Hi, I'm dr Jackson Crawford.
I'm a specialist in the Old Norse language, currently teaching at the University of California, Berkeley,
and as of fall, 2017,
moving to the University of Colorado, Boulder.
I'm back today with another video about a topic in Norse language and myth,
and today I want to look at the names of the runes.
I've done a video about this before,
but I am remaking it, because the previous video
had somewhat poor audio,
and I had used a very light orange marker,
because that was all that I could find on the board,
and that was pretty hard to read.
So, what I've done here is, I have written out the Elder Futhark.
This is the oldest stage of the runic alphabet that we know of.
The earliest inscriptions in Elder Futhark
that are known date to about 160 AD or CE
– these come from Denmark –
and the Elder Futhark continues to be used 'till about 700,
at which point is replaced in Scandinavia
by the 16-letter Younger Futhark,
and in England and Frisia
by the expanded Anglo-Frisian Futhorc.
So, starting from this point,
there comes a system in Scandinavia, that has fewer letters,
and a system in England and Frisia, that uses more letters.
The names of the runes
are not actually attested at any point
in Elder Futhark.
We have to remember that there are actually
fewer inscriptions in Elder Futhark, than there are in Younger Futhark and Anglo-Frisian Futhorc.
This is a much earlier stage of the language,
this is not the alphabet used to write Old Norse or Old English.
The Old Norse language, the language of the Vikings, sagas, the Eddas, is written in Younger Futhark.
And so I think people overestimate just how much is actually preserved in Elder Futhark,
and also try to overapply it to languages like Old Norse and Old English.
I have a video about how to write Old Norse in runes, using Younger Futhark,
which I'll link in a card in the top right corner.
And since the names of these runes aren't preserved anywhere in Elder Futhark,
we have to sort of, try to figure them out, reconstruct them
from the names that are preserved in the later runic alphabets.
We know the names of the runes in Younger Futhark and Anglo-Frisian Futhorc
from the *rune poems*.
There is an Old English rune poem,
an Old Norwegian rune poem,
and an Old Icelandic rune poem.
Each of these poems uses
a couple of lines for each rune
that have a memorable image, or a couple of memorable images,
to help remember the name of the rune.
So, for instance, in the Old Norwegian rune poem
– a personal favorite of mine –
the rune for "m", which is called "Maðr" in Old Norse,
has this little ditty:
"Maðr er moldar auki,
mikil er greip á hauki" –
"Mankind is mud given glory,
a hawk holds strong".
This is just to help to remember the name of the rune
by using alliterative lines of verse, so:
"Maðr"–"moldar", "m"–"m", alliterating,
and then "m" – "mikil er greip á hauki".
This is a pretty simple, basic form of Old Norse or Old English poetry,
and it does make for fairly memorable lines.
I have a translation of the Old Norwegian rune poem,
along with the Old Norse text, that's available as a Patreon reward,
if you look at my Patreon page and you want to check that out.
So, these rune poems, which give us the names of the runes in Younger Futhark and Anglo-Frisian Futhorc,
are what we used to try to figure out what the names of the runes were in Elder Futhark.
But, Younger Futhark, as I pointed out,
has two thirds as many runes as Elder Futhark,
so there are eight runes that we have no information on the Norse names of.
A lot of the time we are actually reconstructing on the basis of almost only
the Old English rune names.
However, there is one additional source of information
that is significant,
which is the Gothic alphabet.
The Gothic language is
the earliest Germanic language available in large, cohesive texts
from the 300's, when
the translation of the Bible by bishop Ulfilas,
or commissioned by bishop Ulfilas, was made.
The alphabet used to write Gothic at that time
was based on the Greek alphabet,
but, the names of the letters in the alphabet
were based on runes.
Also, a couple of the letters in the alphabet are based on runes.
We know the names of the Gothic alphabet thanks to an Old English writer named Alcuin,
who recorded them as best as he could,
and so sometimes the Gothic names of the letters
help us to figure out what
a rune name was in Elder Futhark, too.
So, on this board what I've done is, I've written out the twenty four letters of Elder Futhark.
There is a fair amount of variation
between how these letters look, so I have used
a pretty conservative or archaic form of most of these letters,
rather than few different variants.
Also, the way that the names are written out in the Roman alphabet
will vary from scholar to scholar,
because people reconstruct Proto-Germanic with slight differences.
You can also reconstruct a sort of earlier, and a sort of later Proto-Germanic,
a more Scandinavian-looking Proto-Germanic, a more English-looking Proto-Germanic,
what I've tried to do here is just kind of keep it in the middle line,
but, the names that I used may look slightly different from what you've seen on websites or books.
So to begin with the letter, the rune, that is equivalent
and used to what "f" in English, stands for the sound /f/,
is *fehu.
This is ancestral to the English word "fee",
as in something you pay for parking,
but also to the German word "vieh",
which means "cattle".
Most likely, *fehu in Proto-Germanic meant both,
as does its decendant word "fé", in Old Norse.
The letter for the sound /u/
is *uruz.
Most likely, this originally meant the "aurochs",
an ancient European kind of wild cattle,
but the later rune poems also point to
possible meanings including "storm" and "slag", as in bad iron.
The rune for the /θ/ sound, as in "thin" or "Thor", or "thunder",
is *þurisaz.
