and so back to the left again, which was the manner of the early Greeks, and had its name from the resemblance to a furrow traced by the plough*. The greater part of the ancient monuments written in the Runic character, which are still preserved, are inscriptions dispersed here and there in the fields, and cut out on large stones or pieces of rock. The Scandinavians wrote also on wood and on the bark of the birch-tree. As for the manuscripts in the Runic character, the most ancient we can find appear to have been written some time after Christianity took place in the north, as is judged from several proofs, particularly from the frequent intermixture of Roman letters in them. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the runic gave way still more and more to the other; till at length the missionaries succeeded in totally abolishing the use of them, as tending to retain the people in their ancient superstitions. But this reformation did not speedily take place, and there remained traces of this character for many succeeding ages; nor, as we are assured t, is it yet wholly laid aside among the mountaineers of one province in Sweden. [Upwards of a thousand Runic inscriptions have been discovered in Sweden, and three or four hundred in Denmark and Norway, but few of them are of a date prior to the eleventh century, and there is scarcely one of undoubted authenticity that throws the least light on history. They are, in fact, singularly devoid of interest, and by no means repay the trouble taken by the learned men of the north to decipher them. By far the greater number of these inscriptions are short epitaphs on tombstones, raised after the introduction of Christianity by obscure individuals, in memory of their friends and relations. N. N. set (raised) this stone after (in memory of) N. N. his father, mother, brother, sister, or friend, would be, by the insertion of two ordinary Scandinavian proper names, such as Suti, Steinar, Olaf, &c., a literal translation of the greater part of them. The most interesting Runic in scription we have yet seen is that on the Kingiktorsoak stone which we shall give an account of in the next chapter. Βουστροφηδόν. † See Dalin. Su. Rik. hist. tom. i. p. 237, and Benzel. collect. hist. p. 1, cap. 1. The Runic, like the ancient Greek alphabet, originally con tained only sixteen letters, arranged as follows : We will not fatigue the reader by entering into a critical examination of the conflicting theories that have been brought forward to account for the origin of these characters, for notwithstanding the antiquarian lore by which many of them are supported, they have only served to involve the question they were intended to elucidate in still greater obscurity. Leaving, therefore, these erudite lucubrations to those who may have the curiosity to investigate them *, we shall give, as briefly as possible, a few well authenticated facts on the subject. It may, in the first place, be taken for granted that the Scandinavian Runic alphabet was in use in the ninth century. It is, moreover, highly probable that the Saxons also possessed a Runic alphabet previous to their invasion of England, for it has been clearly ascertained that the Anglo-Saxons were acquainted with Runic letters when they adopted the Roman Schlözer, in his Allg. Nord. Geschichte, edit. 1771, has collected a great deal of literary rubbish on the subject. alphabet on their conversion to Christianity in the sixth century, as they retained two of them-p th and p w-that expressed sounds in their language which could only have been inadequately rendered by a combination of two or more of the Roman characters *. Hrabanus Maurus, an archbishop of Mainz, in the ninth century, has given in his work, "De Inventione Linguarum," a Runic alphabet, which he says was used by the Marcomanni for magical purposes; and another German Runic alphabet has been found in a vellum MS., of the tenth century, in the convent of St. Gallen, in Switzerland; but William Grimm has shown that these are only modifications of the Anglo-Saxon Runes, though he is of opinion that the alphabet of Hrabanus Maurus may probably be that used by the Nordalbingian Saxons prior to their invasion of England, as well as by several other Germanic tribes. That the Germans were accustomed to write on wooden tablets in Runic characters, is proved by the authority of Venantius Fortunatus, a bishop of Poictiers of the sixth century, who, in one of his epistles to his friend Flavius, tells him that when he is tired of the Latin, he can make use of the Hebrew, Greek, or even of the Runic letters. "Barbara fraxineis pingatur runa tabellis; are the words which the poetical bishop makes use of, and by which he meant to designate the German, and not the Scandi *The so-called Anglo-Saxon characters, except the two mentioned in the text, are a mere corruption of the Roman, and ought to be abandoned. Rask very properly made use of Roman letters for his excellent Anglo-Saxon grammar, observing that he did so, "after mature deliberation, the written Anglo-Saxon characters as they appear in MSS. being themselves a barbarous, monkish corruption of the Roman, and the printed ones a very imperfect imitation of the MSS. To persist, therefore, in the use of them, (however venerable their appearance,) seems to be without good reason; for though called Anglo-Saxon, they are no other than those employed at the same time in the writing of Latin; if, therefore, we should be consistent, we ought to employ types to represent every variation of the monkish characters throughout the middle ages; as the handwriting underwent many changes before the discovery of printing, and the restoration of the Roman alphabet." -Preface, page 55. In his compendious work, entitled "Ueber Deutsche Runen," Gotting. 1821. navian Runes, as is evident from several other passages in which allusion is made to his travels in Germany. Grimm has further shown, in the most clear and satisfactory manner, that the Anglo-Saxon Runic alphabet was derived from the Scandinavian at a period when it had only sixteen letters, the complementary letters of the two alphabets having been formed on principles that offer not the slightest analogy. Hence we may safely infer that the Scandinavians were acquainted with Runic letters in the sixth century, and, in all probability, at a much earlier period, though it is certainly very extraordinary that they should have made so little use of them. Grimm, after having established by the most conclusive arguments the facts above stated, attempts to trace the sixteen original Runes* to a remote Asiatic source, founding his conjectures on their inadequacy to express all the sounds of the Old Norse language, and therefore assuming that they must necessarily have been borrowed from a more primitive tongue. Into this inquiry we will not follow him, as we deem the assumption to be somewhat gratuitous †, but leave the reader to draw his own conclusions from a comparison of the three Runic alphabets which we give in the next page, together with the characters said to have been invented by Ulphilus, but which Grimm supposes were known to the Moso-Goths long before their learned bishop's translation of the Gospels, their original form having been somewhat changed when the Goths became acquainted with the Greek alphabet, and further modified by Ulphilus rendering them more adaptable for writing. * Not having as yet met with a satisfactory etymology of the word Rune, we will not give that generally adopted, as it is probably the most erroneous of all, but merely observe that the Norse û corresponds to the German au, and that the famous root mandragora or rather the demon conjured out of it, is designated in old German by the word alraun. See Will. Grimm's Deutsche Runen, p. 67, and Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, p. 376. +In modern German, for instance, the sounds represented by B and P are equally as distinct as in English, yet these sounds are so confounded in some of the provincial dialects, that we much question whether an Austrian village schoolmaster, if called upon to form an alphabet for the jargon he teaches his scholars, would not discard one of them as superfluous. |