Fairfax2014runes Greek

the twisting path of runes
Edmund Fairfax
THE TWISTING PATH OF RUNES

FROM THE GREEK ALPHABET
This paper argues that the direct source for the creation of Germanic runes was the Greek alphabet
as used in Gaul around the middle of the last century BC, a period that saw a significant influx
of Germani into that area. A number of the departures from the source are accordingly due to the
influence of specifically Gaulish rather than purely Greek usage, while other features are due
to the adapters own independent treatment. The adapter was likely a well-born Germanus who
learnt the Greek alphabet from a literate Gaul resident in Gaul or Germania.
1. Lead-in
Of all the unsettled questions that surround the runic alphabet, the issue of origins
has been perhaps the most vexing and intriguing. Despite the at times striking
similarities that exist between the futhark and certain ancient Mediterranean
alphabets the Greek, Latin, Etruscan, North Italic, and even Phoenician a
number of the runic characters fail to match up in form, or in sound, or in both
form and sound with letters from these possible Mediterranean sources, such that
the frustrated investigator might declare,
to seek a one-to-one correspondence between a rune and its prototype has been shown by the past
100 years of investigation into this question to be a fruitless endeavor. (Morris 1988: 150)
Indeed, despite many attempts, no true consensus has yet been reached about
which of these alphabets is to be regarded as the direct source in the creation of
runes. As Heizmann (2010: 12) puts it,
es ist bislang nicht geglckt, alle Runen ihrer Form und ihrer Lautgeltung nach lckenlos aus
einem bestimmten Vorlagenalphabet herzuleiten. Alle Versuche sind vielmehr gezwungen,
sich bei mehreren Runen auf z. T. waghalsige und letzlich kaum objektivierbare Herleitungen
einzulassen, beziehungsweise mit dem Argument eigenstndiger Formen zu operieren.
Much the same assessment is found in Dwel (2010: 230) and Barnes (2012: 9)
as well.
The literature on the origin of runes is extensive, and it would be pointless to
rehash it in detail here, given that overviews of this material can be readily found
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elsewhere, such as in Morris (1988: 9-53), Odenstedt (1990: 145-170), Mees (2000:
33-55, 68-76), Dwel (2008: 175-181; 2010), and Heizmann (2010), the last three
authors in particular providing extensive bibliographies. A few words, however,
should be said here about why earlier attempts at determining the origin of runes
have failed, and I will focus in the following on some more recent scholarship,
which, for the most part, is built on earlier treatments.
Most attempted derivations remain implausible because they have little or no
historical basis. Most noteworthy here is the Punic-Phoenician thesis, recently
resurrected by Vennemann (2006, 2010), according to whom the direct source
of runes is thought to be the Phoenician alphabet as used by the Carthaginians to
write Punic. Given that the Latin, North Italic, Etruscan, and Greek alphabets all
descend ultimately from the Phoenician, that is, either directly or indirectly, and
thus all share common features, one cannot help but isolate formal and phonetic
similarities between Phoenician and runic letters as well.
Problematic to this theory is providing a plausible explanation of how a Ger-
manus could have acquired knowledge of the script and adapted it. Carthaginian
power went into serious decline as the result of three wars with Rome in the
third and second centuries BC indeed the city of Carthage itself was razed to
the ground in 164 BC by the Romans such that Carthage and its surrounding
territory ultimately became a Roman possession, absorbed into the empire. While
Punic-speakers continued to use the Phoenician alphabet well into the AD period,
the script by the first century BC was largely a regional one confined mainly to
the North African coast.
Vennemann claims that knowledge of the Phoenician alphabet was brought to
the Germanic north by Carthaginian colonizers sometime between 525-201BC
and that Germania in its prehistory was under Carthaginian sway until the end
of the Second Punic War. As Dwel (2010: 236) rightly notes, this theory of
Carthaginian colonization ist und bleibt eine Theorie, fr die weder einschlgige
Schriftquellen noch archologische Zeugnisse jedenfalls fr den Zeitraum
500-200 v. Chr. vorliegen.
There is also a major chronological problem in this theory. The first uncontro-
versial attestation of runes in the archaeological record dates from around 160
AD (Stoklund 2006: 358), that is, four to six hundred years after Vennemanns
presumed introduction of the Phoenician alphabet into Germania. While it is
reasonable to assume that a number of decades would pass between the invention
of a script and its first attestation, it should be stressed that the longer the findless
period, the more unlikely the theoretical timeframe becomes, and an archaeo-
logical findless stretch of around four hundred years or more seems excessive:
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given the date of the earliest certain runic find, it seems unlikely that the origin
of runes predates the first century BC.
Vennemann attempts to explain away this hiatus by assuming that objects bear-
ing Phoenician-derived characters were wooden and have since all rotted away.
But runic inscriptions on wooden objects dating to the first millenium AD and
afterwards have come down to us, and thus one must ask why this would not be
so for an earlier period. Moreover, runes have also been found on stone, metal,
and bone, and one would expect the same to hold for an earlier period as well.
To sidestep this chronological problem, one would need to assume a later
period of adaptation, reasonably the first century BC or AD, but by this time-
frame, the Phoenician alphabet was a regional script, one overshadowed in the
Mediterranean area by the more prestigious and dominant Latin alphabet. And
there is no evidence of any meaningful Germanic-Phoenician interchange for
this timeframe, but much evidence for a growing Latin influence and even pres-
ence in Germania. Thus, the Phoenician-theory remains highly implausible from
a historical vantage-point, not to mention several formal-phonetic difficulties,
which will not be addressed here (see further Dwel 2010: 235-237).
Former attempts to derive runes directly from some version of the archaic or
pre-Milesian Greek alphabet, that is, a form pre-dating the fourth century BC
(Kabell 1967; Antonsen 1982, 2002; Morris 1988; Griffiths 1999), likewise meet
with objections, as has been noted before (Dwel 2010: 237), since they too fail
to account for the overlong archaeological findless period inherent in the theory,
a stretch of a half millennium or more.
Chronology is also a major problem in the North Italic thesis. More recent
discussions in favour of this thesis have been penned by Prosdocimi (1985,
2003, 2006), Rix (1992, 1997), and Mees (2000). This theory claims broadly
that runes stem from one or more of the various Etruscan-derived alphabets of
northern Italy used in the BC period. Again, given that the Latin, North Italic, and
Greek alphabets all descend ultimately from the same source, and thus all share
a number of common features, one cannot help but isolate formal and phonetic
similarities between North Italic and runic letters as well.
The extant inscriptions in these North Italic alphabets represent a number of
different languages and traditions, and the alphabets are usually named after the
localities wherein the inscriptions are concentrated. The following main ver-
sions are commonly acknowledged: the Lugano or Lepontic alphabet, used to
write Lepontic and Cisalpine Gaulish; the Este alphabet, used to write mainly
Venetic; the Bolzano-Sanzeno, Magr, Steinberg, and Lothen alphabets, used to
write Raetic; and the Sondrio-Camunian alphabet, used to write Camunic.
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And within these main alphabets are found more local variants differing in minor
details.
Generally speaking, these alphabets, and the languages written in these alpha-
bets, went into decline with the rise of Roman power on the Italian peninsula.
Already by the middle of the second century BC, Rome dominated the peninsula,
and such expansion of power brought Romanization, and thus the Latin language
and its alphabet (David 1996). This is most concretely captured in some of the
Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions in the Lugano alphabet. Two out of the three extant
dedicatory stone inscriptions are bilingual, with the Latin version of the inscrip-
tion, written in the Latin alphabet, more detailed.
In fact, the Lugano alphabet appears to have been a fairly marginal phenomenon.
According to Lejeunes corpus (1985b), only six Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions in
the Lugano alphabet are extant, dating likely from the second and first centuries
BC as far as one can tell, and all but one (that from Todi) found in a rather small
area roughly between the Sesia and Ticino rivers north of the Po. The Lepontic
inscriptions in the same alphabet, beginning in the sixth century BC and com-
ing to a stop around the end of the Roman republic (30 BC), are about eighty in
number. They too are not geographically widespread: most of them are found
no more than roughly fifty kilometres from the town of Lugano between Lake
Maggiore and Lake Como. A limited number of coins bearing Lugano-script
legends have been found in a more scattered sweep, not surprisingly, given that
coins are apt to circulate and need not reflect the actual area wherein the script
was in use, although the Rhodanian coins were perhaps minted by Lepontians
working in Transalpine Gaul (Lejeune 1971). While new inscriptions have been
found since the publication of Lejeunes corpuses, finds outside the Lugano area,
these are scattered isolates (Morandi 2004), again the likely result of objects or
individuals having travelled.
The extant Venetic inscriptions in the Este alphabet around 350 altogether be-
gin in the sixth century BC and come to an end around 100 BC, or a little thereafter,
after which the Latin alphabet is used instead until about 50 BC, when the Venetic
language itself disappears from the record, presumably because Latin had made
serious inroads at the expense of Venetic (Marinetti 2002, Wallace 2004b).
There are about 290 Raetic inscriptions in the Bolzano-Sanzeno, Magr,
Steinberg, Lothen alphabets and their variants (Schumacher 1992, Mancini 2009).
The use of these alphabets beginnt um 500 v. Chr. und erlischt mit der Annexion
dieses Gebietes durch das rmische Reich (Schmeja 1996: 14), that is, 15 BC.
These alphabets appear to have been marginal phenomena as well, judging from
the fairly limited find-area as shown on Schumachers map (1992: 277).
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There are about 170 Camunic inscriptions in the Sondrio-Camunian alphabet.

These inscriptions cannot be dated absolutely: they may date to anywhere between
the late eighth century BC and circa 16 BC (Schumacher 2007: 334).
The very timeframe wherein one can reasonably expect runes to have been
created, to wit, the first century BC or AD, is one characterized broadly by the
serious decline of these North Italic alphabets, manifested in the archaeological
record by the dwindling and outright disappearance of these traditions. Granted,
some inscriptions appear to date to the late first century BC, but this chronological
overlap is hardly compelling. Of the Raetic inscriptions, for example, only six,
according to Schumachers corpus edition (1992: 245-248), can be dated earlier
than the second century BC, and only one of them to the late first century BC. It
seems most unlikely that a would-be adapter would have chosen as his source a
marginal alphabet in serious decline, one, moreover, used to represent a shrinking
minority language, when the more prestigious Latin alphabet the script asso
ciated with the language of Roman government, army, law, and doubtless much
trade in the Italian peninsula and even beyond was current and indeed toted
throughout all Roman-occupied lands (Clackson & Horrocks 2007: 84-88).
This is especially so if the medium in this theory is thought to be a Germanic
mercenary active in Northern Italy. In such a case, the Germanus would have
most certainly learnt the Latin rather than a North Italic alphabet if he learnt
anything, given that the former was the script employed by the Roman army. And
as Rix (1992: 433) has owned, there is no evidence for any significant Germanic
presence on the Po plain for the time in question. Problematical then remains the
question of how and why a Germanus of the first century BC or AD would have
learned a dying marginal and regional script, one greatly overshadowed by the
prestigious and more widely used Latin alphabet.
A further major hurdle to the North Italic thesis is the fact that all of these
northern alphabets have a smaller inventory of characters than the runic alphabet.
The Lugano alphabet has 19 characters (Lejeune 1971: 13-17, 1985b: 7; Morandi
2004: 476), although four of these letters appear only comme marques de potiers
sur des vases, comme marques de maons sur des pierres, comme chiffres, etc.
(Lejeune 1971: 15) (as potters marks on vases, as stonemasons marks on stones,
as numbers, etc.); thus, there are only fifteen living letters in this alphabet. The
Venetic Este alphabet has 20 letters (Marinetti 2002: 45); the Raetic versions,
apparently derivatives of the Venetic alphabet (Rix 1997: 232; 1998: 49-57), have
19 letters (Morandi 2004: 476). Abecedaria for the Camunic alphabet are extant,
which show a larger number of characters, but given that these strings cannot
be dated, they may represent an archaic form of the alphabet, comparable to the
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archaic Etruscan versions, which were reduced in number long before the first
century BC. Thus, these Camunic abecedaria include forms von denen wir heute
nicht mit Sicherheit sagen knnen, ob sie je im Gebrauchsalphabet verwendet
wurden, etwa das Beta (Schumacher 2007: 335). The characters from the Ca-
munic Gebrauchsalphabet as given by Morandi (2004: 476) number 20.
The runic alphabet has 24 letters, and the proponent of the North-Italic thesis
is thus faced with the task of accounting for the existence of a greater number
of runic letters. One is obliged then to resort to the notion that new characters
were invented or alternately borrowed from another alphabet. While such phe-
nomena are not unknown in the history of literacy, there are different kinds of
adaptations, and the contexts thereof need to be borne in mind when drawing
supporting parallels. Adaptations by illiterates are less likely to involve new
characters, at least in the initial creation of the alphabet, given that the adapter
will have no pre-conceived ideas of how a writing system should represent his
mother tongue, and the example of one graph representing more than one phone
tic value in his source will most likely be followed by the adapter as well if there
is an inadequate number of characters to represent fully the sound system of the
adapters mother tongue.
The Cisalpine Gauls adaptation of the Lugano alphabet provides a good example.
With its fifteen living characters, the source had an insufficient number of letters
to represent the sound system of Gaulish, notably no signs for the stops /b, d, g/.
Rather than invent new characters to fill these lacunae, the adapter had the letters
p, t, k do the double duty of representing not only /p, t, k/ but also their voiced
counterparts /b, d, g/, in agreement with Lepontic usage, the direct source in the
adoption. In the hypothetical case of a runic adaptation of a North Italic alphabet,
one might expect the adapter likewise to have made do with a limited inventory.
Moreover, the runic alphabet contains at least one clear example of redun-
dancy: a separate character to represent /ng/ was certainly unnecessary, since the
letters n and g could potentially have been used instead to represent the same
sequence. Redundancies in alphabetic adaptations more often than not represent
an attempt on the part of an adapter to use up needless source characters; that is,
more letters were available in the source alphabet than needed to represent the
sounds in the target language. (Examples of such redundancies from the history of
literacy will be outlined below.) This redundancy suggests that the direct source
of runes had an excess rather than an insufficient number of characters, for why
else bother creating a new character that is essentially unneeded? And positing
that this redundancy was a later innovation is an ad hoc speculation and still
does not answer the question of why a redundancy was introduced. And there is
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little to recommend the view that runic ng represented merely // or [] rather

than /ng/ (= [g]), given that this sequence of nasal + oral stop is still to this day
preserved in certain contexts in some Germanic languages: e.g. Icelandic sning
[si:nik], sningar [si:nikar], and English finger [fg]), and in the regional
speech of parts of the West Midlands and Lancashire still sing [sg]; indeed,
the dropping of the /g/ in word-final /ng/ = [g] of standard English is thought
to begin only in the sixteenth century (Barber 1976: 314-315). This instance of
runic redundancy is a significant argument against any theory based on the as-
sumption that the runic adapter invented new letters in the face of an inadequate
inventory in the source.
In order to sidestep the problem of an insufficient number of characters, some
attempts to derive runes from the North Italic alphabets have treated the latter
as a group. In Meess derivation (2000), for example, eight different versions
are simultaneously considered, together with an archaic Etruscan abecedarium,
that from the Marsiliana dAlbegna tablet, the latter dated to the first half of the
seventh century BC (Jeffery 1990: 236-237). When the North Italic alphabets
fail to provide a reliable source-letter for a rune in his hypothetical derivation,
recourse is made to the characters from the Marsiliana tablet, which predates the
first uncontroversial runic attestation by over half a millennium, not to mention
that this abecedarium represents an archaic form of the Etruscan alphabet which
had fallen out of use by the fifth century BC (Wallace 2008: 17). Or alternatively,
if the usual form of a given letter in one alphabet is seen as too dissimilar to a
rune, the counterpart from another alphabet, if closer in form, is used as support
to justify a given derivation.
In an attempt to justify this approach, Mees (2000: 52) states that the finds
from Steinberg and the Magdalensberg, as do those of Negau, all seem to represent
a mixture of two or more of the more southerly traditions. Yet this statement is
not borne out by Meess chart: only a couple of the letters from the Negau finds,
for example, as given by Mees, differ form-wise from the Venetic letters, and
these departures are minuscule and can easily be seen as simply slight variations
on the Venetic counterparts. A couple of oddities in the Magdalensberg are un-
like any other forms listed in Meess table and would seem to be independent
innovations. Be that as it may, the presence of a few variants typical of other
regions is not sufficient evidence for positing that a given alphabet was created
by blending alphabets, above all when dealing with a corpus that is small and its
elements difficult to date.
Such a cherry-picking approach, one also assumed by Rix (1992), conflates
differences in time and place, and the question naturally arises of how an adapter
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would have realistically been privy to such an overview. It seems most unlikely
that anyone would ever have been taught literacy in this manner; that is to say, it
is implausible that a teacher would have simultaneously introduced to his student
several different alphabets employed in differing localities, with regional vari-
ant letter-forms, and used to record sundry languages, some at differing times.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine to give a latter-day analogy that a Rumanian
child learning to write today would be introduced to the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic
alphabets at the same time, simply because they are historically related and, in
their use, geographically adjacent. Illiterates typically learn one alphabet first, and
then others later when studying other languages that employ a different system.
There is no reason to think that in this regard pedagogy was greatly different in
the ancient world than today.
And highly implausible is the idea that a Germanic mercenary or perhaps
hostage, while in Italy, learnt to speak, read, and write in turn Latin, Gaulish/
Lepontic, Camunic, Raetic, and Venetic, and then afterwards whimsically combin
ed elements from these alphabets in order to create a new alphabet, one not
attested until several centuries later. For such a process, there is little in the
way of supporting parallels that can be drawn from the history of literacy. The
proffered explanations of how a runic adapter would have learnt the North Italic
alphabets as a group pose more questions than they answer. Ultimately, attempts
to derive runes simultaneously from several alphabets rather than just one seem
decidedly wrongheaded.
It has been asserted (Rix 1992: 414), impressionistically, that runes simply look
more like the North Italic alphabets than the Classical Latin or Classical Greek
counterparts do, but the same might be said of the Orkhon or Gktrk script,
the latter commonly thought to be a derivative of the Aramaic alphabet, and this
latter script in turn an adaptation of the Phoenician. Here a fair number of the
characters are exactly identical to various elder-futhark runic letters, while others
are quite similar, but there is certainly no chance of runes being derived from the
Orkhon script, given that these Turkish runes, as they are also called, appear to
have originated in central Asia sometime just before the eighth century AD, the
time of their first attestation (Tekin 1968: 26-30; Kara 1996: 536-537). Likewise
the Celtiberian script also shares a number of letter-forms with the runic alphabet,
some outright identical or very similar, but the Celtiberian script died out around
100 BC, that is, before the likely timeframe for the invention of runes.
When a bounded number of alphabetic characters are handed down, there is
fairly limited scope for the alteration of letters, and it is quite possible for related
scripts to end up with very similar or identical forms through independent inno-
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vation, as the example of the Orkhon script demonstrates. In the end, a general
impression concerning appearance is inadequate, for there must be sound formal
and phonological correspondences between source and derived letters as well as
plausible reasons for any discrepancies.
Rix (1992: 414-415) claims that specifically the absence of angularity in
the standard forms of Classical Latin and Classical Greek letters is a major
problem for the Latin and Greek theses, for it adds a further wrinkle in the deriva-
tion, one absent, he claims, in a hypothetical runic derivation from North Italic
letters. But a number of runes also have curvilinear variants as well, and so a
further wrinkle, one accounting for the rounding of letters, is also needed for the
North Italic thesis as well. Nor is it true that angular forms of Latin and Greek
letters were unknown in the post-archaic periods (Guarducci 1967: 1/371-383;
Quak 1996: 176-177).
The common forms of the North Italic characters, despite their angularity, are
in some cases less like runes than their Greek or Latin counterparts are. Latin h
and Greek ta, for example, are closer to runic h than the common North Italic
ladder-shaped hta is; and Latin m and Greek m more similar than the common
single staff m of the North Italic tradition. The Camunic alphabet underwent a
more radical alteration than its other North Italic counterparts (Schumacher 2007:
335) and ended up with a number of forms even less like their runic counterparts,
such as its arrow-shaped sigma.
The few general but important considerations just outlined make it unlikely
that either the Phoenician, Archaic Greek, or North Italic alphabets or the
Archaic Latin for that matter were the direct source in the creation of runes.
This leaves then the Classical Greek and Classical Latin alphabets as the only
other serious options. Rather than dealing with the Latin thesis here, I will discuss
it at the end of this article, to avoid needless repetition of material presented in
the following sections dealing with the Greek alphabet as the direct source in
the creation of runes.
2. Historical Considerations
Before any attempt is undertaken to show how runes could descend from the Greek
alphabet, one must first address fully the question of whether such a derivation
was likely or possible historically. That is to say, could a Germanicus, some-
time roughly around the beginning of the first millennium AD, have plausibly
been exposed to the Greek alphabet, such that he could have learned and then
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adapted it to his mother tongue? The answer is a resounding yes. Both textual
and archaeological evidence indicates that the Greek alphabet was in fact used
in neighbouring Gaul at this time, introduced some time after the founding of the
Greek colony of Massalia / Massilia (present-day Marseille) around 600 BC.
In the account of the Gauls from his Geography (4.4.2), partly based on an
earlier now lost work by Poseidonius (circa 135-50 BC), Strabo (64/63BC-24AD)
writes that the Galatae were receptive to literacy, that
v v ov,
v. (2006: II/236)
[if coaxed, they so easily yield to considerations of utility that they lay hold, not only of
training in general, but of language-studies as well. (2006: II/237)]
Massilia became something of a hotspot of learning for the Gauls, such that
Strabo (4.1.5) writes,
v v ov o o vo ov, v
o v v, v v
o vo v v, v v o ov,
o v. v oo o vv ov, v ov
vo o ooo v o o v vov, o
o ov oov, o v , o ov ovo,
o. (2006: II/178)
[the city, although a short time ago it was given over as merely a training-school for the bar-
barians and was schooling the Galatae to be fond enough of the Greeks to write even their
contracts in Greek, at the present time has attracted also the most notable of the Romans, if
eager for knowledge, to go to school there instead of making their foreign sojourn at Athens.
Seeing these men and at the same time living at peace, the Galatae are glad to adapt their
leisure to such modes of life, not only as individuals, but also in a public way; at any rate, they
welcome sophists [i.e. learned men], hiring some at private expense, but others in common,
as cities, just as they do physicians. (2006: II/179)]
From Massilia then, it appears that knowledge of the Greek alphabet spread north-
wards. By the time Julius Caesar invaded Gaul in 58 BC, his general impression
was that those Celtic inhabitants who were literate wrote in Greek letters. As he
writes in The Gallic War (VI.14):
Druides a bello abesse consuerunt neque tributa una cum reliquis pendunt; militiae vaca-
tionem omniumque rerum habent immunitatem. Tantis excitati praemiis et sua sponte multi
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in disciplinam conveniunt et a parentibus propinquisque mittuntur. Magnum ibi numerum

versuum ediscere dicuntur. Itaque annos nonnulli vicenos in disciplina permanent. Neque fas
esse existimant ea litteris mandare, cum in reliquis fere rebus, publicis privatisque rationibus
Graecis litteris utantur. (1963: 336-338)
[It is the Druids wont to take no part in war, and they do not pay taxes along with the others.
They are exempt from military service and from all burdens. Fired by such rewards, many
of their own accord present themselves for schooling, while many are sent by parents and
kinsfolk. It is said that they learn by heart a great number of verses there, and thus some spend
twenty years at their studies. And they do not think it right to entrust such to writing, while
in nearly all other things, in public and private accounts, they use Greek letters.]
A further passage in the same work (I.29) suggests that such rationes or ac-
counts could be substantive:
In castris Helvetiorum tabulae repertae sunt litteris Graecis confectae et ad Caesarem relatae,
quibus in tabulis nominatim ratio confecta erat, qui numerus domo exisset eorum, qui arma
ferre possent, et item separatim pueri, senes mulieresque. Quarum omnium rerum summa
erat capitum Helvetiorum milia CCLXIII, Tulingorum milia XXXVI, Latobrigorum XIIII,
Rauracorum XXIII, Boiorum XXXII; ex his, qui arma ferre possent, ad milia nonaginta duo.
Summa omnium fuerunt ad milia CCCLXVIII. Eorum qui domum redierunt censu habito, ut
Caesar imperaverat, repertus est numerus milium C et X. (1963: 42-44)
[In the encampments of the Helvetii were found tablets with writing in Greek letters, and
these were brought to Caesar. On these tablets was a register of names showing how many
had left their homeland, who were able to bear arms, and also separately children, old men,
and women. Of all these, the total was 263,000 Helvetii, 36,000 Tulingi, 14,000 Latobrigi,
23,000 Rauraci, 32,000 Boii; of these there were about 92,000 able to bear arms. The grand
total was about 368,000. Of those who returned home, a census was taken, by Caesars
command, and the number was found to be 110,000.]
A passage from Diodorus Siculuss Historical Library (5.28), written circa 60-30
BC, also alludes to Gaulish familiarity with writing:
v o o o, v vv vo v
v vv v ov, ov ov.
v v vo o v o oo
v v v v, v v vvovv .
(1939: III/170-172)
[the belief of Pythagoras prevails among them, that the souls of men are immortal and that
after a prescribed number of years they commence upon a new life, the soul entering into
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another body. Consequently, we are told, at the funerals of their dead some cast letters upon
the pyre which they have written to their deceased kinsmen, as if the dead would be able to
read these letters. (1939: III/171-173)]
Archaeological finds bear out these textual claims that the Greek alphabet had
currency amongst the Gauls, for a corpus of Gaulish documents written in Greek
letters is extant: around 70 monumental inscriptions on stone, mainly of short
dedications or epithets; and over 220 inscriptions on shards of pottery and other
materials, mostly of personal names and patronymics, not to mention legend-
bearing coins (Lejeune 1985a; Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998). These
documents have been found in the south of what was ancient Gaul (circa 200-50
BC), as well as in the east-central part of the same (circa 100BC-50AD).
Moreover, there is evidence that by the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul, at
least some Germani outside of Gaul were well acquainted with the culture of their
Gaulish neighbours. In his Gallic War, Caesar (IV.3) writes of the Ubii that
paulo sunt eiusdem generis ceteris humaniores, propterea quod Rhenum attingunt multumque
ad eos mercatores ventitant, et ipsi propter propinquitatem quod Gallicis sunt moribus ad-
suefacti. (1963: 184)
[they are a little more refined than others of the same race, since they border on the Rhine,
and often traders visit them, and on account of their nearness, they have grown accustomed
to Gallic ways.]
In light of the foregoing considerations then, it is perfectly plausible that the

Greek alphabet was introduced into Germania by way of neighbouring Gaul. The
question now arises of when and how such a transfer could have taken place. The
alphabetic adaptation must predate, of course, the earliest extant runic inscription.
This has been a source of some debate: the two finds of the Meldorf fibula, dating
from the first half of the first century AD (Dwel & Gebhr 1981; Dwel 2001;
2007; 2008: 24), and the Osterrnfeld shard, from first century AD (Dietz et al.
1996), bear markings that are runelike, but it is not unambiguously clear what
alphabet is employed, how the two inscription are to be transliterated, and what
they mean. Given the controversy, these inscriptions are too uncertain to have
argumentative weight and must be dismissed. This then means that the earliest
uncontroversial runic find dates from circa 160 AD (Stoklund 2006: 358), our
terminus ante quem.
A few historical considerations argue that the most likely timeframe for the
Greek-thesis with a Gaulish connection is the last century BC. First of all, the
184
archaeological record indicates that Greek letters went into decline in Gaul after
the Roman conquest of that territory (58-51/50 BC), as Latin characters took
their place, and Greek letters disappeared altogether by about 50 AD. If runes
do indeed descend from the Greek alphabet and if Gaul was the intermediary in
the spread of Greek letters to Germanic Europe, one would expect the creation
of runes to date from a time before the Greek alphabet went into serious decline,
for if runes were developed in later decades of the post-conquest period, it would
be reasonable to expect the now evidently more prestigious Latin letters to have
been adopted instead.
It should also be noted here that in the decade immediately following the con-
quest, the Romanization of Comatan and Belgic Gaul proceeded rather slowly.
With the outbreak of a civil war in Italy in 49 BC, Roman energy and forces were
drawn away to the Italian peninsula, leaving only a skeleton garrison behind in
Gaul, and it was not until 39 BC, with the appointment of Vipsanius Agrippa as
governor, that Romanization began in earnest (Drinkwater 1983: 18-22; King
1990: 54-56, 64-65).
Furthermore, we know from Caesars Gallic War (I.31) that a significant Ger-
manic presence had arisen in Gaul in the decades just before the Roman conquest, a
presence that would have easily facilitated the transfer of Greek alphabetic knowl-
edge to a Germanus. According to Caesars informant Diviciacus of the Aedui,
Galliae totius factiones esse duas: harum alterius principatum tenere Aeduos, alterius Arver-
nos. Hi cum tantopere de potentatu inter se multos annos contenderent, factum esse, uti ab
Arvernis Sequanisque Germani mercede arcesserentur. Horum primo circiter milia XV Rhenum
transisse: posteaquam agros et cultum et copias Gallorum homines feri ac barbari adamassent,
traductos plures: nunc esse in Gallia ad centum et XX milium numerum. (1963: 46)
[All of Gaul is split into two factions: the Aedui are foremost in the one, the Arverni in the
other. After a fierce struggle for supremacy lasting many years, it came about that Germanic
mercenaries were brought in by the Arverni and Sequani. At first, around fifteen thousand
crossed the Rhine, but when the men, untamed and barbaric, took a fancy to Gallic lands
and cultivation and means, more were brought over, and there are now about a hundred and
twenty thousand of them in Gaul.]
A likely medium then for the transfer of alphabetic knowledge to Germania

