A band of lost Vikings heads south for some good pillaging, converts to Islam and teaches
us all we need to know about the secrets of the Runes.
Heh, you heard that right.
Today it's all the Runes you can handle! First learn what runes are and how the Norse used
them, then watch The Endless Knot to explore the history of the word "rune" and some surprising
ways runes are still relevant to our own tongue. It's a double dose of Runic content!
On to our story.
Spain. The early Middle Ages. The right kind of time and place for the Muslim Conquests
to drive out the ruling Goths. And then for the new ruler to turn around and declare Spain
his own emirate. But it's also the right kind of time and place for some marauding Vikings.
Here they come sailing down the coast around 840! And what do Vikings do? Give me some
words. They, uh, they raid. They... pillage. They... sack. Yes!
The Norsemen sacked Lisbon and then sailed up to Sevilla in 844. They attacked, they
stirred up panic, and then they held out for weeks waiting for their ransom gold. When
it did arrive, surprise!, it wasn't gold. It was a Muslim army ready to crush the Vikings
and burn their ships. Try again? Wait some decades, re-invade Seville and... get slaughtered
by more Andalusian forces. Now only Odin's ravens know what happens next, but the story
goes that a small band of Vikings escaped, wandered around and settled in southern Spain,
where they converted to Islam and became the region's first cheese makers.
The Vikings themselves aren't the ones telling this tale. No, we get tales of Viking raids
from their victims who wrote in bookish scripts like Arabic and Latin. In Arabic, they didn't
even know what to call them, so Vikings were "madjus" (magi, Zoroastrians)!
The madjus weren't just pillaging Spain. They hit England and Scotland 50 years earlier.
They stormed Normandy and Paris. They sacked Liguria and Pisa. Founded Rus' in the East,
so they're even to thank for Russia and Ukraine. They threatened Constantinople, were hired
to guard Constantinople and left this graffiti in the Hagia Sofia. They even took a Greek
holiday to etch runes into the Piraeus lion near Athens.
Now, hold your tears, but the lost Viking cheese makers might just be a legend based
on an interpretation based on an Arabic text. But that brings up a bigger linguistic question.
Why do we run to Arabic and Latin for our Viking history? Did the Norse not know
how to write?
Meet the Runes! This is the Elder Futhark. It's the oldest form of the runes, and it
works like a full-on alphabet. It's not the ABC's though. It's a Futhark: F U TH A R K.
These straight-line letters, perfect for wood and stone, are hundreds of years older than
the Vikings, though. It's hard to say where they come from. They look Italic, but what
kind of Italic? Latin? Some other Old Italic alphabet? But they evolved to write early
Germanic languages like Proto-Norse.
Artifacts in the Elder Futhark are rare, mostly Scandinavian and all short. Often very short.
This comb is our oldest. It says "HARJA". That doesn't say "hair" (that would be funny).
It's probably a personal name. Ah, personal names. Time after time these things say, "This
is my name and I made this." Like on these Danish Golden Horns from the 5th century:
"I Hlewagastiz Holtijaz made this horn!"
But these runes weren't all about passing information. Runes offered protection. Magic
words like TIWAZ (the god Tiu in Tuesday), LAUKAZ (for garlic) and, all over the place,
ALU (ale). Oh, and in this "ale", you can see how the writing direction wasn't even
always left-to-right.
So runes had power. Or, in the words of this runestone:
"Master of runes, I hide here runes of power. Forever plagued by evil deeds and doomed to
insidious death whoever breaks this."
I like it.
Those still aren't Viking runes. These are Viking Runes. The Futhark took this shape
just a bit before the sacking and pillaging at the beginning of our story. This is called
the Younger Futhark, and it was a big change. Spot the difference?
At a time when Latin was busy adding letters, the Norse were actually going backwards in
a way. Cutting letters out. They got rid of P, D and G even though they were still pronouncing
them. Now B, T and K had to do double duty. This happened with a number of letters, consonants
and vowels. By the way, these magical runes, they all have fancy Germanic names.
The Younger Futhark was short on letters but not on inscriptions. Today we only have hundreds
of inscriptions in the Elder Futhark compared to thousands upon thousands in the Younger
Futhark. Mostly runestones honoring dead men.
The language of these imposing stones is Old Norse, and it's already very different from
that Proto-Norse from earlier. Younger Futhark runestones give us a second look at those
ominous seafaring raiders so despised and feared by the book and ink crowd.
"Gunni raised this stone in memory of Ragni, his good son. He died on the western route."
"Ragnvaldr had the runes carved. He was in Greece, was commander of the retinue."
"Inga raised this stone in memory of Óleifr... He ploughed his stern to the east and met
his end in Italy."
"Véfastr had this stone raised up in memory of Guðmundr, his brother. He died in the
Abbasid Caliphate. May God help his spirit."
Then, the end of the Viking Age. Pagan Scandinavia was Christianized. But were they done with
runes? Not right away. When King Harald Bluetooth told the world how he converted the Danes,
he used a runestone. Sweden has the greatest concentration of runestones, and many of them
are late and explicitly Christian. But then watch out! There's still Thor's hammer!
The Latin alphabet took over in the 1100's, when the Norse fully joined the book and ink
club and wrote down their Eddas and sagas. But interest in the runes lingered. They made
a medieval comeback in Codex Runicus for writing Nordic laws. They even survived in a pocket
of Sweden as the Dalecarlian Runes into the 1800's.
The old runes were terse. They were short on words but rich with names. They meant kinship,
protection and remembrance to a people that didn't see writing as the mellifluous prose
of Arabic and Latin. Well, at least to the ones that didn't convert to a book and ink
culture and start making cheese.
But the Norse weren't the only runemasters around in the first millennium. Come watch
The Endless Knot to explore the etymological twists and turns taken by runes, and the word
"rune" itself, in the history of English.
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