Ancient and ArchaeologyÌý permalink
The Runes!
This discussion has been closed.
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Message 1.Ìý
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Sunday, 22nd October 2006
I am a linguist by training and got very interested in IT programming as a language as well.the web is such a marvellous tool for historical reasearch, it is hard to know where to begin. I have just downloaded the jpg of St.Dewi, St.David from the Stained glass of him at St.John's college Oxford.
What I want to ask the experts here is the chronology of the introduction of Latin in to Britain by St. Augustine, and do you think that the Runic (and Germanic) script was used in Britain until the revelatory Latin script was introduced?
Was the Latin script used thereafter for Anglo Saxon?
Are the ff and ng letters of mutating Welsh residual runic letters used in Welsh even today?
Did the use of the Latin script coincide with the conversion of Anglo Saxons.... was the script the
vector for their conversion? (my dates may be confused here) -
Message 2
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Sunday, 22nd October 2006
to add to my own post (bad habit!)
according to this fairly authoritative site, the runes were only introduced in to Britain in the 5thC
AD and that was also about the time of the introduction of the Latin script.
The two scripts seem so different that it is unlikely they were used at one and the same time, so for what purpose was the Latin used and for what purpose the Runes?
Was the rune script used for secular purposes and the Latin for the script of monastic ceremony?
Is the spread of Christianity (ie rapid conversion)accountable by the spread of the very convenient Latin script compared with the dogged difficulty of Fathark (Anglo-Saxon runic script) -
Message 3
Posted by Wendol (U4076986) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
In what way do you consider the furthark to be much harder than the roman alphabet.
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Message 4
Posted by Alaric the Goth (U1826823) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
The Anglo –Saxon runic alphabet is ‘futharc’ or ‘futhark’ as these are the first six letters, ‘th’ being one letter called ‘thorn’ (þ is the symbol derived from the rune that they used in their slightly-altered Latin script for this letter, and they also used ‘ð’ (‘eth’) for ‘th’ though this doesn’t derive from any rune).
Latin script never died out in Britain. It was introduced, of course, in the 1st century AD, if not before (to a very small extent amongst a handful of (elite?) Britons: we have Late Iron Age coins with e.g. the names of British chiefs in Latin letters). It was the script St Patrick (a Briton) took to Ireland for his converts to Christianity to use in the early 5th century. It remained in use in what are now Wales and Cornwall, and the Strathclyde British kingdom (for those few who remained literate, mainly churchmen). They mainly wrote in the Latin language, but we have e.g. ‘Y Gododdin’, a poem written originally in an early ‘Welsh’ (in Latin script) as used in Edinburgh and Lothian, then (6th century/early 7th) forming a British kingdom called ’Gododdin’.
The 5th/6th/7th century Angles, Saxons Jutes, etc. did use the Germanic runic alphabet, a slightly different variant of which was used by the Danes and Norwegians, who came later, in the 8th/9th/10th centuries, to these islands. It is not impossible that a very small number of 'Anglo-Saxons' knew the Latin alphabet even before the mission of St Augustine (597 onwards). They would have had captured Britons as slaves, some of whom may well have been literate.
Welsh letters like ‘ff’ and dd’ have nothing whatsoever to do with Germanic runes, and are merely adjustments of Latin letters to reflect the orthography of Cymraeg. -
Message 5
Posted by Alaric the Goth (U1826823) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
Most of the folk who heard St Augustine preach in Kent, or his disciple Paulinus preach in Northumbria, or who later (also in Northumbria) heard Aidan and his monks from Iona preach, were illiterate. Those (few) who became priests or monks themselves would acquire literacy, and would be expected to learn not just the Latin alphabet but the Latin Language as well (as Bibles and doctrinal books were in it).
We have one poem from the 7th century in Old Northumbrian: 'Caedmon's hymn'. Bede, writing in the 730s, recorded this short poem, allegedly by a shepherd from near Whitby, and it seems to already show the use of the runic 'þ' at an early date, the rest of the letters being Latin, except for 'æ'.
Runes were still used (by Anglo-Saxons) at quite a late date (10th century) for carving onto wood/stone. -
Message 6
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
Thanks for that essay Alaric. Hm.
There was really no point when you can say " they stopped using runes at this point in time".
