Origins and the first inscriptions

In this lesson: the oldest runic finds, where the alphabet came from, what early inscriptions say and how to transliterate the Gallehus horn.

Where did the runes come from, and what did the first people who wrote them actually say? This lesson visits the oldest finds, the main theories of origin and a few famous inscriptions, and then lets you read a sixteen-hundred-year-old sentence yourself.

The earliest finds

Historical In the Vimose bog on the Danish island of Funen, among thousands of objects deposited there, lies a small antler comb from around 160 CE with five runes: harja, perhaps a name. An iron spearhead from Øvre Stabu in Norway reads raunija(z), often taken as “tester”, probably the spear’s own name.

Between 2021 and 2023, archaeologists from the University of Oslo found a sandstone slab with runes at Svingerud in Ringerike. Radiocarbon dates from the graves place it between about 50 BCE and 275 CE, which makes it the oldest datable runestone. The range is wide, but it shows how much may still lie in the ground.

Where the alphabet came from

Historical Scholars agree the runes were adapted from a Mediterranean alphabet by someone who knew how alphabets worked. Compare the runes for f, r, h, i, b and m with Latin F, R, H, I, B and M. The Latin theory points to contact with Rome along the Rhine and Danube. The North Italic theory points to Alpine alphabets related to Etruscan, which also wrote in either direction.

An older Greek and Gothic theory has been abandoned, because the Scandinavian finds are older than Gothic contact with Greek culture. The fair summary: adapted from Latin or a North Italic alphabet, by Germanic speakers in contact with Rome, around the first century CE. There is no evidence of an older “secret” origin.

About 350 Elder Futhark inscriptions are known, from Norway and Sweden to England, the Netherlands and as far south as Hungary and Romania. The people who wrote them, Goths, Alamanni, Franks, Saxons, Angles, early Scandinavians and others, were many peoples who spoke related languages. “Germanic” here means a language family, not a race.

Historical The runes had their own order. The Kylver stone from Gotland, around 400 CE, carved on the underside of a grave slab, carries the oldest complete row. The Vadstena bracteate, a gold pendant from around 500 CE, divides the row into three groups of eight. It was stolen in 1938 and never recovered.

Clues to the origin, in more detail

Historical Two finds are often mentioned in discussions of origins. The Negau helmets, a group of bronze helmets found in Slovenia, carry inscriptions in a North Italic alphabet; one of them is usually read as a Germanic name, harigast, written in that script centuries before the first runes. It shows that Germanic speakers came into contact with Alpine alphabets, which supports the North Italic theory without proving it.

The Meldorf brooch from northern Germany, from around the middle of the first century CE, carries four or five signs that some scholars read as runes and others as Latin letters. It is a good example of a debated object: if it is runic, it is the earliest runic inscription; if not, it still shows writing reaching the north at that time. Experts disagree, and that is fine to say out loud.

The word “rune” on the stones

Historical Some early inscriptions use the word for rune themselves. The Einang stone in Norway, from around the fourth century, is often restored as “I, Godagastiz, painted the rune”, using a verb related to the later Old Norse fá, “to paint, to write”. The Noleby stone in Sweden, from around 600, says something like “I paint the rune derived from the gods”, with the word raginakundo.

A similar phrase, runes “of divine origin”, appears centuries later in the Old Norse poem Hávamál (stanza 80). So people who wrote runes did sometimes describe them as coming from the gods. That tells us about their respect for writing, not about a method of divination.

What early inscriptions say

Most early inscriptions are very short: a name, a maker’s signature such as “I, [name], made…”, the name of an object or a memorial. A few short words recur and still puzzle scholars, like alu, often found on bracteates, whose meaning is debated, and laukaz, “leek”. They show that writing had a place in religious and protective practice. They do not show how it worked, and none involve divination.

Historical The most famous early sentence ran around the rim of one of two golden horns found near Gallehus in Denmark, in 1639 and 1734: ek hlewagastiz : holtijaz : horna : tawido :, “I, Hlewagastiz Holtijaz, made the horn.” It is usually dated to the early fifth century. In 1802 a goldsmith, Niels Heidenreich, stole both horns and melted them down. The horns in the National Museum of Denmark today are copies, and the sentence survives only because people had recorded it carefully.

Reading an inscription the way scholars do

Scholars replace each rune with a bold lower-case Roman letter, write the th sound as þ and the ng sound as ŋ, show separators as colons and put damaged but guessable runes in brackets. Then they normalize the words in italics and translate them. Each inscription has a reference code: DR 42 is the large Jelling stone, Ög 136 the Rök stone, and early inscriptions are cited by their KJ number in Krause and Jankuhn’s catalogue. Interpretation enters at every step, so a “mysterious” inscription may simply be a slip of the knife or a word we only partly know.

