'Alu': A Mystery Runic Word

[Music] hi I'm old Norse specialist Dr Jackson Crawford today on my patreon supported YouTube channel about Norse language myth runes and related subjects in my field of expertise I'm going to be discussing the word Aloo which shows up on many inscriptions in the Elder futhark the oldest form of the runic alphabet sometimes in total isolation there's a lot of speculation about why this word shows up as much as it does and why it should show up in isolation especially because the meaning with which It's associated in these inscriptions isn't even clear to us now I'm not going to be one of the uh you know overconfident shouting guys on the internet and tell you that I've got all the answers but I want to make the question a little bit clearer to you share a little bit more information about this that's hard to find and see if a little bit of a thought experiment might shed some light on this too [Music] foreign [Music] so to begin with what kind of context do we find Elder futhark inscriptions with the word Aloo on them well very often it's in these bractiates these things modeled after Roman coins that are worn as pendant style jewelry now we see for example uh I mean I'll use these catalog numbers and I'll try to find pictures of of some of these relevant ones that may not be the exact same ones from Germany there's UFO B which is ik1492 there's hidea B which is ik74 these are these are catalogs of inscriptions uh there is the bjerna rude bractiate from Norway which has Aloo ridden right to left and top to bottom next to a human face the human face is on these brachiates are thought to be modeled after the artistic example of Roman coins which have a big face of the emperor on them so the faces might be gods or heroes or maybe potentially someone specific meant to be uh you know like the bearer or the maker or something meant to be portrayed there or just imitations of Roman Emperor faces uh or there's a elegasm a Norwegian stone that just says Aloo again right to left and top to bottom and one of I think the weirdest inscriptions with ALU on it is the spawn Hill urn from England which has Aloo ridden three times and each time it's written with the central Stave of the Rune right the top it's a bottom vertical line runes are Rune letters are usually consist of at least one of with the letters going to either side so you get kind of a double day a double LW pretty interesting there's also the famous Lindholm and milit from Sweden which has well a fair amount of an inscription that we don't really understand but after several sequences of repeated letters you know there's a bunch of A's a bunch of Z's a bunch of n's I think we get um Aloo right so there's no consensus on what all of the repeated sequences of letters mean or of course what Aloo now here's my thought experiment for you well actually I'll say one more thing about this which is there's other words that have uh similar patterns of occurrence I mean the best known is area laws and Elder fruit art we see area laws sometimes error laws meaning I Airy laws inscribed in isolation on certain fines and area laws is sometimes found in Hidden contexts so for example I know of a approach that has eye area laws on the back side of it right the part that's not facing a person who would be looking at the person who's wearing it I can't recall any examples that I've seen of worn jewelry with Aloo on the hidden side but otherwise these words do kind of pattern similarly there's also laaukas which looks on the surface like it should mean leek or onion which we sometimes see in this this sort of context too sometimes in isolation as well as the word AWA which it's reasonably inferred means something like luck or fortunate it probably only survives in names like modern Norwegian or even right like good luck wind originally something like that um Aloo also looks superficially at least like we should know what it means I'm going to come back to that in a moment after I I do this little thought experiment about why would you be writing a word in isolation on things like jewelry or stones or urns anyway Here's my thought for us today 2023 English speaking or adjacent cultures what are the things we are most likely to write in isolation anywhere especially on some kind of significant worn item right jewelry or perhaps an equivalent today would be something like a tattoo well the first thing I would think about is an isolated word that you would see written in those contexts is a name might be your name which is an ownership tag it might be the name of a loved one perhaps someone that you're expressing Devotion to uh perhaps someone that you miss right a kind of an rip thing um it's hard to hard to say right but ALU cannot be a name it's a neuter word grammatically so it's not a man's name and it's not a woman's name and there's no family names that any Germanic language culture going 1500 years into the future so not a name well then the next word that I would think of that you would [Music] yeah it's an F-16 a little bit uh a little bit of a bigger brother to the broad tail how many birds otherwise um what was I saying the next thing that I would think of after a name is is some kind of slogan word motto word but there's no slogan here or motto then of course in 2023 you know probably a little bit less in a context 2000 years ago I would think about branding right you know we have shirts that say where we got them or hats to say where we got them or bikes that say you know the brand of the maker or