Runes were more noted for use on memorial stones, which may be how we know about that script's use in this country.
What was the population density at that time compared with the use of letters by literate people?
Would it have been 1 in 10,000 out of 2m population of Britain? Was it solely literacy and the POWER to read and write which designated a man as priest?
Thus any primitive runic script would not have ben used at any time by a Priestly caste, on account of the roman origins.....of the story told.
And yet when Alfred the great wanted to gewt his library going there was almost nobody to do the reading and writing.
When did Europeans start using Chinese style paper? That would have made a huge difference to
useage of the pen and the word. -
Message 7
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
Ink had never been a problem, nor pens from feathers; it was the wood fibre which gave the most difficulty.
Wood-fibre paper was invented in China in 105 A.D. but it only became known about (due to Chinese secrecy) in Japan around 700 A.D. and brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. Ìý
This fact was the main cause of the Islamic golden age, with schools of translation and law in Cordoba flourishing at that time.
Methods of writing on clay must have continued to be used in Britain ever since the roman occupation; perhaps the missionary zeal of the first saints was still done using clay; their real contribution may well have been memory and rote.... and the missionary zeal for it.
Alfred the great's library at Winchester would have been using modern (Chinese) paper.That kind of paper use, spread very rapidly through Europe once it arrived.
Conformity of lettering after that time would have been a... formality. The easier it got, the more people would be inclined to do it, and use the same character set! -
Message 8
Posted by Alaric the Goth (U1826823) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
One factor that contributed to the lack Alfred found of literate people was that the Danes had wreaked havoc in Northumbria in particular, and that had been the centre of learning and literacy in the (pre-Viking) Anglo-Saxon world. The focus shifted to Wessex after Alfred's efforts at reviving/supporting learning had borne fruit.
I do not know what proportion of peole were literate at any point in the pre-1066 era. Or what training was deemed necessary in order to be a (Christian) priest. Literacy need not, I think, have been a requirement, unless you were a Bishop. Bibles were in very limited supply: a typical rural church would not have one of its own, or any other books.
The Norse use of runes in Britain outlasted the Norman Conquest, e.g. I believe that the church at Pennington near Barrow-in-Furness is 12th century, yet has a Scandinavian runic inscription. -
Message 9
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
Looking at one or two runic inscriptions the script was really only used for metallic/stone/jewellery writing. As though the value of the writing was only created by adding it to other things of value.
The art of making wood fibre paper would have been very scarce indeed. Perhaps their methods were more like those of the Druids than they care to mention.
Remembering all the stories of the Bible in the way that priests and rabbis are supposed to do; (then phone Rome to make sure they have got the right story still after ten years)
The real value of reading and writing was not grasped due to not having the chinese style paper making skills, until Alfred's day.
The illuminated manuscripts like the book of Armagh date back to the 8thC do they not?
You have mentioned one fragment above. -
Message 10
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
Looking at one or two runic inscriptions the script was really only used for metallic/stone/jewellery writing. As though the value of the writing was only created by adding it to other things of value.
The art of making wood fibre paper would have been very scarce indeed. Perhaps their methods were more like those of the Druids than they care to mention.
Remembering all the stories of the Bible in the way that priests and rabbis are supposed to do; (then phone Rome to make sure they have got the right story still after ten years)
The real value of reading and writing was not grasped due to not having the chinese style paper making skills, until Alfred's day.
The illuminated manuscripts like the book of Armagh date back to the 8thC do they not?
You have mentioned one fragment above.
what training was deemed necessary in order to be a (Christian) priest. Literacy need not, I think, have been a requirement, unless you were a Bishop. Bibles were in very limited supply:Ìý
No priests and monks would only have had to know or listened to (monks) the stories of the bible regularly. That really reduces literacy to a very small number of people indeed.
They say that Amesbury man who built Stonehenge was literate, so elitism must have been the order of things for many centuries; elitism being the ability to read and write, and send a message to his mate in Budapest (in his case) -
Message 11
Posted by TonyG (U1830405) on Monday, 23rd October 2006
This is not really my field, so I may be well off the mark but is not the case that the Celtic people of Britain pre-Roman conquest and also the Anglo Saxons had a much more oral culture than the Romans?