Libera was a Germanic mercenary active in Gaul during this time, or at least a
noncombatant in his entourage. Indeed, mercenary service would appear to have
been one of the main reasons for well-born Germani to go abroad in the ancient
world. Tacitus would later write in his Germania (14) that
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si civitas, in qua orti sunt, longa pace et otio torpeat, plerique nobilium adulescentium petunt
ultro eas nationes, quae tum bellum aliquod gerunt. (1939: 284)
[should the state wherein they were born become idle from long peace and ease, a good many
well-born youths seek out further afield tribes that are waging some war at that time.]
A further possible medium was a Gaulish expatriate that ended up in Germania

Libera. Caesar intimates in a number of places in his Gallic War that the common
manner of ensuring compliance with an agreement at this time was the giving of
hostages, usually well-born ones. In his description of the Treveris preparation
for a revolt against the Romans in 53 BC, for example, Caesar writes (VI.2) that
Indutiomaruss family, prominent members of the Treveri,
finitimos Germanos sollicitare et pecuniam polliceri non desistunt. Cum ab proximis impetrare
non possent, ulteriores temptant. Inventis nonnullis civitatibus iureiurando inter se confirmant
obsidibusque de pecunia cavent. (1963: 318)
[did not leave off entreating neighbouring Germani and offering them money. When they
could not get those nearest, they tried further afield. Having found some states, and in swear-
ing oaths between them, they confirmed their allegiance and gave security for the money by
means of hostages.]
We learn later that the Treveris plans fell through (VI.8) and that
Germani qui auxilio veniebant percepta Treverorum fuga sese domum receperunt. Cum his
propinqui Indutiomari, qui defectionis auctores fuerant, comitati eos ex civitate excesserunt
(1963: 328)
[the Germani who were on their way as help returned home when they learnt of the Treveris
flight. Following along with these, Indutiomaruss kinsfolk, who had nettled forth the upris-
ing, withdrew from the state.]
Certainly then, an educated Gaulish hostage or exile in Germania could conceivably

have also passed along knowledge of Greek letters. And it seems highly unlikely
that an individual hailing from the Mediterranean world would have bothered to
adapt the Greek alphabet to Germanic, given the common southern condescension
towards northern barbarians. With the foregoing historical considerations in
mind then, the timespan of circa 70-50 BC for the creation of runes would seem
most plausible for the Greek-thesis with a Gaulish connection.
Some former proponents of the Greek-thesis, most recently Giertz (1993),
have argued that the point of contact in the creation of runes was in the east, in the
186
Pontic region, for example. Both the textual references and archaeological finds
discussed above argue against the notion that the practice of writing in Greek letters
was merely some kind of marginal phenomenon in Gaul and thus that a would-be
adapter of the Greek alphabet could realistically have been exposed to Greek letters
only in Greece itself or its eastern colonies. It should not be forgotten that Massilia in
southern Gaul was a Greek-speaking town with a university, and thus Greek language,
literacy, and culture were, so to speak, right on Gauls doorstep. The alternate
possibility of a Germanus being exposed to the Greek alphabet while in Greece
itself or one of its more eastern colonies is less likely, given that a number of runic
idiosyncrasies, as we shall see below, are much more easily accounted for if one as-
sumes that the adapter was exposed to Gaulish rather than purely Greek usage.
The time proposed here for the creation of runes is then roughly two centuries
before the first uncontroversial attestation of runes in the archaeological record, but
in runic scholarship, a findless period of more than a century or so has at times been
held to be problematic. The unquestioned assumption underlying such a limit is seem-
ingly that once runes were created, their usefulness would have been immediately
obvious to the Germani and consequently there would have been a gradual but
steady spread of the runic alphabet throughout northern Europe right after the adop-
tion, manifested in the archaeological record by an ever-growing number of finds,
ultimately reaching back to within a hundred years or less of the adaptation.
Various views have been put forward attempting to isolate this need for runes.
One such is that runes were a significant part of magic or cult practices (Dwel
1992), but this view has been shown to be highly dubious (Antonsen 2002: 37-42).
Alternatively, runes, it is imagined, facilitated trade and business (Moltke 1985:
69) or growing administrative structure (Spurkland 2005: 3-4), but again there
is no support for such notions (Mees 1999: 144-145).
If the content of extant early runic inscriptions, which are mostly devoted to
simple identification, was broadly typical of runic writing in its earliest days, it
follows that runes can hardly have had any real practical function in Germania
Libera and perhaps served merely as a mark of prestige. Indeed, the Roman-Iron-
Age bogfinds from Illerup Denmark, for example, seem to support a link between
early runes and elitist prestige. As Ilkjr (2000: 116) writes,
the composition of the finds shows that the runes belong together with particular groups in
the army. Nithijo and Laguthewa are both inscribed on shield hand-grips of silver, and are
thus linked to the lite; Swarta is also on a shield hand-grip, but of bronze. Equipment of
that material belongs to the upper 10%, but not to the very top level. The same is true of the
indecipherable inscription on a chape, and Wagnijo, as we have already seen, was probably
one of the leaders among the attackers.
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This scenario then would be similar to the case of the early Latin alphabet, wherein
epigraphic evidence suggests that writing was acquired by the wealthiest fami-
lies as a symbol of prestige and then spread beyond the circles of the wealthy
Latins who introduced it (Wallace 1989: 123-125). Such a lack of real utility
for an innovation perhaps initially limited only to a small number of well-born
Germani not to mention the absence of a public educational system or central-
ized governmental bureaucracy in Germania Libera to promote writing would
surely have manifested itself in a fewness of objects bearing runic inscriptions,
in the same way that the limited use of writing amongst the Latins in the earli-
est centuries of Latin epigraphy likewise resulted in very few surviving objects
bearing inscriptions.
A consideration of the quantity of finds also suggests that the early use of
runes was limited. For the 590 years between 160-750 AD, the entire corpus in
the elder futhark is around 350 inscriptions (Dwel 2008: 3); that works out to be
an average of about 0.6 extant inscriptions a year. Within half that timespan (the
250 years between 200 BC-50 AD), the number of extant Gaulish inscriptions
in Greek letters (excluding coin legends) nearly equals that of the elder futhark,
with around 300 items (an average of about 1.2 extant inscriptions a year). As
noted above, writing appears to have been used rather extensively in Gaul, both
publicis privatisque rationibus (for public and private accounts), as Caesar
words it, which could include even a census.
When compared to other corpuses, the smallness of the runic tradition is again
thrown into relief. Around 650 Oscan inscriptions are extant for the 600 years
from the sixth century BC to the first AD (Wallace 2004a: 813), yielding an av-
erage of about 1.1 extant inscriptions a year. For the 650 years of the Etruscan
tradition (700-50 BC), there are over ten thousand inscriptions, but if pieces of
ceramic with potters marks and inscribed pan and cover tiles are added, the total
is closer to twelve thousand (Wallace 2008: 2), which results in an average of
over 17 extant inscriptions a year. For the period 600-100 BC, there are about
three thousand Latin inscriptions (an average of 6 extant inscriptions a year), and
well over 130,000 Latin inscriptions for the whole of the Roman empire from
antiquity broadly (Clackson & Horrocks 2007: 38).
Perhaps even more impressive is that of the more than 15,000 Roman-Iron-Age
pieces unearthed from the Illerup bog in Denmark, pieces of Germanic weaponry
and other military equipment, less than fifteen bear runic inscriptions, that is, not
even one percent of the finds (Ilkjr 2000: 115-116). While it seems most certain
that what is extant today is only a small sampling of what existed in its day, the
relative proportions of finds do suggest that runic writing was not greatly used in
188
Germania Libera in the earliest centuries, and thus it could not have left behind
much of an imprint on material objects, hence the findless period of more than
a hundred years.
A comparison with the earlier spread of Greek letters in neighbouring Gaul
will perhaps be helpful in establishing a reasonable rate of diffusion for Germa-
nia. Many of Gauls oppida, or town-like fortified settlements, had populations
in the thousands by the time of the Roman conquest, which implies a fair degree
of organizational complexity and social hierarchy (Wells 2001: 49-53), and
such population density would have eased and hastened the spread of writing.
In contrast,
the types of settlement which existed in Germania during our period [100BC-300AD] included
the isolated farmstead, the hamlet or group of two or three farms, and the larger agglomeration
of farmsteads to which the term village may unhesitatingly be applied[but] there was no
development of the town-like oppidum on the Celtic model. (Todd 1987: 99)
After the appearance of the first extant Gallo-Greek inscription from southern
Gaul, there is a roughly one-hundred-year lag before such writing appears in the
archaeological finds of central Gaul (Lambert 1994: 81). Thus, a findless period
exceeding a century would not seem unreasonable for Germania Libera, given the
latters far more rural landscape and apparently less complex social organization,
which would not have allowed for the same ease of transfer.
Moreover, by the late second century AD, when a steady trickle of runic in-
scriptions begins in the archaeological record, knowledge of the runic alphabet
appears to have been fairly widespread throughout Scandinavia. This suggests
that runes had been in existence already for some time (Barnes 2012: 2-3).1
1. If the Meldorf and Osterrnfeld inscriptions are accepted as runic, one might won-
der why these two finds stand isolated between the likely date for the creation of
runes as posited here and the trickle of inscriptions beginning in the latter part
of the second century AD, such that the two are preceded and followed by a fair
number of findless decades. Such a case, however, is not without precedent in the
history of literacy:
Between the three hundred years that separate the Namrah inscription of 328
and the earliest Arabic papyrus of 643, the whole history of early Arabic epigra-
phy is represented in only five inscriptions[which] can only mean that writing
in Arabic remained a rare and unusual practice even after the Arabs had devel-
oped their own alphabet. (Bellamy 1989: 97)
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3. Preliminary Phonological and Alphabetic Considerations
Having established then that there are no historical hurdles to a possible runic
derivation from Greek letters, let us now turn to the mechanics of such a deri-
vation. It should be noted at the outset that there were two forms of the Greek
alphabet at this time, one alphabetic and one numerical, the latter differing from
the former merely in having three additional characters, to wit, vau, qoppa, and
san. These three were originally letters in their own right, with the phonetic values
of [w], [k], and [s] respectively, but in the standard alphabet they functioned as
numbers only. And it is this numerical version of the alphabet that underlies a
runic derivation from Greek letters, one wherein the counters vau, qoppa, and
san were treated like the other letters, so as to represent a phonetic value based
on the acrophonic principle.
Below then is this numerical version, with each letter accompanied by its
Greek name and numerical value, together with the Greek phonetic value circa
70-50 BC where applicable, based on Allen (1994). Given that the transfer of
Greek alphabetic knowledge to Germania was most likely effected through the
intermediary of Gaul and thus Gaulish usage, the Gaulish values need to be borne
in mind as well, and these when different are given immediately to the right of
the Greek sounds. Indeed, most of the irregularities in the runic derivation out-
lined below become understandable if one assumes a Gaulish intermediary in
an imperfect transfer. That is to say, the matchup of characters and sounds in the
runic derivation appears to have been partly influenced by Gaulish orthographic
convention and Gaulish pronunciation of the Greek letters or letter-names.
1: A alpha [a(:)]
2: B bta [b]
3: gamma [g]
4: delta [d]
5: E epslon [e], [e(:)]
6: vau
7: Z zta [z], ?
8: H ta [:], [e(:)]
9: thta [th/t/], [ts]
10: I ita [i(:)]
20: K kappa [k]
30: lambda [l]
40: M m [m]
190
50: N n [n]
60: x [ks], [xs]
70: O omicron [o(:)]
80: p [p]
90: qoppa
100: P rh [r]
200: sigma [s]
300: T tau [t]
400: Y upslon [y(:)],
500: ph [ph/ pf/f], ?
600: X ch [kh/kx/ x], [x]
700: ps [ps], ?
800: mega [:], [o(:)]
900: san
A few words should be said about some of these values. There was no perceptible
phonetic difference in Gaulish usage between omicron and mega, or between
epslon and ta, and thus the members within each set were in free variation, at
odds with Greek usage. Extant Gaulish inscriptions show a decided preference
for omicron over mega, and for epslon over ta. Gaulish, moreover, does not
appear to have had the phoneme /y/, and Gaulish upslon had no independent value
but was used only in the digraph o for [u] / [w], in imitation of Greek usage, and
this digraph in turn figured in the diphthongal trigraphs oo [ou] and o [au],
although in a few inscriptions, the latter trigraph is simplified to a. Gaulish also
does not appear to have had the phonemes /z/ or /f/, and so not surprisingly zta
and ph are not found in any extant Gaulish inscription. Likewise, it is doubtful
whether there were any strings of [ps] in Gaulish, since PIE /p/ had disappeared
in most contexts in Celtic, and the two notable exceptions of /pt/ and /ps/ had
become [xt] and [xs] respectively in Gaulish; thus, not surprisingly, the letter ps
is not extant in any Gaulish inscription.
No abecedarium for Gaulish exists, although an early inscribed abecedarium
has been found in southern France, in Lattes, but it is only a fragment, likely
Greek rather than Gaulish at that. The absence of zta, ph, and ps in inscriptions
does not mean, however, that the characters were not part of the alphabet; it is
possible for unused letters to remain in an alphabet, even for centuries. In the
Etruscan adoption of the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet, for example, four
letters bta, delta, omicron, and smek were redundant due to the smaller
inventory of sounds in Etruscan, yet these needless letters remained in the Etrus-
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can alphabet for almost two hundred years (circa 700-500 BC), even though not
used (Wallace 2008: 17).
It is important to observe that there is an overall very close agreement between
the Gaulish and Greek writing systems: only a handful of minor changes were
made to the phonetic values of the Greek letters; form-wise, the letters themselves
remained wholly unchanged; other conventions such as the digraph o = /u(:)/, the
sequence = /ng/, and scriptio continua were followed. And it is highly likely
that the Gauls also used the Greek alphabet as a number-system, and so one can
reasonably assume that the three aforesaid unused letters were still part of the
alphabet, along with vau, qoppa, and san, and further that the Greek letter-names
were also known.
It should also be noted that the precise Greek phonetic values of bta, delta,
gamma, and especially ph, thta, ch, are not altogether certain for the period in
question. It is well-known that the first three of the aforesaid letters underwent
a change in value, from the voiced stops [b], [d], [g] to the voiced fricatives [],
[], [] respectively, sometime between the Classical and Byzantine periods. As
Allen (1994: 32) writes,
it is not possible to establish with certainty at what precise period the fricative pronunciation
of , , developed. But certainly it had not done so in classical times.
Allan does note, however, that the first unequivocal proof for a fricative pronuncia
tion dates only from the ninth century AD. With this in mind, I have assumed
plosive values for these three characters in the following derivation.
The letters ph, thta, and ch also underwent a change in value, from the stops
[p ], [th], [kh] to the fricatives [f], [], [x] respectively. The first clear evidence
h
for a fricative pronunciation comes from the 1 C. AD in Pompeian spellings

