9
The Greek Theory
As early as in 1899, the Norwegian Sophus Bugge tried to remedy the imperfections of theories by arguing that runic writing has a dual ancestry: some runes come from Latin while others — n, þ, o, e, g, w — come from the Greek alphabet. Like other runologists, he thought that the Goths were the first to use runic writing, and that they spread it to other Germanic peoples. Moreover, he believed in an Armenian intermediary for the Greek language. This peculiar theory was furthered in 1904 by Otto von Friesen who thought that sixteen runes came from the Greek alphabet, three from Greco-Latin cursive, and four from (F, U, R, h) the Latin alphabet.62 Otto von Friesen believes like Bugge (with whom he shares conclusions) that the Fuþark was created in the Pontus region (Black Sea) and he gives the credit to Gothic mercenaries that served in Roman legions. The borrowing is supposed to have taken place in the first half of the 2nd century. The theory which acquired the support of the Swedish archaeologist Bernhard Salin63 (and whose explanation of the similarities between the o rune and omega can be counted as an asset) became popular after it was published in the 1919 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
But the Greek theory also faces obstacles formulated as early as 1923 by the Dane Holger Pedersen, which were summed up by Lucien Musset in the words:
Firstly, how can we believe that people sought a cursive and hand-written writing to make an epigraphic writing when Latin or Greek provided that so well with their upper-case letters? Moreover, there’s nothing to account for the supposed influence Greek civilization had on Goths before the conversion of the Goths in Moesia to Christianism in the 4th century […] Lastly, the timespan related to the spreading of runes now seem much too short: the Goths didn’t make it to the shores of the Black Sea until 238, at best until the beginning the 3rd century.64
It’s indeed not quite plausible that the creators of runic writing were inspired by Greek cursive writing rather than capital letters that were used in that period as evidenced by remaining monuments.65 Besides, Greek from that period also wasn’t written from right to left nor in boustrophedon. Lastly, the Greek alphabet doesn’t have a letter that matches þ (th) which is found in runic writing. That explains why Otto von Friesen had to also turn to Latin for his theory.
But the issue is mainly with the Goths reference. The Goths settled along a trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea in the 2nd century, following the flow of the Vistula and the Dnieper. In the beginning of the 3rd century, they created a Germanic cultural center on the northern and northwestern shores of the Black Sea. In Otto von Friesen’s time, people thought that the oldest runic inscriptions were Gothic. The Kowel spearhead has tilarīd inscribed on it, and that seems to be written in Gothic. The great golden necklace found in 1837 in Pietroassa, Romania, has gutaniowihailag inscribed on it, and gutani could be the Goths’ ethnic name (they were called Gutones in Latin). The spearhead of Dahmsdorf that was found in a tomb in Brandeburg could also be Gothic as it has ranja inscribed in it. But the Goths only came in contact with the Romans in 214, and we now know that the first runic inscriptions were written well before their settlement in the Black Sea region. Therefore, it is not possible to consider them as the inventors of runes for chronological reasons. Some people even contest the claim that the Goths knew about runic writing.66
The Greek theory has been recently perpetuated by Martin Giertz in his response to Gad Rausing,67 and by Aage Kabell, Elmer H. Antonsen and Richard L. Morris, but their formulations are very different and we will review them later on in this book.
10
The North Italic Theory
Dated to the 5th century BC, the alphabets of northern Italy (which used to be called “north-Etruscan”) were used by the Cisalpine Gauls, the Veneti people, the Illyrians, the Celto-Ligures, the Rhaetians and the Lepontii. The alphabets prevailed against proper Etruscan writing for a time, which vanished in the middle of the 1st century BC. We know of four major types: The Lugano type (region of the Lake Maggiore and the Lake Lugano) the Bolzano/Bozen (South Tyrol) type, the Sondrio (upper Adda region) type, those three types forming the “sub-alpine group,” and then there is the Veneti alphabets group and its “Illyrian” dialect which are used from the region of Este and Padua to the border of Carinthia. All those scripts seem to be derived from a western Greek alphabet that is somewhat close to the one which was the source of the Etruscan alphabet in Tuscany. They started to lose ground to Latin as early as the 2nd century BC. The last one to disappear were the Veneti types, and they vanished in the beginning of the 1st century.