We know from places such as Pompeii where grafitti has been found on walls, that literacy among Romans was not exclusive to the upper classes, but the Britons left no written records (does Oggham count?) and the early Anglo-Saxons seem to have little in the way of a written culture. Lack of suitable writing materials may have had an influence on this, but vellum was presumably available. -
Message 12
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
That's interesting Tony. What proportion of the Romans at the hey day of Rome could read and write?
Julius Caesar could!(Gallic wars).
I wonder hpow many of the Villa dwellers in Britain during the Roman occupation could read and write?
Alaric suggests that the ability to read in the Latin script comes from that time and not from the time of Augustine... who had such missionary zeal, but I wonder.
And if they were keen on R/R whether they are known to have instructed their servants in the skill? -
Message 13
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
The majority of manuscripts and books in the pre-1066 era (especially the Book of Kells and similar illuminated tomes) were not written on paper but on velum, which I believe comes from animal hide.
We can never be sure of the level if literacy in the Roman and post-Roman eras due to this kind of information not being recorded. What is considered to be the case though is that early Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate with some people knowing runes (and some proabably knowing the latin and greek scripts through travel and/or trade). With christianity coming to the heathen English then latin script certainly became more prominent, but the society did not have the systems and structures in place to educate large sections of it so that literacy was widespread. Only churchmen and some nobles would have been able to read and write. Even so, literacy was not a prerequisite to becoming a priest, and Alfred the Great even wrote once complaining about the lack of literacy and the ability of many priests to read latin; this was one of the reasons why he pushed for greater learning and he was behind a push to translate many works into English.
Regarding the Romans, again it's difficult to state who could and couldn't read and write, especially when you have slaves often being able to write and dictated letters for their masters (who sometimes couldn't write). On the whole though, the majority of the population were *probably* illiterate or could read to a limited degree.
Gyda llaw, oes acen grom ar y llytyren "i" yn y gair "sir"? Dw i ddim yn feddwl. -
Message 14
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
Gyda llaw, oes acen grom ar y llytyren "i" yn y gair "sir"? Dw i ddim yn feddwl.Ìý
copi yn paysd! î Î feilio! Thank you very much for that reply yn hen saesneg!
I wonder how Vellum fared in comparison with the Chinese method used 8thC AD and after? egluro rhywbeth i rywun..... both systems were used for centuries along side each other, rune for craft,art,metal work and Latin script for formal writing.
Let's not forget that Fathark had letters based on Latin script in the first place..... a little bit like deciphering or transposing modern greek letters in to Latin character set letters. -
Message 15
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
"Let's not forget that Fathark (sic) had letters based on Latin script in the first place..... a little bit like deciphering or transposing modern greek letters in to Latin character set letters."
Aye, that's true - some letters are very similar in some cases.
"Thank you very much for that reply yn hen saesneg!"
Hen Saesneg - surely °ä²â³¾°ùâ²µ!
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Message 16
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
°ä²â³¾°ùâ²µ!
Ìý
wyt ti'n si^wr? -
Message 17
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
Cymrâg = Welsh
Hen Saesneg = Old English
As far as I'm aware, I did write something in Welsh, and nothing in Old English (whereas Ic eom swīðe hungrig would be Old English!!) -
Message 18
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
ðe hungrigÌý
You can get that but not the w y circumflex!
It must be Daneg.
Sîr Gar Howell(where else?) -
Message 19
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
No, it was a macro above a letter "i" to make it a long "i" - so it's "swiðe" meaning "very" - it's Old English (for "I'm very hungry", which I was at the time!)
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Message 20
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
OK stog.... so we had Celtic spoken throughout Britain until the 6thC; then we had Old English up to the conquest; then French/Latin Middle English.... and then modern English ushered in by the French becoming foreigners in Britain after domain changes between kings.
Gottit?
Now I have to look at Cymrag to see how Old Welsh is
in relation to modern Welsh if we know. -
Message 21
Posted by TonyG (U1830405) on Tuesday, 24th October 2006
Sir Gar,
I am no expert, so I can’t say what percentage of Romans were literate, but I am certain that there are letters preserved which were written to and from soldiers serving on Hadrian's wall. Officer's wives were certainly literate as I recall having to translate a letter from one in a Latin course I studied a while back.
My impression, and that is all it is, is that the levels of literacy fell with the collapse of the empire and were only slowly revived by the church. -
Message 22
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Celtic was spoken throughout Britain until the 6thC
and Welsh is presumably nearest to that Celtic.
That takes us back to the similarities between Welsh Celtic and Scottish Celtic.
Strange how hard it is to imagine people speaking Latin, but since Celtic was spoken in England at the time of the Roman occupation, some efforts to translate Latin in to Celtic must have been made to make the one group intelligible to the other, at that time.
Herodotus wrote the history of the Welsh at that early date.
stroggler is the expert par excellence. -
Message 23
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Celtic was still spoken in Britain after the 6th century - the Anglo-Saxons didn't just displace the Celts overnight, it took them time to oust the Celtic tongue from what is now England.
And of course Celtic still survives within Britain, namely Welsh - over time due to sound changes and other changes within the language (morphological, semantic, vocabulary borrowings etc) the tongue spoken by the native Britons changed into what is now Welsh (and Cornish until it died out as a native language before being "revived"). -
Message 24
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
The most fashionable subject of study amongst academics, in Old Welsh is the romantic poetry, but I have not seen a comparison of old Welsh with new. We would only get back to the 12thC,with the various illuminated scripts, so HOW they talked before Celtic tongue was driven to the hills, is anybody's guess, there being no script writing evidence of it either.
It is not really important; the symbiotic effect of the development of Welsh alongside English must be the important influence since 1066.
My late Father always used to comment on the French words to be found in Welsh. French and Welsh have many things in common not shared by English... which must be due to their common Latin ancestry.
I can't think of an example for the moment! -
Message 25
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Welsh does NOT have common ancestry with Latin at all.
Sorry to be so blunt but it does not. Welsh descends from Proto-Celtic, which descends from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Latin descends from Proto-Italic languages (also descending from PIE). Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic were closer related to each other than Proto-Germanic (of which English is descended) but the similarities between modern Welsh and modern Romance languages are limited. Sure, there are similarities, not least the retention of the bi-grammatical gender system (masculine and feminine), but most of the Germanic languages have a gender system too (English and Afrikaans are unique in having lost theirs, and Afrikaans is for different reasons). Otherwise, I'm at odds to think of any real glaring similarities between the language groups. Sure, Old Welsh's verb conjugation system (much of it is retained in modern literary Welsh) shows similarities with Latin in places, but then so do the Germanic verbs systems in former days, pretty much because all these verb systems were inherited from Proto-Indo-European. -
Message 26
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Sorry to be so blunt but it does notÌý
Not at all! Not at all! I am learning and thank you for taking the trouble. I will go through that post now.
Welsh does NOT have common ancestry with Latin at all. Ìý
Except for the script it has always been written in? -
Message 27
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Might be the same script but the Latin script is the most used script around the world and it connects very disparate languages such as Vietnamese, Maori, English, Turkish and Swahili.
Type of script does not mean a connection in language-type; cuneiform was used by very different languages in the ancient Middle East, with Akkadian using it (a Semitic language) as did Hittite (an Indo-European language). It is geographical, economic, cultural and political reasons that determine the usage of scripts, not similarities or relationships of languages. -
Message 28
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
goodness! That is an amazing explanation. Ta!
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Message 29
Posted by generallobus (U1869191) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
Slight tangent here but when does the ogham script first appear in these islands and how far did it spread?
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Message 30
Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Wednesday, 25th October 2006
There is actually no European alphabet that does not derive from the Greek (please this is not a boasting or something). All European alphabets are merely variants of the Greek (Latin itself is no other than the Dorian variant). Futhark is no exception to this rule being created when Germanic tribes came into contact with either the Veneti or Etruscans who used variations of the Greek alphabet (first guess) or directly with Greek tribes colonising the Adriatic (second guess) or merely your monthly Greek merchants passing by their regions. And this has happened certainly prior to 5th century B.C.
The only exception to the above rule is the case of that weird alphabet used in Ireland and celtic-related regions in England and Scotland called ogham, a (very) linear alphabet - quite stylish in appearence - that some say it is a unique alphabet on its own, while others say it is simply a codification of other known alphabets (Roman or futhark), though I do not know on what grounds they claim so. Personally I do not see any connection to futhark thus I could not call it runes, of course cannot see any connection to Latin as well and my first guess is that it is the first, one and only (so far discovered) non-Greek alphabet in Europe. -
Message 31
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
That puts a different slant on stoggler's opinion entirely!