such as Dafne ( = v) (Allen 1994: 23), that is, from before 79 AD. This
shift, however, is unlikely to have been an overnight phenomenon, and thus
one would reasonably expect an intermediate affricate stage, thus: [ph], [th], [kh]
via [pf], [t], [kx] to [f], [], [x]. It is also most likely that before the final values
became established as the only correct ones, there was a period wherein a set of
older values co-existed with that of the newer progressive ones, with the latter
belonging perhaps to more informal speech.
Other considerations indicate as well that already in the first century BC, these
three letters had affricate or fricative values. In the Gaulish adaptation itself, ch
was used to represent the fricative [x] and thta the affricate [ts]. Furthermore, it
is well known that the Latin digraphs ch, ph, and th were the usual ways of ren-
192
dering Greek ch, ph, and thta in Latinized spellings of Greek words borrowed
into Latin, and in some of the Classical sources dating from the timeframe in
question, ch and ch were also used to render /h/ (= [x]) in Germanic names, e.g.
Cherusci (Caesar VI.10), oo (Strabo VII.1.3) = *Heruskz. With these
considerations in mind, I have assumed that an affricate or fricative pronuncia-
tion was possible for ph, thta, and ch at this time, although from the vantage
point of a runic derivation, the precise Greek values matter less than the Gaulish
ones, as we shall see below.
The Greek letters given above are the modern standard forms, which descend
from the characters adopted officially in Athens in 403/2 BC, in the so-called
Milesian reform. In the decades following the reform, this version of the alphabet
spread fairly quickly throughout the ancient Greek world as a new norm, replac-
ing the different local scripts that had been in use up to that time. Despite such
standardization, variant letter-forms existed alongside these standard characters
throughout much of the Hellenistic period (336-30 BC), and such variants need
to be borne in mind when one attempts to establish a possible runic derivation
from Greek letters.
Column a in fig. 1 shows a number of epigraphic variants that are found in
Hellenistic Greek and Gallo-Greek inscriptions, after the forms given in Guar-
ducci (1967: 1/380-383) and Lejeune (1985a: 428-434). Some of them can be
subdivided into groups based on similar formal variation. Epslon, sigma, and
mega, for example, developed circular versions, and these lunate variants are
common in Gallo-Greek inscriptions. These lunate letters, as well as thta and
omicron, also had quadrate, or squared, versions. Further stylistic versions were
angulate and curved letters (Guarducci 1967: 1/371-383). Thus, in the latter
part of the Hellenistic period, many of the Greek epigraphic letters had both
curvilinear and rectilinear variants.
Already by the third century BC, cursive forms of Greek letters were also in
use in the Greek world. Some of the forms common in the last century BC are
also included in the chart, in column b, after Thompson (1912: 192). Some of the
Gaulish inscriptions, above all those on ceramic, sport cursive letters, and these
agree well with those given by Thompson and justify the use of the papyri forms
here. It should be noted, with regard to Greek cursive letters broadly, that historical
differences do not come out so much in the real forms of the letters, which very
often remain remarkably alike, but in the character of the handwriting as a whole
(Groningen 1963: 31). And given the not infrequent survival or recurrence of old
forms, one must guard against the danger of assuming that a particular form of a
letter belongs to a fixed or limited period (Thompson 1912: 184).
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edmund fairfax
Figure 1
194
With both the epigraphic and cursive forms, more variant shapes are known and
could have been given here, but I have limited the choice to those most pertinent
to a possible runic derivation. It should also be borne in mind that the boundary
between epigraphic and cursive letters was not rigid, for one of the most signi
ficant changes in the history of Greek epigraphy was the gradual replacement
of the monumental letter forms with cursive forms (McLean 2005: 40). That is,
some originally cursive forms, such as the aforementioned lunate letters, were
introduced into stone inscriptions in imitation of contemporaneous papyrological
script. This is apparent notably in the Gallo-Greek inscriptions, where isolated
cursive letters sometimes stand amongst epigraphic forms.
It should also be stressed here that in the timeframe circa 100-30 BC, that is,
already in the decades before the Roman conquest, a number of Gaulish areas
were familiar with both the Greek and Latin alphabets, as is evident from Gaulish
coin legends, wherein one finds that
ces alphabets sont employs tantt sparment, tantt ensemble. On constate galement un
mlange des types dcriture: dans certaines inscriptions les capitales et les cursives cohabit-
ent. (Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998: 11)
[these alphabets are used now separately, now together. A mix of writing types can also be
observed: in some inscriptions, capital and cursive letters are found side by side.]
In some cases, one side of the coin will have Latin letters, the other Greek (e.g.
obverse EPIENOS, reverse HC), or alternately, one word on one side will be
written in Latin letters and another in Greek (e.g. SULA), or one and
the same word may have a mix of Greek and Latin letters (e.g. EIOYIGIIAGOC).
In addition, a Greek or Latin word may also appear (e.g. IC CIC,
or REX ADIETVANVS) (Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998: 269-271, 167-170,
228-229, 139-144, 365-366). As such, this playful use of two alphabets is highly
reminiscent of some later Old English coin legends, which use now Latin letters,
now runes, now a mix of both (Barnes 2012: 44-45).
For some geographical areas of Gaul, such as the traditional territories of the
Aedui and Lingones, we have extant coins bearing both Latin- and Greek-lettered
legends as well as other objects inscribed only in Greek letters. In the case of
the Sequani, whose lands bordered on those of the two former tribes, we have
coin legends only in Latin letters as well as other objects bearing Greek-lettered
inscriptions (Lejeune 1985a: 340-402; Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998: 23).
And it was in the lands of the Sequani that the presence of the Germanic king
Ariovistus and his mercenaries was especially felt (Caesar I.31-37).
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edmund fairfax
Thus, there is evidence that the literary culture of those Gaulish areas wherein
Germanic mercenaries are known to have been active in the decades just before
the Roman conquest was marked by a familiarity with both the Greek and Latin
alphabets, although before the conquest the former of the two was clearly the
norm, while the latter appears to have been restricted to coin legends.
Furthermore, it is clear that as a result of this familiarity with the two alphabets,
there was some influence of the one on the other in Gaul. In the post-conquest
usage of Latin letters, for example, Latin X was used to represent [x], in imitation
of earlier ch, and thta was introduced to represent [ts], although a barred D was
also used here, evidently a compromise between thta proper and Latin D (Lam-
bert 2002: 368, 374, 379-381). And in the pre-conquest period, Latin U appears
to have suggested the use of upslon alone ( ), rather than the usual digraph ,
to represent /u/ in some Gaulish coin legends. And both Greek and Latin coin
legends could share a few archaic or less common letter-forms as variants. An
open form of a, for example, one in fact common in the North Italic alphabets,
is found in both Greek- and Latin-lettered legends (rows a and b respectively in
fig. 2). Greek-lettered coin inscriptions show, moreover, a pouchless tailed rh
(row d of fig. 2), also found in the Latin-lettered counterparts, with and without
a pouch (row e of fig. 2).
Figure 2
196
Finally, it should be stressed that given the significant formal and phonetic dif-
ferences which exist between the runic alphabet and all of the possible source
alphabets from the Mediterranean area, one needs to assume at the outset that
regardless of whatever alphabet is chosen as the direct source the runic adapta-
tion was a more complex process, one involving changes to both phonetic values
and letter-shapes. Former discussions of runic origins have given little thought
to the question of what procedure the runic creator is likely to have followed in
his adaptation. It is a reasonable assumption that
if an alphabet is created systematically the principles underlying its creation are detectable
in the finished alphabet and the process of its creation can be demonstrated. (Ebbinghaus
1979: 21)
Ebbinghauss reconstruction of the likely process involved in the Gothic adapta-

tion of the Greek alphabet is most plausible and would seem to apply to many
adaptations. Here, the first step is, quite obviously, the decision to accept a given
alphabet and adapt it to another language. In the second step, the adapter goes
through the source alphabet in order to accept or reject phonetic values. In the
third step, characters that have not been accepted with their original value are
reassigned new ones as needed. Redundant letters, if present, may be likewise
assigned new values, or kept as variants, or left unused. And finally, the letter-
forms themselves may be modified to make them suitable to a given medium. I
have assumed such a process in the following discussion.
4. The Phonological Matchup
In the first step of the adaptation then (column c of fig. 1), the adapter would
have chosen to use all of the letters whose phonetic values more or less matched
up with the phonemes of Germanic. Judging from the final results, the follow-
ing characters would have been straightforwardly taken over with roughly their
original Gaulish/Greek phonetic values in the initial selection process: alpha
[a(:)], bta [b], delta [d], ita [i(:)], kappa [k], lambda [l], m [m], n [n], p
[p], rh [r], sigma [s], and tau [t]. The acoustic similarity between bta [b] and
Germanic /b/ (= [] / [b]), and delta [d] and Germanic /d/ (= [] / [d]), would
have allowed the adaptor to use these two letters without any great violence to
the original value.
The adapter also chose epslon for Germanic /e(:)/ and mega for Germanic
/o:/. Given that in Gaulish, there was no perceptible phonetic difference between
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omicron and mega, or between epslon and ta, the adapters choice of one letter
from each set could only be arbitrary, thus resulting in the asymmetry from a
purely Greek point of view evident in choosing for the mid-range Germanic
vowels the pair epslon [e] and mega [:], rather than the set epslon [e] and
omicron [o], or alternately the set ta [:] and mega [:], that is, pairs agreeing
in height in the Greek system.
Judging from formal and phonetic similarities, one can further conclude that
upslon [y] was used to represent Germanic /u(:)/. These two sounds differ only
in terms of front-back position, and neither Gaulish nor Germanic appears to have
had the phoneme /y/. Indeed, the Germanic adapter may never have learnt the true
Greek value in the first place, for a Gaulish intermediary may have replaced the
original value with the nearest sound in his own tongue, resulting in [upsi:lon]
instead of [ypsi:lon], in the same way that a native speaker of English lacking
linguistic skill might say [uw] when trying to pronounce French u or German .
As noted earlier, upslon alone rather than the digraph o at times represents /u/
in Gaulish coin legends, apparently under Latin influence.
Thta, with its Greek value of [t/], would have been the natural choice for
Germanic //. Even if the adapter had been exposed only to the Gaulish value [ts],
the leap to the Germanic interdental fricative would not be so great and would
still be an obvious choice.
Judging again from the striking formal similarity, one can conclude that the
adapter chose ch [kx/x] to represent Germanic /g/ (= [] / [g]), but this is a rather
odd choice from a phonetic point of view, although not wholly illogical. Given that
bta and delta were adopted for Germanic /b/ and /d/, one might expect gamma
[g] rather than ch [kx/x] to have been chosen for Germanic /g/ as well, but ch
did, after all, represent a velar sound, and furthermore, Gaulish substratum may
have been at work here. While Gaulish did not have the phoneme /x/, [x] did
exist as an allophone of /g/ and /k/, but this allophone was normally represented
by the separate letter ch. Perhaps it was this Gaulish convention wherein /g/ =
gamma and ch, and /k/ = kappa and ch that influenced the Germanic adaptor,
such that he chose ch for Germanic /g/, rather than for /h/, as one might have
otherwise expected.
It might be noted further here that confusion about the orthographic representa-
tion of specifically velar consonants was to characterize Gaulish use of the Latin
alphabet in coin legends circa 100-30 BC, a usage contemporary with the Gaulish
use of Greek letters. In this connection, Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer (1998: 7)
write that C est frquemment employ pour G et inversement (TOC/TOG ou
TOCIRIX/TOGIRIX, chez les Squanes) [C is often used for G and the other
198
way around (TOC/TOG or TOCIRIX/TOGIRIX, among the Sequani)]. Lambert

