Hi, I'm Old Norse specialist dr Jackson Crawford.
On my Patreon-supported channel
about topics in Norse language, myth, runes, etc.,
I'm often dealing with the most sought-after questions in these topics,
and I often deal with them in great length,
sometimes in videos of an hour or more,
that reflect years of doctoral research and such,
all condensed into fairly concise format;
But these videos still contain so much information, that when people are looking for
an answer to a shorter question,
then broad questions, like
"how was Old Norse written in runes?"", with tones of examples,
or "what are the differences between the Old Norse language of the Viking Age and later, written in the Younger Futhark runes,
and the earlier language we can call Proto-Norse, written with the Elder Futhark runes?",
you know, these are long, detailed videos, very information-rich,
but people, you know, often have much shorter questions than that.
And so, people don't necessary know what the answers to these questions are,
so I'm making some shorter videos to just
make the answers to these questions more findable.
So, one of these questions is,
or it's often not phrased as a question,
but, like so many things in the Internet, phrased as an accusation,
"Why do you never teach us the rune symbols for numbers?",
But there are actually no rune symbols for numbers,
in the way that the Arabic numerals that we use today
represent the concept, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, regardless of what language you speak.
So, if I look at those Arabic numerals
as a native English speaker the first thing that comes to mind is one, two, three, etc.
But a Spanish speaker looks at the same symbols and sees uno, dos, tres,
and an Icelandic speaker looks at the same symbols,
and can read out of them ein, tveir, þrír.
Same thing with Roman numerals, to the extent that those are still used today.
Those are abstract symbols for the concept of a number,
not for the word for a number in a particular language.
That reflects the *much* more mathematical society in which we live today, right?
We have numbers all around us, I can see numbers all over me,
even here in the middle of the mountains there's numbers on my phone
showing how long this video is running;
There's the model number of this mic that I can see,
there's a number that shows my pants size.
I'm surrounded by numbers.
And all of those reflect some kind of mathematical reality that we deal with today.
We wanna be punctual, we don't want to be too early or too late,
and we reflect that with numbers.
We price things in particular dollars and cents,
we don't wanna overdraft our accounts, all of that is reflected with numbers.
Even if you're bad at math, we engage with math all the time,
and learn very early on at least to do basic addition, substraction, multiplication, division, etc.
But for the ancient and medieval residents of Scandinavia
there's no such daily engagement with math, except pretty much counting,
and so they never develop symbols for numbers
to be used in mathematical formulae
in the way that our Arabic numerals, or, if you're a masochist, Roman numerals can be used.
Instead, when numbers are written down in runic inscriptions
they're just written out as the word for the number.
You can do this in English, too,
I can say: "I have three daughters"
and I can show that with, you know, the Arabic numeral "3",
I can show with the Roman numeral "III",
or I can write out "three".
But, of course, that's language-dependent, that's the English word.
There wouldn't be the same word in Spanish, in Spanish it would be "tres",
in Icelandic, because it's feminine accusative plural it would be "þrjár", etc.
That is what we see in runic inscriptions, the entire word is written out.
So, for example, the Tune stone, which is very archaic,
in Elder Futhark, and I know people mostly wanna see Elder Futhark, so
I found two examples,
there's probably not very many more than that, if there are any more than that.
Notice the Tune stone is, like many very old Elder Futhark inscriptions,
written right to left, not left to right.
We see:
"three daughters".
That's where that exact sample came to mind, cause I can never come up with my own examples.
And the word "þrijoz",
feminine accusative plural, this would be an Icelandic "þrjár", English "three",
is just written out in Proto-Norse as the word "þrijoz".
There's no special rune symbol for the numbers.
Or in the Stentoften inscription,
we don't exactly understand what the first two lines mean,
they seem potentially to have the number 9, "níu",
followed by two things in the dative plural, perhaps.
If, again, we don't fully understand this, but if that first word in the two lines is "níu",
then that's the number 9,
and that is also Old Norse "níu".
So it's just written out as a word.
Now, there's many more examples on Younger Futhark,
which, of course, is in the Old Norse language that we understand better,
but people don't like these as much, because they don't sound as mystical,
even though there's way more Younger Futhark inscriptions.
So, for example,
I guess I'll say this in Swedish, in the Vallsjö inscription we see:
"Three", written out as a word, "Three men made this bridge".
Or Hillersjö,
"one girl lived",
"ein", "one", written out as a word, not with some kind of a symbol.
And we see tons of
numbers written out as words on the famous Rök inscription.
If you haven't seen it, check out the interviews that I've done with
professor Henrik Williams, who has the new interpretations of the Rök inscription,
fascinating stuff,
on my channel.
There we see, for example,
"two things seized as war loot",
"tvær", "two", written out as a word,
"twelve times",
"tvalf", "twelve", written out as a word.
One of the few cases where I'm aware of
numbers not being written out as words
is in some medieval runic inscription, so these are
post-Viking Age inscriptions,
and an alphabet expanded from the Younger Futhark to include
equivalents to all of the letters in the Roman alphabet.
I have a whole video about this, if you wanna check that out.
There are some inscriptions, including one from
the Gol stave church in Norway,
where we get the first letter in runes of each number in a particular sequence,
son on the Gol church we see
æ, t, þ,
f, f, s, s, a, n, t, æ, t, þ, f, f, s, s, a, n, t, and that stands for:
the numbers 1-20,
or the words for 1-20 in Old Norse.
This doesn't seem to have a mathematical purpose,
these aren't being used to multiply and divide.
For whatever reason the numbers are just being written out in sequence,
maybe as an aid to someone learning the numbers?
Hard to know what these inscriptions are for,
but they still don't reflect some kind of abstract,
mathematical use of numbers, the way that we can use our Arabic numerals today.
Alright, I hope that answers that question, and maybe
convinces one disbeliever that I'm not hiding some secret
number-lore from runes from you.
Thank you very much, Patreon, from the bottom of my heart,
for allowing me to continue to make a living from teaching,
while ranting at my phone in my favorite places.
And, to everyone out there, from beautiful Wyoming
let me wish you
~All the best~
Subtitles by Max