something but that's not what's going on here why would you write a word that as far as we can tell is the ancestor of the word Ale Beer Scandinavian food I'll come back to this in a moment let me give you a quick word for my friends and partners at Grim Frost [Music] foreign [Music] a little bit more about the thought experiment actually at this time it's safe to assume that not that many people could read so there could be an element of deliberate invocation of mystery the same way as you might get a tattoo or a piece of jewelry with something written on it in well runes today but not that many people can read or you know or perhaps Hebrew letters which not that many people can read and in that case I think that there's a little bit of an invitation that's implied I want you to ask me what it says right um I think that's possible but then what is the thing that you want to be asked about again from a 2023 context um you know if I show you that I have a piece of jewelry that has a woman's name written on it in Hebrew and especially say like it's on the underside of this ring how do you know that it isn't like if I'm taking the time to show that to you like I'm I'm expecting you to ask me why right like there's a there's a story or there's an Intrigue that I'm trying to create with this um like maybe something like that is going on but again the context in which for 2023 person that makes the most sense is in the context of a name and If this means beer it's kind of anticlimactic I think now you know that's the perspective of recovering alcoholic in 2023 not the perspective of someone who might see beer as a source of ritual ecstasy right people in in many ancient cultures use alcohol or other drugs in order to achieve some kind of ecstatic and what I mean is not you know necessarily ludicrously happy but you know out of themselves state um which is often regarded as someone sacred there's no reason to think that something like that isn't what's implied here um or rather excuse me I I phrase that a little bit oddly there's there's a possibility that something like that is at play here that this is ale as used ritualistically that's meant here but then are leeks or onions used ritualistically like the word laaukons well I mean in some magical remedies in fact it does seem like it and the uh the the leak no cause Old Norse Louis is mentioned uh surprisingly often in edict poetry in a Mythic context so maybe beer and onions as pedestrian as that sounds to us have some ritual meaning as implied by their appearances and isolation on things like these these worn brackets it has been suggested too that perhaps it doesn't mean beer that it means something else some word that's otherwise lost because I'll lose exactly what you would expect the ancestor of Old English elu Modern English ale old nurse oil just means beer you would expect that to be Aloo and proto-germanic so Occam's razor this is the word beer others have suggested by the possibilities the classic one is that this means Alum right this is lauritz saltbites idea that it's uh right and Alum is a mineral used in traditional medicine and then this would be related to words like Latin meaning a Greek Moss meaning bitter so that then you would have a proton-european root for alum or maybe just more simply bitter bitterness uh that this is coming from another possibility that you see actually pretty often out there in the world is uh in the world of people on the internet talking about runes is that this is something to do with hit type words related to magic so you'll often see something like all wants or all wants uh well once you cited often with an asterisk indicating that that exact form isn't found in isolation anywhere from hittite and I decided because I couldn't all I saw was a bunch of people citing each other on the internet I decided to turn to my former student Professor Tony Yates at UCLA kind of neat that uh I have a former student who's now a professor that's that's that's cool um anyway he is uh one of the world's top specialists in Anatolian languages like hittite so I asked him what's going on with this word he told me hittite has a set of words that all seem to be derived from a base all wands so for example we have alwan's meaning uh Enchanted meaning a sorcerer which hittite is probably the least gendered ancient European language which is an interesting thing in itself I'll want satar meaning witchcraft so the base is probably all wants which doesn't actually necessarily look like an inter-european root though so although if the if the true base the true root of that is Aloo with something else added and aunts added at the end from somewhere that could formally be connected to uh Germanic Aloo um I'm a little bit suspicious of that and there's really nothing more to to go on but it could just be based on the hittite word and the Germanic word that there is something like Aloo or I guess it'd probably be like hello and Proto and European meaning something like magic witchcraft sorcery uh if so the word seems to be otherwise lost in Germanic with just this word for you know ale that must have looked exactly like this word for witchcraft surviving some people have suggested that it does survive in one place and Beowulf um so if I start at Line 6 76 767b or 1534 depending on whether you're reading a full line or half-line version of Beowulf uh we see denum elumendum heirloom and a lot of translators have disagreed about how to read this but it kind of looks like by the way this comes in the middle of