Three more inscriptions to try

Once you can read the Gallehus line, try these short ones with the rune table open. The Vimose comb: harja, five runes. The Øvre Stabu spearhead: raunija(z), where the brackets show a damaged rune. And the first six runes of the Kylver row: f u þ a r k. For each, write the runes, the transliteration and one sentence of meaning. Then compare your version with a museum or university page. Small differences, such as a rune you could not identify, are part of learning; even professional runologists disagree about damaged signs.

The Meldorf brooch: runes or Latin?

Historical One small find shows how carefully scholars must work. In 1979 a bronze brooch from a grave near Meldorf, in the Dithmarschen region of northern Germany, was examined and found to carry a short scratched inscription of four signs.

It is dated to roughly the first century CE, which would make it older than any certain runic inscription. The difficulty is that nobody agrees what the signs are. Some scholars read them as early runes, others as Latin letters, and others as something in between. The brooch is therefore usually described as possibly runic, and the question remains debated.

The Meldorf brooch is a good lesson in honesty. When a book says runes “certainly” existed before the second century, or gives an exact date for their invention, it is going beyond the evidence. What we can say is that the oldest secure inscriptions, such as the Vimose comb, come from the second century, and that a few earlier objects are disputed.

Practice variation: an evidence card

Choose one early inscription from this lesson and make an index card for it. On the front, write the runes and your transliteration. On the back, write four lines: where it was found, roughly when it is dated, what it probably says, and one thing scholars still debate about it. Keep the cards together. After a few weeks you will have your own small catalogue of the oldest runic writing, built from evidence rather than from guesswork.

Why are early inscriptions so short?

Beginners are often disappointed that early inscriptions say so little: a name, “I made”, a word on a comb. Part of the reason is the objects themselves. A spearhead or brooch has little space. Another part is survival. Wood was probably the commonest writing surface, and wood rots. The short texts we have are the ones carved into metal, bone and stone, and they may give a narrower picture of runic writing than the people of the time knew.

Questions beginners ask

Why are so few early inscriptions known? Most writing was probably on wood, which rots. What survives is on metal, bone and stone, often from graves and bogs.

Did one person invent the runes? We do not know. The consistent shapes and order suggest a single adaptation, perhaps by one person or a small group, but there is no record of who.

Why does the order begin with f, u, th rather than a, b, c? Nobody knows for certain. Several theories exist, none proven. The order is old and stable, which is why we call the row the futhark.

Can I visit these objects? Many are in national museums in Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm, often with good online catalogues. Some, like the Vadstena bracteate and the Gallehus horns, survive only in drawings and copies.

Myths to drop: The runes are not older than writing in the Mediterranean, they did not come from Atlantis or a lost northern civilization, and the oldest runes were not used for fortune-telling.

A worked example

Imagine someone working through the Gallehus line with the table open. She reads ᛖ as e and ᚲ as k without trouble. Then she hesitates at ᛉ, which looks like a modern “protection” pendant, and remembers that here it is simply a buzzing z at the end of a name. She mistakes ᛟ for a decoration before finding it is o. Her final line matches the lesson except for one swapped rune. In her notebook she writes: “Strange to read a man’s signature from around 400 CE. It feels like reading graffiti, in a good way.”

Try this

Transliterate (writing the runes out in our letters) the Gallehus inscription. Using the futhark table on the Elder Futhark page, write the Roman letter for each rune in this line, marking the separators with colons: ᛖᚲ : ᚺᛚᛖᚹᚨᚷᚨᛊᛏᛁᛉ : ᚺᛟᛚᛏᛁᛃᚨᛉ : ᚺᛟᚱᚾᚨ : ᛏᚨᚹᛁᛞᛟ : Then check your result against the lesson and note which runes were easy to confuse.

Recap

The oldest dated runic object is the Vimose comb, around 160 CE, and the Svingerud stone may be older. The runes were adapted from a Mediterranean alphabet by Germanic speakers in contact with Rome. The order and the three groups of eight are attested on the Kylver stone and the Vadstena bracteate. Early inscriptions are mostly names, signatures and memorials, and scholars read them in careful steps that each involve judgment.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with The Viking Age and medieval runes. For the longer story, see my history of runes.

Further reading: Michael P. Barnes, Runes: A Handbook (Boydell Press, 2012), and Terje Spurkland, Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (Boydell Press, 2005).

Sources

• Michael P. Barnes, Runes: A Handbook (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
• R. I. Page, Runes (London: British Museum Press, 1987).
• Wolfgang Krause and Herbert Jankuhn, Die Runeninschriften im älteren Futhark (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966).

Go deeper: the runes pages on this site

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