(1994: 44-6) also alludes to argant- silver appearing as both ARCANT- and
ARXANT-, with confusion of G, C, and X. In the post-conquest Gaulish use of
Latin letters as well, Latin velar consonants continue to be confounded at times,
such as in some of the month-names from the Coligny calender: *kantlos written
CANTLOS and GANTLOS, and *kutijos written CUT[---] and GUTIOS (Duval
& Pinault 1986: 267-269). Lambert (2002: 280) also records LUGE (perhaps in
an oath) appearing as LUXE.
The confusion of Latin G and C is not surprising, given the great formal simi-
larity between the two letters. But the confounding of G and X would seem to be
owing to an overgeneralization, among some Gauls, of the use of X as a variant
of G and C. While these examples are drawn specifically from the Gaulish use
of Latin letters, they do, however, make a runic adapters confusion of gamma
and ch seem not implausible, given that an orthographic convention stemming
from Gallo-Greek usage succeeded in spawning the same confusion amongst at
least some Gauls.
It might be further noted here that overgeneralization born of orthographic confu-
sion is in fact not uncommon in a number of writing systems, and one might cite
here a latter-day English example as well: by analogy with such words as night,
knight, might, light, right, sight, the word site is not uncommonly misspelled as
sight. Similarly in Old English, the adjective suffix -ig came to be pronounced
[i:], and so the pronoun h could also be written hig by analogy, even though no
/g/ was ever in the word.
The obvious choice to represent Germanic /z/ would have been zta [z] rather
than ps [ps], but the phonetic value of both these letters included a sibilant, and
formal considerations argue strongly that the adapter chose ps for Germanic /z/.
The confusion about the Greek values for zta and ps here is understandable
given that there does not appear to have been a /z/ in the Gaulish language, and
it is conceivable that the brogue of a Gaulish intermediary may have created
uncertainty for the runic adapter concerning the precise pronunciation of the
name zta and thus its value, for the name zta in a Gauls mouth doubtless was
apt to come out sounding like [se:ta], reminiscent of a present-day German pro-
nouncing English eyes as [ais]. And as such then, sta and ps were equally fit
to represent Germanic /z/, and so, not illogically, the latter rather than the former
letter became the source for the z-rune.
The obvious choice for Germanic /f/ would have been ph [pf/f], but the absence
of the phoneme /f/ in Gaulish would seem to have caused some confusion, and
the adapter ended up reversing the Greek values, equating vau with [f] and ph
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edmund fairfax
with [w], and employed the two characters accordingly. Labiodental [f] is not so
remote from labiovelar [w] in terms of place and manner of articulation. Indeed,
in the archaic Etruscan alphabet, a digraph consisting of vau and hta was used
to represent [f], while vau alone represented [w] (Wallace 2008: 21), and this
Etruscan convention also figured in the Venetic and early Latin writing systems
(Marinetti 2002: 47). There is, moreover, an example of f and v (= [w]) being
confused in the post-conquest Gaulish use of Latin letters: in the Larzac inscrip-
tion, the name Vlatucia also appears as Flatucia (Lambert 2002: 263), which
may be an indicator that distinguishing between [w] and [f], and thus the Latin
letters v and f, was problematical for some Gauls, and one might then expect the
same with regards to ph and vau.
This kind of alphabetic substratum, wherein an adapter has been influenced
or from the vantage-point of the ultimate source has been confused by the
intermediarys usage, is not unknown to the history of literacy. In the earliest
form of the Latin alphabet, for example, the letter c, derived ultimately from
gamma, was used (alongside k from kappa and q from qoppa) to denote /k/ and
not /g/, contrary to what one would expect if the adapter had had Greek usage
as his only source. This inconsistency is commonly attributed to the influence
of Etruscan usage, the latter the likely intermediary in the spread of the Greek
alphabet to the Latins. The Etruscan language, unlike both Latin and Greek,
did not have voiced occlusives, and in Etruscan usage, the voiceless stops /p, t,
k/ were represented by p, tau, and gamma/kappa/qoppa respectively; bta and
delta were dead letters not used in writing Etruscan inscriptions, although
still part of the early Etruscan abecedarium until roughly 500 BC. Moreover,
some early Etruscan scribes, particularly in southern Etruria, established con-
ventions governing the use of gamma, kappa, and qoppa, whereby gamma was
used before epslon and ita, kappa before alpha, and qoppa before upslon.
This system is also evident in the earliest Latin inscriptions (Wallace 2008:
17-18, 22-23).
The use of the reflexes of gamma, kappa, and qoppa as positional variants to
represent /k/ in the early Latin alphabet then is clearly a vestige of Etruscan us-
age, at odds with the Greek. Yet bta and delta, dead letters in Etruscan usage,
were in fact taken over into the Latin alphabet with their original Greek values.
Such inconsistency points to confusion on the part of the adapter: while at least
some original Greek values were evidently communicated to the Latin adapter,
as Latin b and d suggest given the great influence of Greek culture on Etruscan
life, it is reasonable to assume that some Etruscans could speak and write Greek
Etruscan conventions trumped Greek usage in certain places.
200
After this first step in the selection process of the runic adaptation, gamma, zta,
ta, x, omicron, qoppa, and san would have been unused, and understandably
so, since they were redundant in the adaptation. And at this point, two Germanic
phonemes the semi-vowel /j/ and the consonant /h/ were yet unaccounted
for, with none of the unused Greek letters corresponding to these values. So in
the second step of the adaptation (column d of fig. 1), the adapter would have
assigned new phonetic values to two of the unused characters so as to give
orthographic representation to the two aforesaid Germanic phonemes. Judging
from the similarities in letter-shapes, x was to represent Germanic /j/, and ta
Germanic /h/. And the adapters choices here seem to have been determined by
sounds in the Greek names. The name for x, pronounced [ksi:], contains the
vowel [i:], which is the vocalic counterpart of [j], the Germanic value assigned
to it. ta had centuries earlier been pronounced hta, with the value of [h], and
perhaps knowledge of this historical detail, communicated by a knowledgeable
informant, motivated the assigning of the similar Germanic /h/ to this letter. The
case of ta will be discussed further in section 6 below.
A direct parallel for such recycling can be found in the Greek adaptation of the
Phoenician alphabet, wherein a number of Phoenician letters were reassigned new
phonetic values, in violation of the original alphabet, in order to give orthographic
representation to some Greek phonemes that had no obvious counterpart in the
source, and the new Greek values were based loosely on the sounds figuring
within the Phoenician letter-names. Thus lep, whose name contained the sound
[a], was used to represent the Greek vowel /a/ (alpha). The letter h, whose name
contained the sound [e], now represented Greek /e/ (epslon). The letter yd, with
its initial sound [j], became Greek /i/ (ita), the latter sound being the vocalic
counterpart of the former, and this derivation is directly parallel to the runic use
of x for Germanic /j/ (as is the use of Aramaic yod [j] to represent both [i] and [j]
in the Pahlavi adaptation of the Aramaic script). The character ww was appar-
ently the basis for not only Greek /w/ (vau) but also the vowel /y/ (upslon). The
character ayin was used to represent Greek /o/ (omicron), for it is possible that
the initial pharyngal consonant induced a back quality of the following a which
the Greeks could identify with their o-sounds (Allen 1994: 171).
Left over now in the runic derivation were gamma, zta, omicron, qoppa, and san,
and these redundant characters could have easily been jettisoned. The adapter, how-
ever, evidently wished to take over the alphabet as a whole, even at the cost of redun-
dancy. Such a conservative desire, it might be noted, is not uncommon in adoptions
and adaptations of writing systems, evident, most notably, in the Greek adaptation
of the Phoenician alphabet and the Etruscan adaptation of the Greek alphabet.
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The runic adapter then kept the five aforementioned letters as well, and to
three of them, he assigned new values as well, based on the sounds figuring in
the Greek names. Omicron was to represent the sequence /ng/ (= [g]), as the
striking formal similarities suggest. This sequence of nasal-velar consonants
occurred in several Germanic words of high frequency (e.g. *fingraz finger,
*hringaz ring), and the new value seems to have been suggested by the nasal
and velar consonants in the Greek name omicron.
In doing so, the adapter created redundancy in the alphabet, for the n-rune
and g-rune could have potentially been employed instead to represent the same
sequence. And thus he departed from the systematic approach evident up to this
point wherein each single letter represented only one phoneme, and a different
phoneme, independent of considerations of length. This redundancy and anomaly
is exactly parallel to the earlier creation of the anomalous and redundant Greek
letter x from Phoenician smek. In a similar attempt to take over an entire al-
phabet and at the same time make meaningful use of redundancies, two sounds
from the character-name smek the velar and sibilant consonants apparently
suggested the value for the corresponding Greek character, yet the combination
of kappa and sigma / san could easily have been used instead.
Examples of such redundancy and inconsistency wherein sociolinguistic con-
siderations outweigh linguistic ones are fairly common in the history of alphabet
adaptations. One further example might be cited here:
in Bolivia the Aymara allophones of /u/ and /i/, [o] and [e] respectively, came to be represented
in writing because Spanish orthography includes the letters <o> and <e> which correspond to
Spanish phonemes. Leaving these sounds unrepresented in Aymara would be, from a strictly
linguistic viewpoint, systematically reasonable because allophones are morphophonologi-
cally predictable. However, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, to some Aymaras the Aymara
orthography would look defective and less dignified if it had fewer letters than the prestige
language Spanish. (Coulmas 1989: 227)
The phonetic value that the runic adapter assigned to zta has hitherto been
somewhat of a mystery, for the rune does not occur in any meaningful inscrip-
tion before around the fifth century AD, that is, in any datable inscriptions that
can indicate a phonetic value. On the basis of later decipherings then, such as
that from the fifth-century Caistor-by-Norwich bone, the rune is often ascribed
the value of [i(:)] and transliterated as , although other less likely values have
been proposed (Beck 2003). Such inscriptions, however, postdate the invention
of runes by several centuries, and so one might reasonably ask if this was the
original phonetic value.
202
A few considerations suggest that at its inception the -rune had the value of
[ei], a diphthong that had been inherited from Proto-Indo-European but which
later became [i:] in Germanic, thus merging with the phoneme //. This shift
would certainly have made a rune with such an initial value altogether redundant,
ensuring its shadowy existence in later runic writing, since the regular i-rune
could then represent the resultant sound instead. Moreover, when assigning new
values to recycled letters, the adapter, as I have argued, seemingly attempted to
have the new value at least similar to a sound in the Greek letter-name, and the
first vowel in the name zta may have suggested the value posited here, in the
same way that earlier the second element in the Phoenician letter-name h had
suggested the value of [e] for the corresponding Greek character (epslon).
And there is proof that the diphthong /ei/ had not yet merged with // before the
end of the BC period, at least in some varieties of Germanic. A second-century-AD
Latin inscription from the Rhineland bears the name of a Germanic goddess, to
wit, ALATEIVIAE, here in the Latin dative singular (CIL:XIII/8606). The string
-TEIV- is undoubtedly cognate with OE Tw, OS Tu, OHG Zu, and ON tvi / tr,
all from PG *teiw- (< PIE *deiw-). The same root appears in the older inscription
from the Negau B Helmet HARIGASTITEIVA, inscribed in North Italic letters
and dated broadly to some time between 450-100 BC (Nedoma 1995: 16-23).
A further etymological consideration adds force to the equation. While it is true
that the acrophonic runic names are extant from a period centuries later and could
have easily been introduced after the initial creation of runes, and while it also
true that the name yew for the -rune is extant only in the Old English runic
tradition (oh / w), wherein this rune could also denote a consonant rather than a
vowel, Bammesberger (1994: 7-8) has shown that the reconstructed root *hw- (>
OE oh) could yield, in a vrddhi formation, a thematic derivative with /ei/, to wit,
*eigw- (> *eiwa-, > *wa- > OE w). If the acrophonic names of later times do
indeed date back to the initial creation of runes and/or slightly thereafter, then a
word denoting yew and containing an initial /ei/ could have been available.
The adapter then, in his evident conservative wish to use up all of the Greek
letters, created now two instances of redundancy in the runic alphabet, for the
diphthong /ei/ could just as easily be represented by the e- and i-runes written
successively, in the same way that the sequence /ng/ could just as easily be re
presented by the n- and g-runes written successively. This anomalous creation
of a sign for one single Germanic diphthong, with none for its counterparts /au/,
/ai/, or /eu/, is parallelled by the Gaulish use of the Greek digraph , beside , to
represent the Gaulish vowel //, with only one single alphabetic means to represent
each of the other monophthongs.
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edmund fairfax
Only gamma, qoppa, and san would have been left now. Even though he had
already had ph represent Germanic /w/, the adapter redundantly allowed gamma
to represent the same sound as well, for the name gamma with its velar and labial
consonants was at least a faint echo of labiovelar /w/. And it is not altogether
implausible that the adapter may have misremembered and proceeded from a
garbled form of the letter-name, for /g/ is the expected value here. Evidently
unable to find any other value for qoppa and san without doing violence to the
names, he went ahead and redundantly let these characters represent /k/ and /s/
alongside kappa and sigma. And in doing so, he unwittingly mimicked the Greek
adapter of the Phoenician alphabet, who likewise had ended up with two letters
for k and two for s.
In summary then, four of the original twenty-seven Greek characters (zta,
ta, x, omicron) were assigned altogether new values, while a further four letters
(gamma, ph, ch, ps) were assigned values that are different but phonetically
related to the original ones, and the three counters vau, qoppa, and san were as-
signed phonetic values acrophonically.
It should be stressed that this is not a dramatic departure as far as adaptations
go. The number of phonetic changes here is comparable to that in the Greek
adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. Of the twenty-two original Phoenician
characters, three letters (the sources of alpha, epslon, omicron) were assigned
altogether new values, while another eight (hta, thta, ita, x, smek, san,
qoppa, sigma) were assigned values that are different but phonetically related
to the original ones.
Nor should the use of the three counters vau, qoppa, san as bona fide letters
in the runic derivation be seen as implausible. In the Gothic adaptation of the
Greek alphabet, vau was used as both a counter and a letter with the phonetic
value [kw], while qoppa and san continued as counters only (Boaert 1950;
Ebbinghaus 1979). Likewise in the Coptic adaptation of the Greek alphabet,
qoppa functioned as both a number and a letter with the phonetic value of [f],
while vau and san stood for numbers only, and in the Georgian adaptation of
Greek letters, all three counters functioned as both numbers and letters with a
phonetic value (Gamkrelidge 1994: 27-28, 52-53).
5. The Adaptation of Forms
With the Greek letters now adapted to the Germanic sound system, the question
arises of which precise forms of the Greek characters the adapter could have
204
possibly adopted, epigraphic or cursive. Many former attempts to derive runes