Beowulf fight with Grendel so it's just kind of like an insertion in the middle of an action scene for all the Danes the town dwellers all the brave men there came a loose Sherwin looks like the old English word for ale right something that comes from proto-germatic Aloo but doesn't mean beer or doesn't mean whatever this other word is you know if it if it's magic or something but then what's the the share one this looks like a noun given the context um there is in the poem Andreas pretty obscure Old English poem there's a word Maya du cherwin which actually seems to mean need feasting but then in the middle of Beowulf fighting grindel why do all the Danes all the brave Danes have beer feasting if it's that there's also uh sherawan which based on I think it's one occurrence which is I think don't deprive me of your mercies seems to mean deprived so is it beer deprivation but then why in the middle of Beowulf fighting grindel are we talking about people being deprived of beer right is it because they can't drink you know and have a good time multiple or is it because they're worried the Bale is going to die and they're gonna have beer anymore because grindel's gonna kill them all that doesn't seem to make a ton of sense so but then if elu means magic magic deprivation or magic feasting or something like that also doesn't really make sense in context so aylu Sherwin I think actually doesn't help us very much yes it may suggest that there's a synonym or excuse me a homonym to proto-germanic ALU Old English ALU that means something else but I don't think this passage and Bill helps us really get any closer to it I also think that it's possible to account for the origin of the ale word pretty non-magically I mean if it's related to some kind of bitter or Alum root and connected to Latin Aleman or Greek what was it that's plausible there's also Harold burvon suggestion which I like that it actually the original base root would be something like hell and proton-european then we have a color or brightness root which I think is very plausible having done a lot of research on color and brightness words and everything from Proto and European down to Modern Scandinavian so then it would be related it would be basically like the brown drink related to Elk from the same hell root potentially right so like the brown animal this would then ultimately be related to Sanskrit Arusha like reddish avastin Arusha which means like a white right you can see how color terms change meaning pretty fast pretty pretty often um so whether it's the bitter drink or the brown drink there's a very easy non-magical way to account for where the word ale or beer comes from and to have any kind of plausible connection for a magical source for a word like Aloo or Old English mole we have to turn to a hittite word that doesn't really look that into European um unless it's a compound of some very old Aloo word with something else um big question and really what I think we've got here at the end is just a big question right why does someone feel the necessity to write this word in isolation on a brachiate right on some worn jewelry item again to me whether you're talking about a very literate Society like ours or a partially runically literate Society like that of proto-germanic speakers proto-north speakers it seems like it's meant to get attention right if I have a piece of jewelry that I wear with a woman's name in Hebrew on it well you don't necessarily know that's what it says but I mean you ask me about it and I say it's a woman's name I want you to ask me about her right even and maybe especially if it's a little bit hidden right like I'm letting this kind of like shows I'm I don't know turning over some pendant or something that on the back side of it there's there's this name it's like yeah I want you to ask me what it says I feel like that's it it's intended to be somehow uh attention getting and that makes it a little bit harder for me to believe that it's necessarily magical but that it has something more to do with some kind of status thing right I want you to ask me about my statuses but but then what right up a receiver of Ale a receiver of bewitchment maybe then you have a magical connection if it is related to that that hittite word it's outrude but it's more questions than answers and the very confident people shouting about this with big beards on the internet telling you they know what it means don't know what it means these are the people in the comments who will tell you they know what it means or that someone else does it's a mystery and I hope that this video has helped you gain a little bit more information about why it's a mystery what all these different threads that don't have a satisfying resolution are that are woven around this word and maybe something to think about in terms of well why are you showing off a word like this there's some kind of reason and I think that we haven't quite ever gotten to the bottom of what it is and maybe we never will for now I want to say thank you to patreon and from um so close and to to one paradise I'm shut out from and so far from another shut up run here in beautiful Colorado I'm wishing all of you all the best [Music]

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 13,673

Keywords: education, norse, old, old norse, norse myth, norse mythology, odin, Óðinn, edda, havamal, hávamál, wanderer's havamal, wanderer's hávamál, viking, vikings, norse god, norse, gods

Id: 2iAFKLm9B-4

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023