As early as 1856, the German Karl Weinhold alluded to the possibility of a Fuþark derivation from a north-Etruscan alphabet.68 In 1873, Sophus Bogge wondered if the Germanic people had known and adopted that alphabet through the intermediary of a Celtic tribe from the Alps. But it is the publication of north Italic material at the end of the 19th century69 that really blew wind into the sails of the third theory (called the “Etruscan,” “north-Etruscan” or “north Italic” theory) and made it able to compete with the Greek and Latin theories. That new theory was laid out in 1928 by the Norwegian Carl J. S. Marstrander, and then expanded the following year by the Finn Magnus Hammarström.
After having discarded the Latin theory because the phonemes of four runes do not exist in Latin, and after having put the Greek theory to one side because it did not appeal to him, Carl J. S. Marstrander brought up the theory that runic writing was derived from the Rhaetian alphabets of Magre, Sondrio and Bolzano, and the Lepontii alphabet of Lugano. He attributes it to the Marcomanni of Bohemia and Moravia, who supposedly spread the runes to the Goths and the Germanic peoples of northern Europe in the second half of the 1st century.70 The Marcomanni (“the walkers, or frontiersmen”) whose most famous king is Maroboduus, are Suebi who first settled in Thuringia and Saxony. In Caesar’s time, they are to be found near the Helvetians on the upper stream of the Rhine. They then settled in the alpine regions to found a stable state, an area with Etruscans and Ligures, and then Illyrians and Venetis, all of whom had cultures that were absorbed by Celtic populations in the 4th century BC. Marstrander used this to argue, like Holger Pedersen before him, that the beginnings of runic writing had a direct impact on Ogham writing.
To back up his views, Marstrander used a runic inscription on a bone fragment found in 1924 in Maria Saal in Carinthia that was thought to date to the roughly the year 100, which made it the oldest known inscription. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a fake. He also uses the Negau B helmet, which seems more susceptible to prove his theory. That helmet, that was found in Zenjak Negova (Negau), comes from a Celtic sanctuary on the border of Noricum and Pannonia. It is usually dated to 1st or 2nd century, but it may be older, possibly belonging to an auxiliary recruited by the Roman army to fight the Illyrian uprising in the years 6–9. It bears on its external side a fourteen-character-long inscription in north Etruscan written from right to left: hariXastiteiva, which seems to be a consecration “to the god Harigasti(z).” Harigast or Herigast could be another way to call Óðinn as God of war, whereas Teiwaz (*tiwaz) is the dative case of Týr’s name (later Ziu). So we have an archaic Germanic inscription, admitted as such in 1925, but which was drawn with Etruscan letters. Is it enough to make it the “missing link” between the sub-alpine alphabets and the first Germanic runes? Marstrander purported it to be the proof that an ancient Germanic person was familiar enough with “north Etruscan” writing to have used it to transcribe his own language. Robert Nedoma and Thomas L. Markey then picked up where he left off.71
Magnus Hammarström picked up in 1929 the thesis put forward by Marstrander but, by relying on the fact that north Italic alphabets kept some archaic traits from the old Greek alphabet (like writing from right to left, or the absence of the double consonant, which is also the case for runic writing), he put the creation of the Fuþark back to between 150 BC and the beginning of the 1st century.72 According to him, the origin of runic writing is to be f
ound in a sub-alpine alphabet already heavily influenced by Latin, which supposedly eventually spread to northern Europe through the Marcomanni or Celtic populations from the Alps.
The discovery of new North-Etruscan inscriptions, like the vase of Castaneda (Grisons canton, Switzerland) that dates back to the 5th century BC and bears an inscription in the Sondrio alphabet, as well as several inscriptions in Nordic writing found on slopes of the Magdalenensberg, in Carinthia, gave more backing to the idea of an affiliation between runic writing and north Italic alphabets.
