to post *my* interpretation of it (mixed with stuff I have from
other sources, so read it with an implicit disclaimer).
Runes seems to have been present among the germanic speaking peoples of
europe at an early stage. They show (I am told) a strong resemblance to
the celtic oghams. They also show obvious resemblances to the
latin/greek family of alphabets.
It is obvious that runes had its magical uses. In the norse
mytholgy/folklore there was a strong belief in "name magic". That is:
if you knew someone's/something's true name you could control him/it.
If you wrote down the name it was a powerful magic tool (almost like
voodoo). By the same rule, you would try to avoid calling powerful
beeings and forces by their real name to avoid calling them, and
perhaps annoying them.
A swedish scientist (in the TV program) saw the origin of runes as more
prosaic. His opinion was that runes orginated from a need for marking
trading goods, especially with regard to ownership, when sending the
goods far (i.e. when trading with the Roman Empire).
He backed his theory with findings from archeological excavations in
Bergen, Norway. Among these findings were a lot of simple everyday
messages ("Post-It" stickers, as it were! ;-) on wood and bone. These
inscriptions dated to medival times (the 13th, and 14th century AD).
This was at a time when christanity was well established in Norway, and
Latin letters were well known. For latin letters, however, you needed
pens, ink and parchment. Parchment, especially was expensive, and not
to be wasted on trivialities.
If you had a knife (as everybody had, at that time), and a splinter of
wood, or a piece of bone, you used runes. The runes were more suited to
"rissing" (inscription? engraving?) than were Latin letters. It seems
that many, maybe even most, people at that time were runic litterates.
Therefore runes coexisted with latin writing, until the time of the
Black Plague (1349, in Norway).
According to the scientists, the runic writings mirrors the spoken
language at that time, much better that does suviving contemporary
Latin documents.
Seemingly backing the runic litterate theory, are also the otherwise
incongrous runic graffiti, found in as diverse places as the Sophia
Cathedral in Miklagardr (Constantinople, maybe put there by a couple of
bored Varangian Guardsmen), The Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim
(=Nidaros) (about a famous Icelandic priest: "Laurensius Kalvsson is
a..." Ehem!), and early defacing of gravemounds by wayfarers taking
shelter ("I xxx slept with...").
The runic alphabet (or "'futhark', not 'alphabet'!!" as a friend of
mine likes to correct me ;-), had an active lifetime of some 1400 odd
years, and was at the end a fairly sophistcated form of expression.
This kind of ruins my picture of runes as something jealously guarded
by filthy primitive shamans. Oh Well! One can't choose ones ancestors,
I guess.
- Steinar (or is it: "Stainiawarjar")
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected] (Bill Schulz)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Runes: Magic Letters, "Post-It" stickers and Graffiti
Date: 3 Jun 91 04:31:31 GMT
Organization: Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ
I thought I might add a couple of references for those who want to
follow up on Steinar's information.
For an excellent discussion of Runes, their history and use, see
Haugen, Einar THE SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES, Cambridge, Mass, 1976.
The above book contains scientific information, mostly of a linguistic
nature, though Haugen could not refrain from evaluating the
mythological origin of the Runes.
If you want information on Runes as magic, see
Thorsson, Edred, FUTHARK (sorry, exact citation unavailable, but last
20 years)
There are several other books by Thorsson on the same theme, but this
is probably the fundamental one. This is not a scientific book; if
you don't believe in magic it will put you off, but it does have a lot
of historical information in it. Thorsson was trying to be very
accurate.
| Bill Schulz
|
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|
| Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
From: [email protected] (Per-Erik Martin)
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Student
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 19:00:32 GMT
In article <[email protected]>
[email protected] (Anders Andersson) writes:
>Were the runes ever used on paper or similar material (perhaps in
>Dalarna), i.e. written with something like a pen? If so, did that
>contribute to the development of the glyphs, and how?
