the "scholars of old" are racist hacks

everyone is using a "runology specific" notation style instead of international linguistic standard

places itself as "linguistic," but ignores current and widely accepted linguistic practices

places itself as historical, but also ignores common practices by historical scholars

runology as a current field seems to adamantly refuse to learn from LITERALLY ANY OTHER FIELD

two insightful twitter threads:

• deceptive

• too much planning

• it’s not 1940

elaborate runes:

• cultured

• be popular at d&d

If you’ve read my posts about runes, or read about runes from other sources, you’ve probably seen runes represented in bold writing like this:

ekhlewagastiz : holtijaz : horna : tawido :

This method of transcription was invented for typing runes when runic characters weren’t available, which is still the case on some people’s computers or phones. But it is meant to be functionally equivalent to:

ᛖᚲᚺᛚᛖᚹᚨᚷᛊᛏᛁᛉ᛬ᚺᛟᛚᛏᛁᛃᚨᛉ᛬ᚺᛟᚱᚾᚨ᛬ᛏᚨᚹᛁᛞᛟ᛬

The transliteration is supposed to reflect the rune that is used, not it sound value or anything like that. It’s supposed to be a reflection of the raw data and nothing else. So for example, the younger futhark runes ᛅ and ᚾ, as well as ᛐ and ᛚ, often got mixed up, but if you’re transliterating an inscription that does that, you represent it faithfully even though you “know what they meant.” If someone writes ᚿᚠᛚᚱ instead of ᛆᚠᛐᚱ, then your complete presentation looks like this:

ᚿᚠᛚᚱ᛬ᛌᚢᛆ᛬ᛌᛁᛆ nflr : sua : sia aptr sun sinn ‘after(/in memory of) his son’

In theory, the runes could be represented by arbitrary letters, numbers, or other symbols and it shouldn’t make a difference. We *should* be able to write ek 19-6 instead of ek with no actual meaningful change. We use letters that correspond *somewhat* to the linguistic value of the runes because we can get away with it and because it aids in reading, but it’s meant to be fundamentally arbitrary with the correspondence just being nice when it’s possible.

There is a recognized rupture between systems for the elder futhark and younger futhark. They are too different structurally to be combined into a single system. It may be possible to have one system for both elder futhark and Anglo-Saxon runes, however I don’t know whether that has been done (for example you would need to write ᚲ one way and ᛣ a different way, not using k for each).

Yesterday when I was writing this post about how to use the ǫ̃ss/óss rune, I transliterated it as ą. The program I use to look up inscriptions from a database, Rundata uses o for the same rune, because it has to transliterate the same way for all younger futhark inscriptions, and most of them use óss for o. Why did I change it, if we’re just supposed to transliterate the rune, and not make claims about the sound value?

Well, while runologists have always been agreed that a uniform method of transliteration is necessary, nobody’s actually come up with one which is universally applied. Terje Spurkland wrote a good article about how transliterating both ᛔ and ᛕ as p, which has always been the common practice, prevents runologists from using databases to determine the distribution of them; he suggested using p for ᛔ and K or ᴋ for ᛕ, that is, still different from k standing for ᚴ. Michael Barnes has argued that dotted runes should not be transliterated as separate from the rune they’re derived from, and should be shown with diacritics, so that ᛑᚵᛔ would be transcribed ẗk̈b̈ instead of dgb. Barnes also does distinguish ᛔ and ᛕ, though differently from how Spurkland suggested, writing them b̈ and p respectively.

Neither Spurkland’s nor Barnes’ suggestions are widespread. It’s unfortunate that these ideas were not in circulation a hundred years+ ago when the early work that led to our modern databases was being done, because those databases would show much more valuable information now. I foresee an overworked grad student somewhere in Scandinavia cross-referencing the Samnordisk Runtekstdatabas with Upplands Runinskrifter, etc. and redoing all the transliterations according to a new standard.

I go back and forth on how strict I should be with transliterating on this blog. I don’t have the time or space to add this post to every other one of my runic posts. Maybe I should just stick a link to this post in all my future runic posts. Mostly I just try to make it easier on the reader without open defiance of the idea of convention. You’ll also surely have noticed that a lot of this looks like shit on Tumblr, which is not exactly optimized for this.

What I actually believe is that we should have an additional level of transliteration. One that relates the individual runic symbol to a universal encoding schema, and one that is localized to the runic inscription itself. I would also want to distinguish long-twig from short-twig, so that perhaps we would transliterate ᚾ to N and ᚿ to n. Then the sample I gave above might look more like:

ᚿᚠᛚᚱ᛬ᛌᚢᛆ᛬ᛌᛁᛆ nflr : sua : sia aftr : sun : sin aptr sun sinn ‘after(/in memory of) his son’

Alternatively, we would require a massive expansion to the runic Unicode block to better distinguish different shapes, so that it would more closely resemble Odd Einar Haugen’s Gullhornet and Gullskoen fonts.

Here are Michael Barnes’ conventions from his Runes: A Handbook:

Transliterated runes and separation marks are given in bold type.

Unless precise shape and number is important to the discussion, separation marks are reproduced as : regardless of how they appear in an inscription. That is also the convention where separation marks occur in a sequence of normalized runes.

Line division may be reproduced exactly as in the original, or, where more convenient, signalled by |. In insignificant cases it may be left unmarked.

A gap in an inscription is indicated by a gap in the transliteration.

Uncertain runes or separation marks are placed in round brackets, e.g. (m).

Unreadable but countable runes are given as mid-height asterisks (*).

Unreadable and uncountable runes are marked ... That is also the convention where part of an inscription has been omitted.

Runes conjectured, or supplied from earlier drawings and/or photographs, are placed in square brackets, e.g. m[u]þu[r].

A lacuna at the start of a line is signalled by ], and at the end of a line by [.