That allowed the north Italic theory to find success. In the 1930s and 1940s, Helmut Arntz carries it on but instead of involving the Marcomanni, he involved the Cimbri who supposedly spread runic writing to central Germany after their defeat at the battle of Vercellæ in 101 BC. That is, if the creators were not in actually some Germanic tribes in the northwestern Alps that settled in northern Italy in the 4th century BC (the Alpengermanen as Pytheas and Livy called them), and of whom we know little except that their members served in the Celtic and then Roman militaries as mercenaries.73
In 1939, Franz Altheim and Elisabeth Trautmann picked up this theory but altered it.74 They too thought that the Cimbri spread the runes to central Germany and then to their original territory, but they stressed that the borrowing could also have taken place in northern Noricum or in the Brenner region when the Cimbri retreated to south Germany after being beaten in the battle of Noreja in 113 BC, or also in north Italy, in the Transpadane region where they were located in 102–101 BC. Altheim and Trautmann had more confidence in the second hypothesis, which enabled them to suppose that the Cimbri also borrowed from the Rupestrian engravings of the Val Camonica. So, runic writing would supposedly originate from a fusion of a north Italic alphabet and some magical/religious symbols and pictograms borrowed from those rupestrian engravings.
After WWII, the north Italy theory was picked up by Karl Schneider, Otto Haas75 and Ralph W. V. Elliot.76 Lucien Musset was siding with it and underlined that
from a typological standpoint, the general resemblance between North Etruscan alphabet and the Fuþark is striking. There are signs in the Lugano and Rhaetian alphabets, especially the Sondrio and Bolzano ones, whose analogy with runes are too great to be fortuitous.
However, he added that this does not make the North Etruscan hypothesis a “proven truth,” but that it was the “most satisfying one in existence to explain the facts currently known.”77 It was also backed by Thomas L. Markey78 , Bernard Mees79 or Helmut Rix,80 and the latter used the inscriptions of the Val Camonica to justify his position. The north Italy theory has also received the back of several Italian researchers like Vittore Pisani or Aldo Luigi Prosdocimi.81
The north Italy theory is convincing mainly because it accounts for the “archaic” character of the Fuþark much better than the Greek and Latin theories do. Indeed, the north Etruscan writings kept some archaic traits (for instance that it is written from right to left or in boustrophedon) at a time when they were completely removed from the Greek and Latin alphabets. That theory also fits nicely with what we currently know about runic writing, meaning that it was created sooner than we thought. Since north Italic languages have been replaced by Latin at the latest in the middle of the 1st century BC, it means that if they are responsible for the birth of runic writing, then runic writing must have been appeared before that time. That is why Ralph W. V. Elliot pushed the creation of runic writing back to 250–150 BC.82
However, only four runes are identical or extremely close to north Italic letters: u, a, s and l. Borrowing could be plausible for the k, z/R, t and o runes, but the f, r, b, e and m runes are closer to Latin. Moreover, some letters remain without equivalents: þ (q), g (g), n (n), j (j), ï (4), p (p), ŋ (5) and d (d). “There are still shapes whose genesis is hard to explain,” writes Alain Marez, “because they match neither Latin nor north Italic alphabets.”83 There are also a lack of phonetic similarities between runes and north Italic letters, even when their shapes are quite similar, and this must be taken into account. For instance, the rune d and the italic letter s have more or less the same shape, but not the same phonetic value. The same goes with the runic l and the italic p, etc. Lastly, the letters of north Italic alphabets don’t have names: just like Latin letters, they were only called by the sound their sound.
Another issue is the lack of a uniform model for the runes. In order to explain that the Fuþark was derived from north Italic writings, it is necessary to claim that the creators of runic writing did not borrow from a single alphabet, but from three or four different alphabets, which is not very plausible, especially since some “inventions” from unknown sources were also supposedly added. Wolfgang Krause himself acknowledges that “a precise model for the runes among north Etruscan alphabets has yet to be discovered.”84 Furthermore, the theory is weakened by the fact that no runic inscription prior to the 5th century has been found in southern Germany.