Notice that this is borrowed in Old English and Old Norse,
as well as by modern scholars for writing early Germanic languages,
to stand for the /θ/ sound.
So "th",
in English "thin", or "Thor", or "theatre",
should not be written with a t–rune and an h–rune,
it's written with just this rune for that "th" sound, so *þurisaz.
The letter is called "thorn", when it's used in the Roman alphabet,
this is based on the Old English name,
But the Elder Futhark name
was more likely *þurisaz, which means "giant",
which is based on the name in the Old Norse tradition.
The rune for the letter "a", the /a/ sound,
is *ansuz, this is a "god".
This is the word that becomes "Áss" in Old Norse,
plural "Aesir", as in family of gods, that Odin, Thor and Tyr belonged to.
Then there is the rune *raiðo,
for the sound /r/.
This means a "ride", which is
much like what it sounds like, it's the ancestor of the English word "ride".
Then there is the rune *kauna, for the /k/ sound.
This, most likely, has its Norse meaning
of a "blister", or "boil", or "sore",
although the meaning suggested by the English rune poem, the "torch", is also possible.
Then there is the rune for the /g/ sound,
this is *gebo, which means "gift".
And the sound for the /w/, or w–sound,
this is *wunjo, which means "joy".
Then there is the h–rune,
which looks much like an h, but with a diagonal bar in the middle,
this is *hagalaz, which means "hail",
as in an unpleasant form of precipitation.
Then there's the n-rune, *nauðiz,
this means "emergency", "desperation", "need";
this is the origin of the English root "need".
Then there's *isaz, this means "ice".
This is ancestral to English "ice", this is the rune for the letter "i".
This is the /j/ rune,
this is the sound written with a "j" in most Germanic languages,
although with a "y" in English.
The name of it, *jera, is ancestral to English "year".
But we should remember, that this was more often used
for the particular part of the year, when the harvest came in,
and especially of a good harvest,
rather than for a rotation of the Earth around the Sun.
We might be better of translating this as "harvest",
even though it is ancestral to our word "year".
The next three runes, there is a lot of uncertainty about.
We know that this rune stands for the p–sound in Proto-Germanic,
but "p" is very rare in early Germanic languages, so it doesn't appear very often.
The testament of the Old English rune poem and the Gothic alphabet
is confusing here,
it does seem that the name contained the element "per-"
which might be related to pear tree,
but what its exact shape was is unknown, it might have been *perðo, it might've been *perþro,
it's very difficult to tell,
because there's been some corruption in the medieval evidence here.
This rune, we're not even sure exactly what it meant,
the best speculation I've read is that it meant the sound /æ/
in Proto-Germanic, so the sound of "cat" or "bat", the vowel sounds in those words,
but, based on the name of it in Old English,
its name might've been *eihaz, which doesn't contain that sound.
Notice that all of the other runes' names contain the sound of the rune,
so this is a little odd and confusing.
*Eihaz would mean the "yew tree",
and another curiosity here is that
this name becomes the name of this rune
when it's adapted into the Younger Futhark in Scandinavia,
so maybe this was actually the name of this rune -
it's all pretty unclear,
especially since this rune isn't even used in meaningful inscriptions
outside of England,
and in England we find it used to mean a bunch of different vowels and even consonants.
So, very confusing testimony about this letter.
This rune stands for the z–sound,
notice that this cannot come at the beggining of a word,
so unlike the other rune names
the sound represented by the name comes at the end of the name.
*Algiz means "elk",
this is ancestral to the English word "elk",
but since this is European English we're talking about
this is what Americans would call a "moose".
Then there is the rune for "s",
it has many different forms in Elder Futhark,
this is just one, but its name was pretty clearly *sowilo,
meaning "Sun", as in in the sky Sun.
Then there is the t–rune, this is named *tiwaz,
this is the name of the god Tyr, it becomes Týr in Old Norse,
and becomes Tiw in Old English,
which is of course still with us in the form of "Tuesday".
Then there's the b–rune, *berkana, which means "birch tree".
There's the rune for "e", the /e/ sound,
this has a couple of different forms, including one that looks more like an "M".
Its name was *ehwaz, which means "horse".
Then there's the m–rune, which means-
which is named *mannaz, which means "man",
ancestral to English "man".
The l–rune, named *laguz,
its name means "lake".
This also has sometimes been reconstructed as *laukaz,
which would mean "onion", "leek", "garlic".
Then there is the second rune that has a name
that does not start with the sound that it represents.
*Ingwaz, 'cause no word in Proto-Germanic or any Germanic language that I know of
can start with the ng–sound,
this is the sound like in "sing", or "ring", or "finger".
The name *Ingwaz is the earlier name of the god Freyr, god of agriculture.
Then there is the d–rune,
it's named *dagaz, which means "day",
And the o–rune,
which is named *oþala, which means "inherited property".
Sometimes in Elder Futhark inscriptions you'll see the order of these two runes reversed, but
the correct or original order seems to be with "d" and then "o".
I have another video on this channel
that concerns the possible origin of the runes,
looking at some of the ideas about that, as well as my own pet hypothesis about it,
as well as some other videos about topics in runes, Old Norse language and Old Norse myth,
including about my new thanslation of "The Poetic Edda",
the main source for the myths, the Norse gods and heroes.
For now, I hope this has been somewhat useful and informative to you,
and I'm wishing you
~All the best~
Subtitles by Max