AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Elder futhark rune sounds4/11/2024 Nonsense sequences in early inscriptions. The evidence falls into a few categories: My aim is not to debunk the notion that runes were magical from early times, but rather to show you the kind of evidence we do have and let you decide for yourselves whether you’re convinced. Unfortunately, much of this evidence is difficult to interpret. And it is true: there is evidence that runes were linked with magic from the earliest days of their use – or, at least, from the earliest evidence we have of their use. Often, when reading popular books about runes, you will read that runes have been intimately associated with magic since their earliest days. But how far back does this relationship go? Runic magic Indeed, more than mere mystery and secrets, the thing the runes are most linked to today is magic. Whether or not the association between the meaning ‘secret, mystery’ and the meaning ‘character in a runic alphabet’ arose because the runes were first thought of as secret, mysterious things, runes today have certainly inherited this association. There’s an idea out there that the joining of the two broad fields of meaning ‘secret, mystery’ and ‘rune’ arose from the accidental collision of two originally separate words, on the argument that the runes probably didn’t represent any great secret or mystery. If this derivation is accurate, I’d love one day to hear the tale of how a roar became no more than a whisper. 2 Outside of the Germanic and Celtic families, connections have been made with the Latin rūmor ‘rumour rustling, murmur’, which has been traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root *rewH- ‘roar’. character in the runic alphabet, only happened in Germanic. Whatever the answer, the extension of the semantic field to ‘rune’, i.e. Are the Celtic and Germanic forms cognate? Or was this an instance of borrowing from one to the other? If so, which was the source and which the recipient? But the nature of the relationship is still cloudy. Given the strong similarities between the Celtic and Germanic words in both form and meaning, a relationship is impossible to deny. What’s striking about this form is that very similar forms are found in Celtic languages: Modern Irish even has rún ‘secret, mystery’, continuing Proto-Celtic * rūnā. Looking back at the earlier history of the rune word, we can trace back the various early Germanic forms to a Proto-Germanic * rūnō ‘secret, mystery rune’. Even English has a related, albeit archaic verb round, meaning ‘whisper’! Middle Low German reports a set phrase mid rūne und rāde, meaning ‘in secret deliberation’. Other Germanic languages show cognates as well: in Swiss German, there is – or was? – a word Raune, which is a type of vote given by whispering into the ear of a magistrate. Here the OED interprets roun as ‘cry, song’, but it’s easy to see how other interpretations are possible. īefore 1300, Thrush & Nightingale (Digby) l. Summer has come with love to town, // With blossom and with brides’ roun. Somer is comen wiþ loue to toune, // Wiþ blostme, and wiþ brides roune. The OED remarks that the precise sense of roun is often difficult to discern, given that its usage was mostly confined to poetry, for example: There is also a set phrase in roun ‘in secret’ which I’d very much like to bring back into currency. Roun had a wide range of meanings extending from ‘secret, mystery’ to ‘(secret) deliberation, counsel’ to ‘utterance, conversation’ to ‘song’ to ‘language’. Old English rūn is continued in Middle English roun, 1 which would probably rhyme with down if it still existed today. Perhaps it entered English by more than one of these routes it’s a mystery (aren’t you glad I didn’t say rune ?). A word rūn ‘secret, mystery rune’ is found in Old English, but the Modern English word rune entered the language in the 17th century, likely either from post-classical Latin rūna (itself a loan from some early Germanic language), Icelandic rún, or its cognate in a modern Scandinavian language (e.g., Danish and Norwegian rune, or Swedish runa ). The word rune has an interesting history in English.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |