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. Stick around and subscribe for language.