from a pre-existing alphabet have implicitly assumed that an epigraphic form was
the model, presumably since the extant early runic inscriptions are epigraphic in
nature and the rune-shapes themselves generally fail to show the curvilinearity
one would expect to find with a cursive script, although some variant rune-forms
do show curved lines.
Cursive writing appears to have been the norm in the workaday world of
later antiquity. The Vindolanda tablets, for example, which give a slice-of-life
picture of workaday Latin writing circa 90-125 AD, show the near exclusive
use of cursive letters. More compelling is the fact that the two runes corre-
sponding to kappa and x can be derived more easily from the cursive forms
than from the epigraphic counterparts, while the rest of the runes could be de-
rived indifferently from either the cursive or epigraphic forms. In no instance
is one forced to derive a rune only from an epigraphic character. The reason-
able conclusion to draw herefrom is that the creator of runes based his forms
mainly or at least partly on cursive Greek letters, and I have assumed this in
the derivation.
Nor is it unheard of for cursive letters to be the source for derived characters,
as is shown by the Gothic adaptation of the Greek alphabet (Boaert 1950;
Ebbinghaus 1979), and the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, wherein
there is a little evidence that at least three of the Greek letters were based on cur-
sive rather than epigraphic letters (Jeffery 1990: 18). In the Glagolitic adaptation
of Greek letters (Cubberley 1996: 346-347), as well as in the Pahlavi adaptation
of Aramaic letters (Hale 2004: 764), the derivative forms are likewise thought
to stem from specifically cursive characters.
In the runic adaptation, these Greek forms then were clearly altered, and the
question of why naturally arises. The traditional view is that the letters were
adapted to make them suitable for inscribing on wood, such that horizontal and
curvilinear lines were avoided in favour of rectilinear uprights and diagonals.
Some more recent runologists, however, have doubted this woodgrain explana-
tion. Heizmann (2010: 16), for example, writes that
die Tatsache, dass sich gerade unter den ltesten Funden durchaus Objekte aus Holz be-
finden und wir in dieser frhesten Phase auch auf runde Runenformen stoen, ist ein ernst
zu nehmendes Gegenargument.
It is, of course, possible to engrave any shape of line on stone, metal, or wood,
but I can say from personal experience, having experimented with inscribing
runes on wood with a jackknife, that there is something to be said in favour of the
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edmund fairfax
woodgrain theory: it is simply easier and thus faster, especially for the unskilled,
to work in more or less straight lines when inscribing on hard surfaces, above
all when attempting to form fairly small letters, that is, around two centimetres
high. And with wood, especially heavily-grained wood, the results are clearer
when one avoids lines parallel to the woodgrain.
This manner of formal adaptation to material is evident in other scripts as
well. The szkely rs or rovsrs (Old Hungarian script) and its likely source,
the Turkish Orkhon script, both show the same angularity, and both are extant
in inscriptions on hard materials. And one might even mention here graffiti key-
scratched into the metal or glass of subway-cars today, where curvilinear lines
are likewise often simplified to angular strokes.
The presence of curvilinear lines in early runic inscriptions, moreover, is not
a valid counter-argument to the woodgrain theory. The occasional appearance
of block-capitals in modern cursive handwriting to give an analogy does not
invalidate the view that cursive writing was an adaptation of form to medium,
developed to ease and quicken the act of writing on soft smooth surfaces; rather,
two different forms have been simply mixed together, each originally designed
for a different use. Furthermore, while all the runes are extant in angular form,
not all can be found with rounded lines. And when rounded strokes do appear,
they are, at least to my knowledge, restricted to lines with crooks, to use the
word in Antonsens sense (2002: 52-54); thus there are no rounded forms of a
or m, for example.
So why then, in an alphabetic adaptation, favour upright and diagonal rec-
tilinear strokes, but not altogether exclude curvilinear lines or even the odd
horizontal stroke? The intermittent appearance of rounded lines amidst a pre-
dominantly angular style is perhaps best seen as a reflection of the origin of
the runic letters: in the adaptation of characters to hard surfaces, some of the
original curvilinearity was preserved, while variants that were fully angular
came to exist side by side, perhaps in imitation of the stylistic possibilities
available in the host alphabet, for, as noted above, Greek characters, even in
Gaulish usage, had both curvilinear and rectilinear epigraphic variants as well
as cursive forms.
In the third stage of adaptation then (columns e-f of fig. 1), with the characters
adapted to the Germanic sound system and the cursive forms available as models,
the adapter altered the shapes of the letters so as to avoid curves and horizontal
lines. And in doing so, he seems to have shown a marked preference for a begin-
ning downstroke and mainly directional branching (i.e., rightward branching with
dextrograde variants, leftward with sinistrograde).
206
It should be noted that this hasta+coda-principle, to use Brekles term, was

already a marked phanemic tendency in the history of the Greek and Latin al-
phabets. As Brekle (1994: 136) writes,
intuitively it has been recognized for a long time that many letters seem to look in one
direction; i.e. in the direction of the writing; this intuition corresponds again nicely with the
hasta + coda principle. Among the topologically possible types of vertical-axial asymmetry
(compare e.g. the structure of <N>, <S>, and <Z> we can identify one type as the one which
we have called hasta + coda structure. Its historical development and varying quantitative
distribution pervade both the phanemic and kinemic grammars of our alphabet (with both
majuscules and the minuscules); the ideal case is such that vertical line segment (hasta) has
one or two additions (coda(e)) in the direction of writing (deviations from this rule can be
explained historically in a principled way). The correlation between letter-internal vectoriality
and the direction of writing can be explained on technical grounds: from the early beginnings
of our alphabet onwards we find many lettershapes that show a more or less vertical initial
or final downstroke (= kinemic hasta) which regularly appears as an initial phanemic hasta.
This holds true for the Phoenician-Greek-Roman line of development, but not e.g. for the
Hebrew Quadrata.
It appears then that the runic adapter independently extended this principle of
formation to a few other letters.
These principles then the avoidance of curves and horizontal lines and the
preference for a hasta+coda-structure account for the apparent shift of the
characters for a, d, e, , l, p (column e of fig. 1), such that the letters may begin
with a perfectly upright downstroke and then proceed with diagonal branching
strokes. The characters for , p, and three-twig e have been rotated all the way
onto their sides. With cursive kappa, there was a tendency to separate the bystaves
from the main upright and for the upright to disappear altogether, a development
reflected in the shape of runic k, which likewise appears to stem from a cursive
form shifted onto its side.
It has often been remarked that the characters for ng, j, and k in early runic
inscriptions were commonly written smaller than the other letters, and this prac-
tice too appears to be due ultimately to Greek influence. In Greek cursive writ-
ing of the pre-Roman period, omicron ist meist kleiner als die gewhnlichen
Buchstaben (Gardthausen 1978: II/180), and this smaller form of omicron could
also appear as an epigraphic variant in the Hellenistic period (Guarducci 1987:
81). A number of the Gaulish inscriptions in Greek letters also show this small-
sized omicron (Lejeune 1985a: 22, 67, 72, 84, 106, 111, for example). It would
appear then that in recycling omicron as runic ng (5), the adaptor took over the
original small size as well. Given the formal similarity between runic j (j) and
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edmund fairfax
ng (5), and in turn between runic k (k) and j (j), the same small size appears to
have been extended to j and k as well by analogy.
Former attempts to derive runes from a Mediterranean alphabet have usually
assumed that there was only one prototypical form for each character, whence
variant forms developed later, after the initial adaptation. This assumption seems
to be particularly common with proponents of the Latin-thesis, presumably since
monumental Latin has very few variant forms (Mees 1997: 133) and thus can-
not constitute a direct source for some of the runic variants. And some runologists
have attempted to establish lines of chronological development, such that staved
k (K), for example, is thought to be a later development from staveless k (k), a de-
velopment supposedly postdating the fifth century AD (Odenstedt 1990: 41-49).
Such linear chronological constructs, typically based on the uncritical accept
ance of dubious inscriptional datings, have been rightly taken to task, by Williams
(1992) and Antonsen (1995; 2002: 149-167), for example. Or as Imer (2011:
178) puts it,
it is very clear that the runes [circa 160-560 AD] do not follow one strict and unified chronological
development, where one original grapheme was replaced by one single grapheme after another,
as other researchers have suggested (Odenstedt 1990; Birkmann 1995). On the contrary, various
graphemes appear in the same chronological period, presumably following the individual rune
writers ability or the nature of the material on which the inscription is found.
In fact, a number of the elder-futhark variants can easily be derived straight from
variant Greek cursive forms and were doubtless part and parcel of the initial
adaptation. The two versions of runic e, one with a crooked top (e) and one with
a flat top (E), most likely descend from two versions of cursive epslon, to wit,
the one bearing three twigs and the other consisting of two strokes. Likewise, the
large- and small-pouched versions of find their counterparts in the short and
long cross-stroke variants of thta. Just as cursive rh had an open and closed
variant, so too does the runic counterpart. And cursive upslon had two versions,
one with a staff and one without, and these the runic adapter appears to have
taken over as well.2
2. Her above-cited generalization notwithstanding, Imer (2011: 178) claims that
only [a] few runes show distinct traces of development within the Late Roman
and Migration Periods, which must be ascribed to chronological difference.
These are the e-, s-, and k-runes, and to a lesser extent the j-rune.
208
At the conclusion of this process of formal adaptation, the adapter would

have ended up with a number of characters easy to confuse (column f of fig.
1): a, r, and small-pouched would have been nearly identical to each other;
w-from-gamma and l would have been identical to each other; the same with d
and large-pouched ; likewise crooktop-e, m, and s-from-san; h and n nearly so;
k-from-qoppa and w-from-ph more or less identical. And so in the final stage
of the adaptation (column g of fig. 1), the adapter further altered nine of these
characters in order to disambiguate.
To distinguish a from r and small-pouched , the upper pocket of a was trans-
formed into parallel diagonal branches. The form of a with a closed pouch shown
in column e of fig. 1 is in fact extant in first-century-BC Gaulish Greek-lettered
coin legends, as shown in row a of fig. 2 (Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998:
11). It is also possible, however, that the runic adapter, rather than altering the
closed-pouched version of a, had in fact been exposed to the open variant of the
same letter, an archaic form of the character, which is attested not only in Latin
and North Italic inscriptions but also in Greek- and Latin-lettered Gaulish coin
legends, as shown in rows a and b of fig. 2 (Colbert de Beaulieu & Fischer 1998:
11). In this case then, the less common variant may have been chosen in order
to sidestep possible confusion with r and small-pouched .
In column f of fig. 1, I have also assumed that a tail was added to both the
open and closed versions of r, again so as to sidestep confusion with a and small-
pouched . Rh had a similar treatment in the Gothic adaptation of the Greek
alphabet, and Ebbinghaus (1979: 28) writes in this connection that Wulfilas r
drawn without a tail comes rather close to Wulfilas w, and the tail can easily be
explained as an addition to keep the two letters distinct.
As in the case of a, it is also possible, however, that the runic adapter, rather
than altering a handed-down tailless form, had in fact been exposed to a tailed
variant, which he used instead in order to avoid confusion with small-pouched
. It should be noted that in some of the pre-Milesian Greek alphabets, rh had
a short tail, rather like the modern Roman r (row c of fig. 2), and this tailed
The derivation presented in this article, however, argues against such a claim with
regard to the first three mentioned runes. Indeed, given the smallness of the corpus
and the existence of a substantial number of finds that cannot be precisely dated within
the broad timeframe of 0-550 AD, any claims concerning chronological development
for this period must remain highly moot. Indeed, to posit that a runic variant must be
late merely because it does not appear in any inscriptions datable to an earlier phase
begs the question, when so many inscriptions cannot be precisely dated.
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version did come back into usage roughly during the timeframe in question. As
Guarducci (1967: 1/382) writes,
al principio dellet imperiale, il rho si arricchisce qualche volta di una piccola appendice
che, in alcuni luoghi della Grecia, era gi comparsa in et arcaica. Questa form analoga alla
erre (R) latina; non si pu, anzi, escludere che proprio lesempio della R latina abbia favorito
la nuova comparsa del rho di tipo R nelle iscrizioni greche.
[at the beginning of the imperial age, rh is sometimes enriched with a small tail which, in
some parts of Greece, had already appeared during the archaic period. This form is analogous
to Latin ar (R); thus, it cannot be excluded that the very example of Latin R favoured the new
appearance of an R-type rh in Greek inscriptions.]
This version was clearly known in first-century-BC Gaul, extant in Latin-lettered

Gaulish coin legends (row c of fig. 2), which may at times show a mix of Latin
and Greek letters, as noted above. Moreover, an idiosyncratic version of this
tailed variant is also found in Greek-lettered Gaulish coin legends, here without
the upper pouch (row d of fig. 2); the Gaulish counterparts in Latin letters (row
e of fig. 2) show comparable forms with or without an upper pouch (Colbert de
Beaulieu & Fischer 1998: 11-14).
To distinguish w-from-gamma and l, the branch of the former character was
turned back on itself to form a pouch. To avoid confusion between d and large-
pouched , the former letter was augmented with a mirror-image of itself; that
is, the letter was doubled and then the second reversed and joined to the first.
This alteration may have been suggested by a Gaulish convention whereby thta
= [ts] was at times redundantly doubled, e.g. o for o Metsilos,
apparently to reflect an ongoing phonological shift from [ts] via perhaps [tss] to
[ss], cf. the Latin spellings Meil-, Medsil-, Messil-, cited in Lambert (1994:
44). Thus, the use of doubling in the Gaulish contrasting dental pair ()
may have been the inspiration for (> Q) (> d).
To keep separate crooktop-e, m, and s-from-san, the diagonal top lines of m
were lengthened to form an x-like configuration between the two uprights, while
s-from-san was rotated onto its side. To sidestep confounding h and n, one of the
staves in the latter letter was dropped altogether and the diagonal branch then
placed athwart the remaining staff, although given the existence of a single-staved
form of n in Hellenistic Greek and Gaulish epigraphy, as shown in columns a-b
of fig. 1, runic n may possibly derive directly from this single-staved variant.
To distinguish k-from-qoppa and w-from-ph, the upper diamond of the former
letter was opened, which in turned necessitated inverting u to avoid confusing
the latter two letters, and in doing so, the left branch of the u-variant with a staff
210
was straightened so as to be one with the staff, in keeping with the preference
for a beginning downstroke.
The rune derived here from ph has at times been interpreted as a variant form
of runic ng or alternatively as a bindrune consisting of the runic symbols ng and
i joined together (Grnvik 1985). Upon these latter readings, doubt has been cast
by more recent finds, notably the Illerup lanceheads: the rune in question here
is most convincingly interpreted in the Illerup inscriptions as w (Stoklund 1987:
286-287, 298).
It might be noted here that at least two further variants were added fairly early
on in the history of runic writing. S-from-san developed four- and five-crooked
versions, a development that had independently happened as well centuries ear-
lier in the archaic Greek period. W-from-gamma also developed a large-pouched
form, presumably by analogy with the small- and large-pouched versions of , or
perhaps out of confusion, and this resulted in the same D-like form having two
different phonetic values. Moreover, as mentioned above, most crooks could also
be formed as a bow, presumably as a vestige of the original cursive form of the
characters, and this further increases the number of allographs.
In summary then, eight of the original Greek letters (alpha, delta, epslon,
thta, kappa, lambda, p, san) were reoriented, and at least six forms (gamma,
delta, m, n, qoppa, upslon), and possibly two others (alpha, rh), were further
altered to disambiguate. It should be stressed that formal changes in the interests
of disambiguation are also assumed in other writing traditions, as in the develop-
ment of minuscule Latin letters, for example (Brekle 1995). Likewise, Schumacher
(2007: 335) notes in reference to the changes to the letter-shapes in the Camunic
alphabet that die Umbildung einzelner Zeichen scheint dabei eine ganze Ketten
reaktion weiterer Umbildungen nach sich gezogen zu haben. Moreover, the
formal changes in this runic derivation should not be seen as unrealistically
excessive or farfetched. In fact, compared to other alphabetic adaptations, such
as the Glagolitic and Georgian adaptations of Greek letters, the degree of formal
alteration to the original characters proposed here for the creation of runes is quite
small and, more importantly, can be shown to be principled.
6. Knowledge of Earlier and Regional Forms
As mentioned above, the creator of runes chose to have Germanic /h/ represented
by the Greek letter ta, which had earlier been called hta and had formerly re
presented the sound [h], a value very close to the Germanic phoneme. (It is unclear
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whether Germanic /h/, or more accurately /x/, had developed the allophone [h] by
the time in question; see, for example, Voyles (2008: 47).) Given that the adapter
in reassigning new values to Greek letters seemingly strove to respect original
phonetic values as much as possible, or at least sounds in the Greek letter-names,
as seen above, it may be that the runic adapter had access to historical linguistic
and orthographic knowledge from a well-educated informant.
Certainly such knowledge would not have been impossible in the ancient world.
Surviving inscriptions and manuscripts from earlier periods would have been
available then through which a later observant reader of Greek or Latin might
have become aware of earlier conventions. As Groningen writes (1963: 9),
there have always been scholars who, by natural disposition or by practice, were more or
less expert in reading old manuscripts. The Greek man of letters was often obliged to search
for his sources and data in old books. The oldest literary texts themselves were, for a large
part, not written in the Milesian alphabet which became normal later on. For a transposition
into other Greek characters () a certain skill in reading old handwritings
was necessary.
And such knowledge of earlier forms could even manifest itself in archaizing
inscriptions:
Older masons often continued or even revived the use of letter forms, formulae, layouts, and
spellings characteristic of earlier periods, sometimes even mixing them indiscriminately with
contemporary letters forms. This tendency may represent an attempt to make inscriptions look
older and more venerable than they really were. For example, from Hadrians reign onward,
there was a general archaizing tendency in society, resulting in the use of archaic letter forms
in inscriptions. (McLean 2005: 43)
In connection with Latin as well, it is amply clear that knowledge of earlier

