13 - Runic Literacy in North-West Europe, with a Focus on Frisia

Summary

THIS CHAPTER DISCUSSES runes and runic writing in the Early Middle Ages in general, and in Frisia in particular. Objects with runes on them have been found in the Frisian terp-area dating from around the sixth to the ninth century. In this chapter I aim to discuss how we should assess ‘Frisian’ runes and their relation with other runic traditions. Although the oldest known runic objects date from the second century, it is assumed that the runic alphabet was created sometime in the first century AD.1 But why, when and where runes were developed from an archaic Mediterranean model is still an unsolved question.

Runic writing, the exclusive indigenous script of Germania, emerged in a period when Germanic-speaking people grew increasingly in touch with the Roman imperial world, a literate world. Many Germanic men served as mercenaries in the Roman army. They received Roman citizenship after twenty-five years’ service, and we may assume that some of them returned home after this service. Because this citizenship was hereditary, the sons of these auxiliaries were also Roman citizens, even before entering the army. Some of them made a career in the army, and learned to read and write. This became increasingly common in the second and third centuries AD, exactly the period in which we infer runic knowledge to have spread across a large part of northern Europe (Stoklund 2006, 358).

Most scholars now believe that runes were based on a Mediterranean alphabet, most likely the roman/Latin alphabet.2 I believe they will have been devised in close connection with Roman culture and possibly on Roman territory. The obvious context would then be creation through one of these Germanic soldiers, with their literary training in the army and the implicit ability to create a script of their own (Derolez 1998, 26; Pollington 2016, 79). The survey produced by René Derolez (1998, 5–6) contains the observation that ‘there was a near-perfect agreement between the runes of the futhark and the phonemes of Germanic as reconstructed for the beginning of the period under consideration. Could such a phonemic fit be the result of a gradual adaptation or does it presuppose a conscious and systematic arrangement?’. And Antonsen (1996, 11) claimed that ‘no alphabetic writing system can survive from one generation to the next without a spelling tradition’.