RUNIC OR VIKING ALPHABET AND THE MEANING OF THE ARCANA

The runic or Viking alphabet is the writing method used by the Norse peoples throughout the Viking Age. The term runic comes from the symbols that make up this alphabet and are called runes, which are equivalent to the letters in the Latin alphabet.

Runic Alphabet and its Meaning

The runic alphabet brings together a group of alphabets which make common use of letters called runes, which were used to write in the Germanic dialects, primarily in Scandinavia and the British Isles, although they were also used in central and eastern Europe, to through antiquity and the Middle Ages, prior to and during the Christianization of those territories.

The Scandinavian varieties of the alphabet are known as futhark or fuþark (pronounced according to the AFI International Phonetic Alphabet: ), a word that comes from the six initial runes: which are transliterated as F, U, Þ, A, R and K. The Anglo-Saxon variety is known as futhorc, because of the resulting changes in the articulation of these same six letters in ancient English.

The oldest runic legends found so far date back to around the year 150, and in general, the alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet with the arrival of Christianity, around the year 700 in central Europe and at the end of the Viking Age, around 1100, in Scandinavia.

Even so, the use of runes continued in Scandinavia well into the 20th century, particularly in rural Sweden, being used mainly in rune decoration and in runic almanacs. The most important trio of runic alphabets, which we will detail later, are:

The archaic futhark (c. 150-800) The Anglo-Saxon futhorc (400-1100) The young futhark or Scandinavian futhark (800-1100)

You can also find various versions of the young futhark:

The long branch runes also called Danish The short branch runes or Rök runes, also called Swedish-Norwegian The Helsingian runes (lacking a post or vertical axis) The Icelandic runes

As time passed, the young futhark became:

The Marcomannic runes The medieval runes (1100-1500) The Dalecarlian runes (c. 1500-c. 1800)

The origins of runic calligraphy are unknown, since a large number of the characters or symbols of the archaic futhark greatly resemble the symbols of the Latin alphabet.

Among other contenders to be its ancestors are the northern Italian alphabets dating back to the 5th to 1st centuries BC. C., Lepontic, Rhaetian and Venetic, all of them very close and originating from the Etruscan alphabet. When the spellings are compared, similarities appear in numerous aspects.

Context of the Runic Alphabet

The name assigned to the symbols of these alphabets is “rune”, as opposed to “letter” in Latin and Greek, as shown already on a German carved staff from the 6th century and also, perhaps as a rune, on the Eingang stone (4th century). This epithet comes from the root run- (rune in Gothic), which means “secret” or “whisper” (unlike Finnish, which took the similarity “runo” but means “poem”).

Runes began to be used by the Germanic peoples of the 1st or 2nd centuries. The oldest runic legend dates back to around 160 and is located on a comb found in the Vimose swamp, Funen, on which you can read harja (comb). Another candidate that enters the dispute to be the oldest is the 1st century legend of the fibula (brooch) of Meldorf.

This stage coincides with the last linguistic phases of the proto-Germanic or general Germanic language, which developed into the dialects of its three derivatives in the following centuries, although not explicitly separated: the northern Germanic languages, western Germanic languages ​​and eastern Germanic languages.

There is no differentiation between long and short vowels in the preserved runic legends, although such a distinction was phonologically present in the spoken languages ​​of the time. Likewise, there are no labiovelar consonant symbols in the archaic futhark (symbols that were incorporated into both the Anglo-Saxon futhorc and the Gothic alphabet as a variety of the letter p.

mythological

The runes were considered to be of divine origin (ancestral Norse: reginkunnr) according to remote Scandinavian conviction, which were granted by the gods, a gift from Odin to mortals.

This is already evident around the s. VII d. C. in the legend of the Noleby stone, in Sweden (Runo fahi raginakundo toja…, which translates “He prepared the appropriate divine rune…”) and in the Sparlösa stone of the 9th century (Ok rað runaR þaR rægikundu, which means “translate the runes of divine origin”​). Of greater notoriety in Hávamál, verse 80, the runes are also detailed as reginkunnr:

80. Þat er þá reynt,
er þú að rúnum spyrr
inum reginkunnr,
þeim er gerðu ginnregin
ok fáði fimbulþulr,
þá hefir han bazt, ef hann þegir.

80. It is proven:
if runes inquiries,
those of divine origin,
those that high powers made
and the upper tulr (“priest” Odin) dyed,
much is obtained by silencing.

The Rúnatal Poetic Edda states that their creator was the deity Odin, and stanzas 138 and 139 detail how Odin obtained the runes through his own sacrifice. The writing is as follows:

Old Norse

Veit ec at ec hecc vindga meiði a
netr allar nio, geiri vndaþr oc gefinn Oðni,
sialfr sialfom mer,
a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn.

