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Rune Scholars
Rune Scholars
This 6th
century Noleby futhark inscriptions says :I prepare the suitable
divine rune ... for Hakoşuz.
Rune stone from Västergötland, with
the older type of futhark
The first academic scholars who made
systematic surveys of runic monuments per se' were Johan Bureus (d.
1652) in Sweden and Ole Worm (d. 1654) in Denmark and Norway.1
The first usage of runic monuments as historical sources was
published in 1893 by the Danish scholar Ludvig Wimmer.2
References to the work of Ole Worm and Ludvig Wimmer permeated the
modern runologic literature. It is generally assumed that the runic
script entered the Germanic world around the first several centuries
after Christ as a result of commercial interactions with the Roman
Empire. The oldest known runestones are on the Scandinavian
peninsula and date from ca.300-400 AD. The oldest known example of
the script itself has been dated as ca. 200 AD.
Professor Eric Moltke3
gives a detailed comparative analysis of the fuŞark
with the major variants of the Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Latin
alphabets and arrives at the conclusion that the Latin alphabet of
circa 0 A.D. was the basis for the fuŞark.
Ludvig Wimmer also believed that the futhark was based on Latin
letters. The Greek and Etruscan alphabets have been taken seriously
by scholars in the past as possible sources for the futhark. The
latest 'Greek' theory was published in 1988.4
1Omeljan
Pritsak, The Origin of Rus', Vol. I: Old Scandinavian Sources
other than the Sagas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1981), p.773.
2Ibid,
p.774.
3Erik
Moltke, Runerne i Danmark og deres oprindelse (Copenhagen:
Forum, 1976), pp.32-58.
4Bengt
Odenstedt, "A New Theory of the Origin of the Runic Script: Richard
L. Morris's Book Runic and Mediterranean Epigraphy," in Old
English Runes and their Continental Background, ed. by Alfred
Bammesberger (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1991),
p.359.
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