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Message 32
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Not quite sure how that differs from my opinion as I agree with Nick here. All European alphabets (except Ogham) are variants of Greek alphabets (I believe the Etruscans' was inspired by a version used in the Italian peninsula that was slightly different to that used in Greece).
However, the Greek alphabet itself is largely derived from the Phoenician alphabet (actually the Phoenicians used an abjad rather than an alphabet - an abjad shows the consonants but not the vowels, so we have the Greeks to thank for introducing vowels into our alphabets). Here's a link to the Wikipedia page which shows visually the similarities between the two scripts:
According to the article the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek round about the 9th century BC.
That said, the Phoenicians didn't come up with the alphabet/abjad all on their own - their script was a continuation of the proto-Canaanite script which is first seen in the 15th century BC, and it is this script which is the ancestor of the following scripts: Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Berber (plus former scripts like the futhark and Etruscan), with possible connections to some Indian scripts (Devanagari), Thai, the Mongolian vertical script, and even more tenuous Hangul (the Korean).
However, for a good book on the Latin alphabet and how each letter developed from ultimately a Canaanite and Phoenician letter check out this book:
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Message 33
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Ogham appears to have been a purely British Isles invention, although reading articles on the internet it appears around the 4th AD so the concept of an alphabet would not have been new to the peoples of these isles with the Romans having been in Britannia for three/four centuries and christianity having been introduced on both sides of the Irish Sea.
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Message 34
Posted by generallobus (U1869191) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Thanks Stoggler.
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Message 35
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
No worries. I'm sure Wikipedia has an article on ogham if you want to know more...!
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Message 36
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Stoggler's wiki reference above would provide many happy hours for somebody... but I want to get back to the time of Hywell Dda of Wales.... and the European books of law and monastic rules of the 9th-10thC (published in the 13thC)!
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Message 37
Posted by Dai Bath (U2444609) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
I have just seen a fascinating map of a likely journey to Asia minor at that time.
This approach is much more interesting than the Runes, but it has to be said that the distance between Ireland and Wales for regular social intercourse was quite great by sailing standards as it involves a great deal of tacking back and fore back and fore, so it is a good deal further than it looks on a map. (so my cousin tells me!) -
Message 38
Posted by widget (U2260877) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Hi guys
I'm finding this thread extremely interesting, and i'm sorry to hijack it a little but I have a question...
I'm currently studying the construction of half timbered houses and mud & stud as part of a domestic architecture module of my Heritage degree. Yesterday I came across some information on how the builders/carpenters of the half timbered buildings would have numbered their pieces of timber to be erected in a certain sequence at the site. Now, they seemningly used roman numerals to a point and then found that when carving a numeral like XI onto a timber, that timber could easily have been installed upside-down in the number IX position! Therefore they started using a sequence of VIIII iinstead of IX etc etc. But ALSO i found that they started using symbols which are very close to the Futhark runes, and this is in the 15/16 century.
Please excuse my complete ignorance on this subject but was Futhark widely used, or perhaps only by craftsmen, in this period? -
Message 39
Posted by generallobus (U1869191) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
re message 35.
Cheers Stoggler.
I remember seeing a standing stone on Benbecula in the outer hebrides. It was inscribed with both ogham and runes and (apparently) represented where a norse raiding party had come ashore. Instead of raping and pillaging they had had their champ fight the local champ, who had won. The norsemen then left and the stone was erected to commemorate the incident. -
Message 40
Posted by Stoggler (U1647829) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Hi widgetgirl
To be honest, I'd never heard anything like that before but interesting nonetheless. I'm not surprised that carpenters came up with something other than roman numerals though after the problem you described - perhaps that explains what went wrong with the new Wembley...
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Message 41
Posted by widget (U2260877) on Thursday, 26th October 2006
Aaah, i just for a second thought i'd answered my own question - Arabic numerals. I then looked up Arabic numerals (which do look pretty similar to the untrained eye!) then re-read the bit in the book (Trudy West - The Timber Framed House in England) which states that Arabic numerals were unknown in England until the Rennaissance. Huh? Anyone shed some light?
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