Við hleifi mic seldo ne viþ hornigi,
nysta ec niþr, nam ec vp rvnar,
opandi nam,
fell ec aptr þaðan.

Castilian

I know I hung on a tree moved by the wind
nine long nights wounded with a spear and offered to Odin, myself given to myself,
in that tree of which no one knows the origin of its roots.

They gave me no bread or drink from the horn,
I looked deep,
I took the runes, I took them between screams,
After that I collapsed to the ground.

A couple of accounts are available about how the runes came to mortal knowledge. The Rígsþula relates how Ríg, described as Heimdall in the introduction, fathered three sons by women: Thrall (slave), Karl (freedman) and Jarl (noble).

These sons became the ancestors of the three categories of men indicated by their names. When Jarl reached the age to begin handling weapons and exhibiting other signs of nobility, Rig returned and, having accepted Jarl as his son, instructed him in the runes. In 1555, the banished Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus established a tradition about a certain Kettil Runske who had stolen three rune staffs from Odin and thus learned the runes and their magic.

Historical

The runic alphabet evolved late, centuries after the Mediterranean alphabets from which they possibly came. There are known similarities with the alphabets of Phoenician origin (Latin, Greek, Etruscan) that cannot be attributed to simple chance.

One of the ancient Italic alphabets, the Rhaetian alphabet of Bolzano, is frequently referred to as a candidate for being the source of runes, with only five runes of the archaic futhark (e, ï, j, ŋ, p) having no equivalent. in the Bolzano alphabet. This theory is usually dismissed by Scandinavian scholars, who usually favor the Latin origin of most rune letters.

The proposal of ancestral Italic or northern Etruscan origin is supported by the legend of the Negau helmet that dates back to the 2nd century.

The angular figures of the runes are in common use with most contemporary alphabets of that time used in stone or wood engravings. A peculiarity of the runic alphabet, when compared to the ancestral Italic family, is the lack of horizontal layouts. Runes were regularly written on the edges of modest pieces of wood.

The primary carved grooves ran through the piece vertically, in the opposite direction to the grain of the wood: the curves are difficult to outline, and the horizontal lines tend to get lost among the grains of the wood. This particularity is also shared with other alphabets, such as the initial forms of the Latin alphabet used in the Dueños legend.

The West Germanic provenance theory surmises that the runic alphabet may have been introduced by West Germanic clans.

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the oldest legends (c. 200 AD), located in swamps and tombs in the area of ​​Jutland (the legends of Vimose), exhibit word endings that, when translated by philologists from Scandinavia as Proto-Norse, have not yet been deciphered and are a source of controversy among linguists. Legends such as wagnija, niþijo and harija supposedly symbolize the names of tribes.

As a conjecture, the names of the Vangiones, the Nidense and the Harii, tribes located in the Rhineland area, have been raised.

Since the names ending in -io are an adaptation of the Germanic morphology of the Latin ending -ius, and the suffix -inius is transformed into Germanic -inio, the difficult ending in -ijo in the masculine declension of Proto Norse could be solved assuming the Roman influence in the Rhineland region.

While the rare -a ending of laguþewa (cf. Syrett 1994:44f.) can be solved by allowing the name to be West German.

However, it should be noted that in the early stage of runic writing it is admitted that the inequalities between the Germanic languages ​​are minimal. Another hypothesis admits a North West Germanic unity that predates the emergence of Proto-Norse, particularly until the 5th century.

An alternative proposition that highlights the impossibility of cataloging the first legends of both northerners and westerners is the one suggested by È. A. Makaev, who admits a “special runic koine”, an early literary Germanic used by the entire Common German community after the distancing from Gothic (2nd to 5th centuries), therefore the pronounced dialects would have achieved greater and greater diversity.

The origin of the archaic Futhark was completed by the early 5th century, with the Kylver Stone becoming the initial evidence of the Futhark order, as well as the Peorth rune.

Varieties of the Runic Alphabet

From the legends found, it has been possible to establish a classification between three primordial varieties of the runic alphabet: archaic futhark, Anglo-Saxon futhorc and young futhark.

Archaic Futhark

The archaic Futhark alphabet, used for writing in Proto-Norse, is composed of 24 runes that were usually grouped in three groupings of eight, each of which was called ætt. The initial known ordered list of the total group of 24 runes date back to the year 400 and were found on the Kylver stone in Gotland (Sweden).

Each rune consisted of a name, chosen to symbolize the sound of itself, but such designations have not survived…