No, not to my knowledge, except maybe in Dalarna in the end. With that
branch of runes as the exception the number of runes weren't really
increased, unless you count dotted and undotted runes as different
ones. The need for two different a-runes and two different r-runes
(important differences in the beginning one must presume) disappeared
so they came to be used for different sounds instead, and dots where
introduced to distinguish between u/y, i/e and k/g for instance. In the
beginning of the 17th century, when the use of runes among common
people had almost stopped, the futhark was virtually the same as it
were 800 years earlier, with the minor changes mentioned above. By then
the interest in national history and the ancestors writings had grown
among the higher, educated classes (who of course learned to read and
write the latin alphabet) and attempts to "save" the runes were made.
Johannes Bureus published his "Runa ABC-bok" in 1611, and they even
planned to publish books printed with runes instead of latin
characters. Bureus tried to design a futhark-style suitable for
handwriting with pen and ink, but I don't think it were ever used.
--
|\/|\/|\/| Per-Erik Martin,
| | |/\| Department of Computer Systems, Uppsala University,
|/\| | | Email: [email protected]
|
| From: [email protected] (joseph d scott)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: The Vikings!
Date: 17 Dec 1993 01:38:15 GMT
Organization: University of Arizona UNIX Users Group
In 1898 Olof Ohman, who had immigrated from Sweden in 1879, claimed he
had found a runestone partially enwrapped by the roots of a poplar tree
while he was clearing farm land. The stone told the story of a group
of viking explorers who had gone on a bit of a fishing trip in
Minnesota in 1362, when half of their number were slaughtered by
natives. By the end of the year it had been easily demonstrated as a
fake, not in the least because it was written in a dialect unique to
the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in Minnesota in the nineteenth
century. Unfortunately, ten years later it was purchased by one
Hjalmar Rued Holand, a Norwegian writer (and graduate of the University
of Wisconsin), who spent the next fifty years vociferously proclaiming
the stone's fourteenth century origin. He was successful enough that
the Smithsonian exhibited the stone as genuine in 1948.
Nevertheless, analysis of the stone revealed that it had been carved no
earlier than 1880, using a one-inch chisel of the type commonly
available in turn of the century Minnesota hardware stores. The carver
had a passing knowledge of the runic alphabet and the odd local
dialect. At least one third of the runes on the stone are either
unknown in 14th century usage, or are in open conflict with it. And
the dialect is unlike any other that has ever been used, except the
local dialect in Minnesota around 1900.
It is called the Kensington Stone, after a town in the county it was
discovered in. Hundreds of stones were unearthed in Minnesota in its
wake, most of them even more blatant frauds then the Kensington Stone
was, and none of which has proved genuine. In addition, some 50 stones
have been manufactured and found in Oklahoma, but again, all so far
have been patently fraudulent.
[Info taken from _The Vikings in History_, F. Donald Logan]
Joe
______________________________________________________________________
Joseph Scott
University of Arizona
[email protected]
________________________________________________________________________________
From: [email protected] (OddMagne Sekkingstad)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: The Vikings!
Date: 18 Dec 1993 23:10:38 GMT
Organization: Institute of Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway
In 1908 the Norwegian-American historian Hjalmar Holand got the stone.
He interpreted the text on the flat side as follows: "Eight Goths [from
Go"taland in Sweden] and twenty-two Norwegian on an expedition from
Vinland to the west. We camped at two capes[or reefs] one day north of
this stone. We went fishing. When we came back we found ten men red
with blood, and dead. AVM[Ave Maria] save us from harm[or
destruction]."
The text on the edge read:"Ten men have been sent to the sea to look
for our ship fourteen days' journey from this island. Anno 1362."
The latest supporting evidence of such an expedition is a note written
on a copy of Poe Urban's map, just west of the Canadian lakes, which
reads: "Newly discovered land." [Cortesa'o, 1954]
It is belived that the Kensington stone has something to do with the
Scandinavian-English expedition in America in 1360-1364.
--
Odd-Magne
|