alphabetic forms, orthographic conventions, and linguistic details did continue
into later periods. Allen (1996: 11, 27-28, 31) notes, for example, that the au-
thor Rufius Festus Avienus, writing in the second century AD, attributes to the
earlier writer Quintus Ennius (239-169 BC) the convention of letter-doubling
to show consonantal length in Latin. Priscianus Caesariensis (5th-6th centuries
AD) cites Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC), who recorded that the writer
Lucius Accius (170-c. 86 BC) wished to follow the Greek practice of writing
/ng/ and /nk/ as gg and gc. And according to Velius Longus (2nd century AD),
Verrius Flaccus (died 14 AD) is said to have favoured using a half-m (an in-
verted v) to mark the weakened pronunciation of a final m followed by a word
beginning with a vowel.
212
And such historical information, concerning even other writing-systems, could

be imparted to students, as Quintilian makes clear in his first-century-AD peda-
gogical treatise Institutio Oratoria (I.iv.6-16). Indeed, Quintilian believed it the
duty of a good grammaticus to communicate such knowledge, for discat puer,
quid in litteris proprium, quid commune, quae cum quibus cognatio [a boy must
learn both the peculiarities and the common characteristics of letters and must
know how they are related to each other], and grammatici saltem omnes in
hanc descendent rerum tenuitatem, desintne aliquae nobis necessariae litterarum
[all grammatici will at any rate not be above such minutiae, whether certain
letters necessary to us are absent] and an rursus aliae redundent [whether on
the other hand certain are superfluous]. The teacher might, for example, speak
of Q, cuius similis effectu specieque, nisi quod paulum a nostris obliquatur,
Coppa apud Graecos nunc tantum in numero manet [q, which, though slanted
slightly more by us [than k], resembles both in sound and shape qoppa, now used
by the Greeks only as a number], or note that quae ut vocales iunguntur aut
unam longam faciunt, ut veteres scripserunt qui geminatione earum velut apice
utebantur, aut duas [those which are linked together as vowels, either make one
long vowel as the ancients wrote, who used doubling of vowels as (we would)
a macron or two [i.e. a diphthong]] (1933: I/65-69).
Let us return to the case of ta, bearing in mind that Gaulish does not appear to
have had an /h/ (Lambert 1994: 43-45) and thus the closest approximation would
have been the velar fricative [x]. In order to reconstruct how extraneous knowledge
of earlier and even regional forms may have been influential in the runic adapters
treatment of ta, one might imagine then an educated Gaul informing his Germanic
pupil that this letter is called ta and is used, like epslon, to represent the sound
[e] the Gaulish rather than true Greek values but it used to be called hta and
represented the sound [x] a possible Gaulish approximation of Greek [h] and
the letter is used to represent [x] in the Latin alphabet again, a possible Gaulish
approximation of Latin [h]. And this knowledge then later influenced the adapter
perhaps when recycling ta, prompting him to use it to represent Germanic /h/ (=
[x]), after epslon instead of ta had been chosen to represent Germanic /e/, and
once ch, the only other logical choice for /h/, was no longer available. Interest-
ingly enough, ta was also the source for /h/ in the Gothic adaptation of the Greek
alphabet, and historical information may have been at play there no less.
This imagined pedagogical scenario is not at all unlike the discussions of letters
and orthographic conventions found in Quintilians handbook, discussions which
he indicates were supposed to take place between teacher and pupil. Indeed, it
is apparent that knowledge of earlier alphabetic forms could live on even in the
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Germanic north, for the inscriber of the Viking-Age Rk stone inscription made
limited use of older outmoded runic shapes in a few places (Palm 2010: 33).
Archaizing runic inscriptions are also known from the Mediaeval period (Barnes
2012: 120-121). And still today, of course, students learn about older or regional
orthographic conventions: in Dutch, old ae for modern long a; in Swedish, old fv
and qv for modern v and kv; in English, British -our versus American -or.
Nor should it be seen as inconsistent that the runic adapter could have known
about the earlier name and value of ta and yet exhibited a shaky command of the
basics. Beginning students of the German language today may very well learn in
their first few lessons that Eszett (ess-zed), the name of the letter , reflects the
formal origin of the character, namely, that the letter was modelled on a blacklet-
ter ligature consisting of a long s and small z. Yet such students, especially
English-speaking ones, not uncommonly confuse at first the digraphs ei and ie.
Here common classroom experience shows that it is not at all implausible for a
neophyte to be privy to historical information about a writing system and yet at
the same time be prone to make mistakes in connection with some of the most
fundamental aspects.
The derivation of runic h from ta, it should be stressed, does not in any way
hinge crucially upon the idea that the adapter knew the earlier name and value
of ta. Since the Greek alphabet had two e-letters, only one of them needed to
be used to represent Germanic /e/, and this would have left the second, ta, free
to be reassigned any new value. The fact that the new value is very close to the
earlier Greek value seems to me more than just a coincidence, however, above
all when arguably the new values assigned to other recycled letters are related
phonetically to segments within the Greek names.
I suggested above that some knowledge of regional usage in this case, a
few details about the Latin alphabet may have been communicated to the
runic adapter as well, details which may have influenced a few of the adapters
choices. As discussed earlier, legends from extant Gaulish coins make it clear
that in the timeframe circa 100-30 BC, that is, already in the decades before
the Roman conquest, several parts of Gaul were familiar with both the Greek
and Latin alphabets. Thus it is possible that the adapters decision to use ta to
represent Germanic /h/ was influenced by knowledge of both the Latin value as
well as the older Greek one. Likewise, the adapters preference for a less com-
mon variant of rh and of alpha may have been strengthened by the knowledge
that these variant forms were also found in the Latin alphabet as used on Gaulish
coins. Indeed, as noted above, the revival of tailed rh in the Greek world more
generally appears to have owed something to Latin influence.
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7. The Adapter
In more than one place above I have alluded to apparent but explicable confu-
sion or alternatively to independent-mindedness on the part of the runic adapter.
And indeed, further examples can be cited which point to either unfamiliarity
with or a mistaken understanding of Greek/Gaulish conventions, or alternately
a deliberate decision not to follow the same.
It has often been noted, for example, that the direction of writing in runic
inscriptions is largely free, in contrast with the regular left-to-right direction
found in the Gaulish and Hellenistic Greek traditions, or the Classical Latin for
that matter. The failure of early runic inscriptions to conform to this convention
is likely nothing more than an independent manifestation of early literacy, the
upshot perhaps of the runic adapter having been originally exposed to mainly an
alphabetic string. In other words, he had been little acquainted with the reading
and writing of continuous text, in Greek or Gaulish, and therefore never absorbed
the principle of exclusive left-to-right direction. (Or if he did, he at least never
bothered to pass on the convention to subsequent users.)
It might be noted here that when the Greeks first adopted their alphabet circa
800 BC (to give a conservative estimate), the Phoenicians regularly wrote from
right to left and very seldom used boustrophedon or left-to-right arrangements,
yet the Greeks at first did not follow the Phoenicians slavishly in this but em-
ployed left-to-right and right-to-left directions in their writing, at odds with the
then Phoenician orthographic norms.
We may therefore infer that neither the Semites who taught, nor the first Greeks who learnt,
were concerned with much more than the basic elements of instruction in the art of writing.
(Jeffery 1990: 45)
As Swiggers writes (1996: 267-268),
such a situation can be typical of the initial stage of any adapted writing system[for] such
early stages are characterized by the slow emergence of scribal tradition and by geographic
and individual diversity in the absence of a fixed norm.
Even the earliest phases of Phoenician writing itself similarly employed left-to-
right and right-to-left directions before settling on the latter arrangement. Here
too, it might be further mentioned, the Venetic alphabet is at odds with its source,
the Etruscan alphabet, for while Venetic inscriptions run indifferently sinistroverse
or dextroverse for no apparent reason (Marinetti 2002: 40), Etruscan inscriptions
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go from right to left with few exceptions, regardless of period or area (Wallace
2008: 24).
While both Greek and Gaulish regularly distinguished long from short conso-
nants by letter-doubling, neither had any fully systematic means to distinguish
long from short vowels. It would seem then that the runic adapter generalized
non-designation of length: if the vowels are not marked for length, then why
should the same not hold for consonants? And this avoidance of letter-doubling
manifested itself rather rigorously in runic epigraphy, even across word-boundaries,
again in contrast to Greek and Gaulish usage, and Latin as well.
It is well known that in runic inscriptions, a nasal consonant is usually not
written when found directly before a homorganic obstruent: e.g. widuhudaz
(Himlingje rosetta-fibula) for Widuhundaz (cf. ON hundr, Gothic hunds, OE
hund < PG *hundaz). This convention appears to go back ultimately to the
Greek/Gaulish practice of writing the sequences /ng/ = [g] and /nk/ = [k] as
(gg) and (gk) respectively, e.g. Gaulish IC for Kongen
nolitanos (Lejeune 1985a: 20), and Greek for nkyra. Given that letters
were not normally doubled in runic writing, the sequence gg = /ng/ would end up
becoming simply g, hence the essential contradiction in runic writing of having a
distinct character for /ng/ (thanks to a recycling of omicron based loosely on the
sounds in the Greek letter-name) and an adapted convention whereby /ng/ could
also appear as g. And it would seem that, deliberately or mistakenly, such nasal
non-designation was generalized to apply more broadly, that is, not just before
g but also before any homorganic obstruent.
The Greek/Gaulish practice of employing the digraphs and o to represent
monophthongs could have been imitated by the runic adapter but was not. As
mentioned above, there was, moreover, no perceptible phonetic difference in
Gaulish usage between omicron and mega, or between epslon and ta, the
members within these two sets being in free variation, although extant Gaulish
inscriptions show a decided preference for omicron over mega, and for epslon
over ta. In choosing the seldom-used mega rather than the common omicron
as a sign to represent the Germanic /o/, the runic adapter was somewhat at odds
with Gaulish usage.
All of the departures from the original writing system outlined above not to
mention the alteration to the very order of the letters themselves suggest that
the runic alphabet was the upshot not of an adoption but rather of an adaptation
and that the Germanic adapter was not at home in written Gaulish or Greek (or
any other written language), for otherwise one would have expected greater corre
spondence between the source and runic writing. Indeed, it would appear that the
216
adapter had learnt or at least remembered the bare minimum, that is, mainly the
shapes of the Greek letters and their phonetic values as filtered through a Gaul,
and in unwittingness or forgetfulness or misunderstanding of further conventions
(or even indifference thereto), he partly followed his own fancy in creating a script
for his mother tongue, as one might expect from a no-guff warrior learning his
letters outside a formal classroom setting.
It might be noted here that alphabetic adaptations which depart noticeably
from their source seemingly in an attempt to create something distinctive are not
unknown. One might cite the Georgian or Glagolitic alphabets: both are gener-
ally believed to stem from Greek letters, yet the final results are quite distinctive
despite their origin. The letter-shapes in the Armenian alphabet have been so
radically altered that the system seems as much a novel creation as an adaptation.
Indeed, the desire to disassociate through alphabetic novelty finds a most extreme
manifestation in the Cree alphabet, created from mainly shorthand symbols in
order to avoid using the Latin script with its perceived stigma of colonialism. In
this regard, Coulmas (1989: 226-227) writes that
as the most visible items of a language, scripts and orthographies are emotionally loaded,
indicating as they do group loyalties and identities. Rather than being mere instruments
of a practical nature, they are symbolic systems of great social significance which may,
moreover, have profound effects on the social structure of a speech communityLanguage
attitudes such as the desire to have an orthography which makes the language in question
graphically similar to another or, conversely, makes the language dissimilar to another,
may be irrational but they are social facts which often strongly influence the success of a
proposed system.
The view of the runic adapter offered here stands in opposition to the notion at
times implicit in the literature that the runic adapter must have somehow been a
specialist, that is, someone with expertise in language and literacy and it is
thereby implied must have proceeded in a most scholarly and scientific manner
when creating the runes. But such an assumption is unfounded, for the runic writ-
ing system departs noticeably from conventions found in all the Mediterranean
writing systems, not just the Greek, in ways that betray a lack of scientific rigour
on the part of the adapter (e.g., the representation of /ng/). But this is hardly
exceptional in the history of alphabetic adaptations, wherein inconsistencies,
seemingly needless departures from the original, and redundancies can be found,
examples of which have already been cited above. Moreover, the fact that the
runic alphabet is based on phonemes, or at least significant sounds (Schwink
2000: 246), is no proof of a specialist at work: learning an alphabet as used to
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represent phonemes or significant sounds in the source language would auto

