Some Thoughts on the Origin of the Fuþark

f	u	þ	a	r	k	g	w
h	n	i	j	æ	z	p	s
t	b	e	m	l	ng	d	o
The Common Germanic or Elder Fuþark

The origins of the Germanic writing system known as the fuþark is a hotly debated issue in scholarly circles, and the present paper is intended only to air some views and perhaps inspire others to contribute to the debate. I name the script 'fuþark' in this article in order to avoid the much misunderstood word 'runes': briefly, a rune (OE run) is a secret, a mystery and the characters used for writing were called runstafas 'rune-staves' in Old English The characters are not themselves runes but mere ciphers or symbols pointing to or marking out the mysteries proper. In this piece, I shall use the word 'runstave' when referring to an alphabetic character.

The origins of the script have been sought in three main areas: the Greek, Roman and North Italic alphabets. I shall deal with each of these in turn.

Greek

An origin in the Greek script was proposed over a century ago on the strength of the known Gothic expansion into south-eastern Europe. The Goths developed a script of their own under the famous Bishop Wulfilas, which clearly shows its Greek origins but with more than a nod towards the fuþark in the shapes of some characters; this suggested that possibly the runestaves were a Germanic adaptation, through the Goths, of the Greek script and in support of this idea scholars pointed to the shape of the 'o' rune which seems to be an angular variant of Greek omega . Also the fuþark's earliest examples tend to be written in either left-to-right or right-to-left, or even alternating between both ('boustrophedon') which was a feature of Greek graffiti into the Christian era.

However, despite the match of omega and the 'o' rune, a Greek origin makes it hard to account for certain other correspondences, such as for 'r' when the Greek character is P. A further objection is that the fuþark seems to have originated (and all the earliest finds are located) on the neck of the Jutland peninsula, where Denmark joins Germany; if this is so, then it is hard to explain how this north-western Germanic area acquired the script before its more southerly neighbours if it was being transmitted from the south.

Roman

The Roman script is an obvious candidate for the fuþark's origins, since interaction between the Roman Empire and various Germanic peoples took place from at least the first century BC - for example, the Suebi who helped Vercingetorix resist Caesar. There are good matches for individual characters: F and , R and , B and , T and , etc. (all with a close match in sound value) and also X and , G and , etc. where the sound has been altered. But it has to be borne in mind that the earliest inscriptions in the fuþark are somewhat crude, with badly-formed characters - some only 'half height' compared to the others - and very poor layout, while the Roman alphabet even in the C1st BC was by comparison a mature script with established conventions of design and format; nor can we ascribe the 'immature' aspects of the fuþark to Germanic taste, since the Romanised areas of the Germanic world used the Roman script perfectly correctly.

North Italic

An origin in the southern Alps has been proposed for the fuþark since it overcomes some of the objections to the formal Roman version. The North Italic script was relatively free in direction, and the individual letters sometimes had variant forms which do correspond quite well to certain runestaves, while the script overall was just about as 'crude' in execution as the earliest runic efforts. This does make one wonder why anyone would use it as a model when there were much more impressive scripts to hand! Even accepting an Alpine starting point, there are still some runestaves which require a Roman model to explain them. Also, while there was considerable transalpine trade and contact in antiquity (witness the mummified body of Otzi, the 'Ice Man' from the early Bronze Age) there is no obvious reason why writing did not make the transition until the Roman Iron Age. And as with the Greek origin model, it is very difficult to explain why the first inscriptions occur in the northern area rather than in e.g. Austria, if the Alpine region were its birthplace.

Now one might argue that the earliest runic finds are all small, portable objects (spearheads, brooches, jewellery, assorted wooden objects) which could have been brought into the north from Central Germany with the runestaves already on them. This phenomenon (transportation of personal items from the south to the neck of Jutland) is exemplified in the Hjortspring bog deposit, where the artefacts discovered apparently represent the military equipment of a defeated raiding party from the Hamburg region (significantly, no inscriptions have been found on any of the items recovered). But, if the fuþark were in daily use in more southerly parts - as it would have to have been to account for the mundane nature of some of the early inscribed finds - then we should expect some evidence of the script from there. There is none known to date.

A fourth contender for the origin of the fuþark is the Swedish rock art known from some areas, e.g. Bohuslan, which appears to contain many recurrent symbols; some have argued that these are ideographs and the runestaves are an adaptation from this 'picture writing' to an alphabetic system. Now a native northern European origin has been popular with some people for ideological reasons, but the evidence suggests that all other alphabetic systems which feature vowel letters are derived from an ancestral Greek series, and ultimately from Phoenician so this seems unlikely to be the whole story.