As we have seen earlier in this section, the supporters of the north Italic theory also fail to agree on which Germanic populations committed the borrowing. Marstrander and then Wolfgang Krause believed it was the Marcomanni, Helmut Arntz, Franz Altheim and Catherine Trautmann believed it was the Cimbri. Some other authors believed it was some “Germans from the Alps” (but that idea has been discredited) or that it was some Germanic soldiers that served in the Roman army, but these are merely suppositions. In fact, we could argue that the Cimbri were too busy to invent a writing after their defeat in 101 BC. Besides, why would they not have picked up the Greek or Latin alphabets anyway?
11
The Contribution of Linguistics
Most runologists are reluctant to admit that runic writing could have been created before Christ. That is because runology has been almost exclusively based on archaeology for a long time. Elmer H. Antonsen doesn’t hesitate to write that “the conviction that runic writing came into being relatively late isn’t grounded in science.”85 Linguists are more prone to believe that runic writing appeared earlier because they mainly rely on the epigraphic and linguistic analyses of the oldest inscriptions. Lucien Musset could still write in 1965 that “concerted efforts to study the phonetic and grammatical sources of runes are out of the ordinary.”86 It is not the case today.
The linguists that examine inscriptions in the Old Fuþark mainly focus on its “archaic” characteristics — which we have already described — like the fact that runes are written from right to left or in boustrophedon, which isn’t the case for classical Greek or Latin from the imperial period. Antonsen writes that “those archaic traits which are typical of the oldest inscriptions can’t be a coincidence and those inscriptions can’t have been traced by ‘primitive minds.’” Those traits must have been borrowed from the symbols of the alphabet when the borrowing from the writing system took place, which means that the runic alphabet could not have been inspired by the Romans in the Rhine region since they wrote exclusively from left to right. Runic writing’s appearance must have been prior to the oldest inscriptions that we know and of by a large margin, and it must have come into being much before the Roman occupation of the Rhine, and other aspects of the writing system go in the same direction.”87
For instance, the fact that early runic writing had two different letters to express the /i/ sound: i and ī (i and 4, *eisaz and *iwaz) shows that the Fuþark could not have been invented later than the 2nd century, a time when the /ei/ diphthong of the common German was still different from the original /i/ diphthong, that is to say when non-accented diphthongs still existed as diphthongs. That is why we can find some -ai (instead of -ei) archaic diphthong endings in non-accented syllables in several ancient runic inscriptions (anahahai on the stone of Möjebro, talgidai on the fibula of Nøvling).88
Richard L. Morris, who also rejects the north Italic hypothesis for phonetic reasons, compared the runic tradition with the Mediterranean epigraphic traditions.
The similarities between the runic writing system and
the Greek or archaic Latin systems have up until now been ignored or simply asserted to be the result of imperfect attempts by primitive Germanic population to master the epigraphy of the highly refined classical traditions of imperial Rome and Hellenistic Greece. But when the runic tradition and the Mediterranean traditions at their first stages of development are put side by side, the results are extremely different […] the question ‘where do the runes come from?’ is yet to be answered because the defining traits of the archaic Greek and Latin alphabets were not sufficiently taken into consideration.89
Morris believes that it is necessary to compare the runes not only with the classical Greek alphabet, but also with the prior archaic Greek alphabets because the runes look more like the letters of the latter. Beyond the fact that both systems allow writing from right to left and in boustrophedon, they have more in common: they both ignore double consonants, they tend to remove the nasalized consonants before other consonants (for example a m before a b, or a n before a d or before a g), etc. By drawing comparisons between the Fuþark and primitive Greek alphabets that were gone by the 4th century BC, Morris obviously alludes to a borrowing that happened before to that time. He concludes that the study of runic and Mediterranean epigraphies “demonstrates that the resemblance of runic tradition with Greek and archaic Latin makes it impossible for the runes to have been borrowed from the Latin tradition around the birth of Christ — including the Latin tradition in Gaul and Germania — or from Greek from that same period. Around the time Christ was born, those alphabets had already been so stylized that if a borrowing happened that late, then the runes would have looked much more like the Greek or Latin alphabets of that time. And if the runes were borrowed then, then the first people to use the runes should have written from left to right because it was the only regular way to do it.”90
Runes and the Origins of Writing Page 3