matically suggest a similar analysis to an adapter in his treatment of his own
mother tongue. Indeed, the reconstructed phonemic inventories of Gaulish and
Germanic for this timeframe are not so greatly different that the task of isolating
significant sounds would not be difficult.
It should be stressed that the inclusion of such an impressionistic element
as partly whimsical independent-mindedness need not constitute a drawback to a
reconstructed derivation, so long as such elements can be plausibly accounted for.
Thus in assessing a derivation, one must, on the one hand, carefully distinguish
between a possible lack of procedural rigour on the part of the adapter, and, on the
other hand, an investigators lack of plausible explanation for whatever decisions
the adapter did in fact make. It is the latter and not the former which renders a
reconstruction doubtful. And this distinction has often gone unobserved in former
discussions of runic origins, wherein plausible explanations can be passed over
because they fail to show a procedural rigour that is unwarrantedly assumed for
the adapter. It should not be forgotten that an alphabet is also a sociolinguistic
phenomenon with a human factor. As Coulmas (1989: 227) notes, with refer-
ences, it has been observed more than once that the users of orthographies do
not always agree with linguists in evaluating the suitability of an orthographic
system for a given language.
I have assumed throughout that there was only one runic adapter. The no-
tion that the runic script was created by a group of people (Odenstedt 1990:
169), or was the upshot of different independent adaptations, is unlikely. If the
creation of runes had been the handiwork of a committee, then one would again
not expect to find as many needless departures from the original in the deriva-
tion as there are (for example, runic g from ch rather than from gamma, runic
z from ps rather than from zta, runic f from vau rather than from ph), for any
oversights stemming from one individual would likely have been noticed and
corrected by others. And there are few known cases of alphabets created by com-
mittee. Nothing in the runic corpus, as already discussed, hints that writing was
so important to Germania that the invention of a writing system merited such
an elaborate procedure. And if runes had been adapted independently in differ-
ent places, one would reasonably expect then to find markedly different schools
of writing, especially regionally based, but there is no evidence in support of
such a scenario, for the runic writing in the earliest inscriptions betrays in fact a
markedly homogenous character.
And it is most certain that the adapter had been taught the alphabet, even
if he did not master it fully or follow it slavishly. The notion that an illiterate
218
individual could simply observe characters on objects, gather them together,

and without any instruction create a mainly phoneme-based alphabet that coin-
cidently shares a large number of features with ancient Mediterranean alphabets
is altogether implausible. Instructive here is a consideration of the efforts spent
by an illiterate Cherokee named Sequoyah in the 1810s to create the Cherokee
alphabet based on or rather partly inspired by the to-him-unintelligible char-
acters found in print. He first developed a logographic system, which he ulti-
mately abandoned in favour of a syllabary of originally 86 characters, some
of them being form-wise straightforward adopted Latin letters, others deriva-
tives thereof, and several outright inventions, but none of them corresponding
phonetically to any formal equivalents in the Roman alphabet. In his untutored
groping, he unwittingly retraced in part the history of literacy logograms to
syllabary to alphabet without ever having reached the final stage (Foreman
1938). One might reasonably expect similar results for the creator of runes had
he not been taught.
8. The Latin Thesis
The Latin theory, which argues that runes stem directly from the Roman alpha-
bet, seems to enjoy at present the most widespread popularity, even though no
convincing hypothetical derivation of runes from that alphabet has yet been
offered. More recent proponents in favour of the Latin thesis are Odenstedt
(1990), Seebold (1991), Rausing (1992), Quak (1996), Williams (1996, 2004),
and Lund Hansen (2003).
Unlike the Phoenician, Archaic Greek, and North Italic theses, the Latin
presents no historical hurdles. The likely timeframe for the creation of runes (the
first century BC and AD) saw a marked expansion of Roman power in western
Europe as well as the spread of the Latin language and Roman alphabet, such
that the latter came to be on the doorstep of Germania.
At first sight, a good number of runes can be straightforwardly equated with
Latin counterparts, but when attempting a derivation in a principled manner, as
used above with the Greek thesis, one comes up against unsolvable problems with
some of the letters. Thus, as Williams (1996: 211) rightly puts it, one cannot
easily derive the runes from the Latin alphabet. To clarify this difficulty, I
present a hypothetical derivation comparable to that given above for the Greek,
following the same principles, so that the shortcomings of the Latin thesis and
the advantages of the Greek can be more easily demonstrated. The derivation
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presented here for the most part agrees with earlier ones, a convenient overview
of which can be found in Odenstedt (1990: 159-167).
As in the case of the Greek thesis, Gaul would seem to be the most likely me-
dium in a hypothetical spread of Roman letters to Germania. The Latin alphabet
was known in Gaul already before the Roman conquest and supplanted Gallo-
Greek letters by roughly the middle of the first century AD, as discussed above.
A confusion of letters denoting velars, which was a conspicuous feature in the
Gaulish usage of the Latin alphabet, arguably figured in the creation of runes,
and this points to a Gaulish intermediary. And, of course, geographical proximity
also favours a Gaulish connection.
Columns a-b in figure 3 show the common forms of the monumental and cur-
sive Latin letter-forms as used in Gaul during the period in question, based on
the corpuses of Lejeune (1985b) and Lambert (2002: 367-385). I have restricted
the number of variants to those most similar in appearance to possible runic
counterparts. By the middle of the third century BC, the Latin alphabet had re-
duced its inventory from 26 to 21 letters; the characters y and z were readopted
later from the Greek alphabet, apparently in the Augustan period (30 BC-14AD),
bringing the total up to 23 (Meyer 1973: 28). The letter z is in fact found in the
corpus of Gaulish Latin-lettered inscriptions. As mentioned earlier, X in Gaulish
usage normally had the phonetic value of [x]. Gaulish continued to use thta to
represent [ts], although a barred D could also be employed instead. I have simply
placed thta/barred-D at the end of the alphabet; its precise position in the Gaul-
ish abecedarium need not concern us here.
Column c shows the first stage of the adaptation, the takeover of letters with
their original phonetic values; column d the second stage, wherein new values
are assigned to letters that were initially passed over; e the reorienting of letters
in order to produce a form with a beginning upright and rightward branching (the
hasta+coda-principle); f formal alterations in order to avoid curves and horizon-
tals; g further alterations in the interests in disambiguation.
To begin, the adapter would have gone through the string and selected those
characters whose phonetic values more or less matched up with the phonemes
or significant sounds of Germanic. Thus A, B, C, E, F, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R,
S, T, V, X, and would have been taken over in a straightforward manner (col-
umn c of fig. 3). One might argue that the Gaulish confusion about the values
of velar letters influenced the adapter, resulting in X rather than G representing
Germanic /g/. One might argue as well that D was used to represent /d/ and /
to represent //; the Gaulish phonetic value of the latter letter [ts] was not so far
from the Germanic sound, and thus / would still be an obvious choice for
220
Figure 3
221
edmund fairfax
Germanic //. The two letters then would have undergone the same development
as in the Greek thesis: D was doubled, the two elements merging as a single let-
ter, in order to sidestep any possible confusion with , and the inspiration for
this alteration of / (> Q) DD (> d) may have been the use of doubling in
the Gaulish contrasting dental pair () D. The rune e can be seen to derive
from a rotated E, as in the Greek thesis, and E from a common variant of e used
in Gaul (ii). In the latter case, the upper connecting line in the runic form can be
explained as perhaps an alteration added to sidestep any possible confusion with
runic i. As in the Greek thesis, the x-like configuration added to the reflex of M
can be explained as a disambiguating addition to avoid confounding e/E and M.
Again, as in the Greek thesis, the single-staved form n can be accounted for as
either an alteration of Latin N to sidestep confusion with H or as a derivative of
a single-staved variant. No convincing explanation, however, can be given for
the addition of the tails to o (> o) and p (> p), and the inversion of both L (> l)
and V (> u).
One would expect Latin Z to be used for Germanic /z/, but runic y = /z/ is
wholly unlike the Latin character form-wise; the rune, rather, looks much more
like Y, while Z is more or less identical to $, but the latter runes value of /ei/ has
no relation to that of the Latin character. Even if another of the proposed values
for runic $ is accepted instead (Beck 2003), the derivation here nonetheless
remains problematic, since no convincing explanation can be given for either
of these anomalies, nor for the extension of the upright staff in Y to yield y, the
latter more or less identical in form to ps.
The remaining three Latin letters G, K, and Q are redundant in such a deriva-
tion. At this point, unrepresented are the Germanic phonemes /j/ and /w/. In the
second stage of the derivation then (column d of fig. 3), the adapter would have
recycled two of these redundant letters and assigned new values to them. G, which
one might argue is rather similar form-wise to runic j, would now be used to
represent /j/. The cursive form of Q is rather similar to runic w, and it would seem
reasonable to assume here that Q might be recycled to represent /w/.
Only one Latin letter (K) now remains unused, with one runic character (5)
still unaccounted for. While one might argue that the phonetic values of these
two signs ([k] versus [g]) share at least the feature of velar, the forms of the two
letters have very little in common, and it seems most forced to try to derive 5
from K. The latter character was subject to little variation, and thus it seems most
unlikely that 5 can be derived from perhaps some lost variant form of K.
If 5 is not derived from K, then where did it come from and why was it cre-
ated? As discussed earlier, the rune is redundant, since potentially n and g could
222
have been used together instead to represent the sequence /ng/. Such redundancy
suggests that the rune was in fact the result of an attempt to use up a left-over
source letter so that the alphabet could be taken over as a whole. Positing that
5 is an independent derivative of o has little to recommend it, given that the
phonetic values of the two have nothing in common, and the question of why
the redundancy of 5 was introduced remains unanswered.
And if 5 is not from K, then what happened to the Latin letter? It would seem
most odd to jettison the letter as a redundancy and then create needless 5 from
nothing, when the former character could have been recycled and assigned this
new value. Moreover, the shape of Latin O is more similar to 5 than to o, and one
must wonder why the former rune rather than the latter is to represent /o/, if truly
derived from a Latin letter. To argue that 5 is from kk, with the second character
of the pair flipped and joined to the first, is hardly compelling: if two characters
are to be combined to represent /ng/, why would one not use n and g instead,
which have a clear connection with the phonetic value of the rune in question?
In contrast, 5 and o can be easily accounted for as the reflexes of omicron and
mega in the Greek thesis.
Likewise, the rune $ remains most problematical. Despite its formal similarity to
Latin Z, it has no phonetic connection to the value of the latter sign, and given that an
adapter would need a sign to represent Germanic /z/, there is every reason to expect
Latin Z to be taken over with both form and phonetic value intact. The value /i/,
apparently from an earlier /ei/, argues that this redundant character was the upshot
of the adapters attempt to use up a needless letter from the source alphabet so that
the alphabet could be taken over as a whole. The letter can easily be accounted for
in the Greek thesis but remains an inexplicable anomaly in the Latin.
Thus, a handful of runes cannot be derived from Latin letters in any principled
manner. This has been acknowledged even by proponents of the Latin thesis:
Odenstedt (1990: 166), for example, concedes that the inventors motives for
allocating particular Germanic sound values to Roman capitals will probably
never be fully clarified.
In attempts to sidestep such lack of motivation in the derivation, some propo-
nents have downplayed the importance of phonetic considerations and focussed
narrowly on form. Williams (1996: 214, 217), for example, states that shape
alone determines the formal origin of the runes, and thus posits the following
problematical derivations: p (/p/) < K, 5 (/ng/) < O, w (/w/) < P, o (/o/) < Q, m
(/m/) < E, e (/e/) < M, $ (//) < Z, y (/z/) < Y, Q (//) < D, and d (/d/) < ?. The
lack of phonetic correspondence between derivative and source here is brushed
off with the assertion that
223
edmund fairfax
when the traditional alphabetical order was rearranged into the fuark sequence, there was
probably a mix-up of certain graphemes, whereby five or six sets of runes were switched
pairwise.
Williams (2004: 267) later revised this view:
I should have realized that if the switching process were non-arbitrary, it must have taken
place simultaneously with the process of creating the runes as we know them. Whoever
was responsible for the mix-up obviously knew very well which runes corresponded to
unnecessary letters in the Roman alphabet, and the subsequent switch must therefore have
been intentional.
Of the problematical forms listed above, only K, Q, and Y, however, are unnec-
essary letters to Germanic even in Latin, Y and Z are not unnecessary since
they were used in writing Greek loanwords containing /y/ and /z/ but still no
reasons for the other changes in values are given, nor a source for the rune d.
And thus his derivation remains groundless.
Such shortcomings have likewise bedevilled other attempts to derive runes
from Latin letters, wherein problematical K is typically discarded altogether,
because of the difficulty of deriving any runic letter therefrom, and two to seven
runes are taken to be novel inventions (Odenstedt 1990: 159-167). As already
discussed in section 1 above, the idea of invented letters is problematical for a
runic derivation, given the existence of the redundant runes 5 and $, which argue
that the source alphabet had an excess rather than insufficient number of charac-
ters. Ultimately, the notion of invented letters here is a last resort symptomatic
of a forced derivation and, at the same time, of an unfounded reticence among
some runologists to accept the idea that letter-shapes as well as phonetic values
can be significantly altered in an alphabetic adaptation.
9. Closing
The historical, graphic, and linguistic considerations presented here offer strong
support for the view that runes stem directly from a cursive form of the Greek
numerical alphabet, most likely adapted around the middle of the first century
BC, by way of neighbouring Gaul, where the same alphabet was in use at the
time. The adapter may have been a well-born Germanic mercenary active there,
and there he will have learnt his letters perhaps informally from a literate Gaul.
A not insignificant number of departures from the source suggest that the creator
224
of runes had little meaningful acquaintance with written Gaulish or Greek or at

least forgot or largely ignored Gaulish/Greek conventions in freely deriving an
alphabet for his mother tongue.
111 Quebec Avenue

Toronto ON
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the twisting path of runes

THE TWISTING PATH OF RUNES

There are about 170 Camunic inscriptions in the Sondrio-Camunian alphabet.

little to recommend the view that runic ng represented merely // or [] rather

in disciplinam conveniunt et a parentibus propinquisque mittuntur. Magnum ibi numerum

In light of the foregoing considerations then, it is perfectly plausible that the

A likely medium then for the transfer of alphabetic knowledge to Germania

A further possible medium was a Gaulish expatriate that ended up in Germania

Certainly then, an educated Gaulish hostage or exile in Germania could conceivably

3. Preliminary Phonological and Alphabetic Considerations

for a fricative pronunciation comes from the 1 C. AD in Pompeian spellings

Ebbinghauss reconstruction of the likely process involved in the Gothic adapta-

4. The Phonological Matchup

way around (TOC/TOG or TOCIRIX/TOGIRIX, among the Sequani)]. Lambert

5. The Adaptation of Forms

possibly adopted, epigraphic or cursive. Many former attempts to derive runes

It should be noted that this hasta+coda-principle, to use Brekles term, was

2. Her above-cited generalization notwithstanding, Imer (2011: 178) claims that

At the conclusion of this process of formal adaptation, the adapter would

This version was clearly known in first-century-BC Gaul, extant in Latin-lettered

6. Knowledge of Earlier and Regional Forms

In connection with Latin as well, it is amply clear that knowledge of earlier

And such historical information, concerning even other writing-systems, could

As Swiggers writes (1996: 267-268),

represent phonemes or significant sounds in the source language would auto

individual could simply observe characters on objects, gather them together,

8. The Latin Thesis

Williams (2004: 267) later revised this view:

of runes had little meaningful acquaintance with written Gaulish or Greek or at

111 Quebec Avenue

Psychology, Physiology, Linguistics, and Semiotics, 129-139. Dordrecht: Kluwer

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