Now there is one source of information in the search for runic origins which is often overlooked: the staves themselves. What can we deduce from the system they represent? One thing seems likely: they are the invention of one man or one group in one place at one time. This is indicated by the fact that the system does not seem to evolve, but springs into existence fully formed (like Mannus emerging from the primeval ice). Taking individual staves and matching them to what we know about the sound system of Proto-Germanic, it is remarkable how good a match there is. There seems to be no real redundancy at all: when scripts are adopted from outside, there are usually letters taken over from the originating system which are not really needed in the adopting one, such as 'X' and 'Q' in English. The fuþark seems to have no otiose characters, and furthermore there doesn't seem to be any need for more runestaves than there actually are: Proto-Germanic is assumed to have had 24 sounds which match closely the 24 runestaves.¹ We can be sure that only 24 runestaves formed the original series since a handful of inscriptions exist setting out the character set in toto. It therefore seems unlikely that such a close match of sound to symbol could have ever evolved through the chance mechanisms of random borrowing.

Following this line of reasoning, there is a pattern in the shapes of the runestaves which can be explored. The majority of the characters have an asymmetrical configuration, usually a branch or two off the right side of the stave, but there are four runestaves which are symmetrical not just about one axis but about both (so that if subjected to the transpositions so beloved of geometry teachers, the reflections are always identical to the original). These are , , , . In combination these four characters can form a network or 'matrix' and perhaps not surprisingly the shape of (almost) ever other runestave is deducible from this matrix.

Now perhaps one needs the eye of faith for , , and to be mapped out here, but we should bear in mind that we may not have the very earliest forms amongst the inscriptions which chance has handed down to us. (Furthermore, the shape of one runestave on the Kowel spearhead is almost a square, which may be a form of or of .) If we assume that the protoform of had the branches at the centre and bottom - as the matrix would suggest they should be - then two factors would militate against using it:

1. the model of Roman 'F', and
2. the fact that no other character has branches from the stave at the middle and bottom: all have a preference for branches at the top and/or middle, and only have them at the bottom when symmetrically arranged with features at the top. Furthermore, one of the earliest attestations of has a bow on both sides of the stave (the shield mount from Illerup, Denmark).

It is interesting - but perhaps not very surprising given the history of the transmission of the script - that the extension of the 24 character set to 28 undertaken by the Anglo-Frisian tribes in the face of changing linguistic needs, still maintained the format of the runic matrix (i.e. the new runestaves can all be derived from the same matrix as the older ones).

It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that the very earliest inscriptions are not so very ancient as we might think. Linguistically, even the oldest are at some remove from what we assume for Proto-Germanic. The inscription on the Gallehus gold horn reads:

ekhlewagastiz : holtijaz : horna : tawiðo²

"I Hlewagast (of) Holt (the) horn made"

If this were to be accepted as an example of Proto-Germanic then there would have to be some explanation of the following points:

1. ek for 'I' where we would expect disyllabic *eka.
2. horna is an accusative singular, like its cognate Latin cornem - both from PIE *krnm - and the presumed Proto-Germanic form would thus be *xurnan, so the recorded form here horna has had its root vowel lowered from -u- to -o-, its final nasal dropped and its initial *x- remodelled as h-³. Likewise holt- stands for Proto-Germanic *xult- .
3. Proto-Germanic had no short 'o' but the inscription here uses the rune for both long (as in tawiðo) and short (holt-, horna) vowels.

If this article seems very prosaic and dull compared to the exciting article on the mysterious and enigmatic runes of ancient times you hoped for, then let me leave you with one mystery: the order of the characters. As far as I can deduce, the majority of alphabetic scripts use an adaptation of the order alpha, beta, gamma, delta of Greek (that's why it's called an alpha - bet(a)!) which is ultimately of Semitic origin. But the fuþark uses an entirely different order (hence its name!) which has defied attempts to link it to other systems' practices. This is one of the many rune-related topics I hope to return to.

Notes

1. To make this assertion, one has to assume that the runestave has the sound written æ in OE grammars. This proposal was put forward by runologist Elmer H. Antonsen. Further, one has to ignore the posited set of velar consonants with lip-rounding which produce Latin 'qu' (e.g. quod) and would give rise to Germanic 'xw' (e.g. 'xwat' what). (The sound I represent as 'x' for Germanic is a voiceless velar fricative, like the 'ch' of Scots loch.) Germanic languages seem to have considered this as two phonemes 'x' + 'w' although there was a special letter assigned to the sound in Wulfilas's Gothic alphabet.
2. Proto-Germanic had no voiced stops, thus the 'd' in 'tawido' would be pronounced as a voiced 'th'.
3. In fairness, we cannot be sure whether the rune stands for 'h', 'x' or both (or indeed some other sound).