The idea of recording all the runic inscriptions of Sweden dates back to the early 1600s when Johannes Bureus laid the foundations for Swedish runic research. Only two older works can lay claim to the title of corpus editions: these include the collection of woodcut prints depicting more than eleven hundred Swedish rune-stones published in 1750 and known as Bautil, and Johan Gustaf Liljegren’s Run-urkunder of 1833 which transliterates all the runic inscriptions known at that time. In the early 1880s, the National Antiquarian Hans Hildebrand laid plans for what would become the collected series Sveriges runinskrifter and in 1900 the first fascicle on the runic inscriptions of Öland was published. The immense contributions made from the late 1920s onwards, primarily by Elias Wessén, Sven B. F. Jansson and Elisabeth Svärdström, have ensured that most of the Swedish provinces have today been covered, although a few provinces, mostly in Norrland, are still lacking and many of the earliest volumes require supplementation and revision predominantly because of new finds. The volumes in the series normally comprise two parts consisting of text and plates. Each inscription that belongs to the genuine runic tradition is given its own number and the inscriptions are usually ordered according to geographical principles within each province.
The first corpus edition of Norwegian runic inscriptions appeared as part of Ole Worm’s Monumenta Danica and contained only fifty items. In 1864, Sophus Bugge began working with runes and later conceived the idea of producing a modern corpus edition. Norway’s inscriptions with older runes (NIæR) appeared under his name and that of his successor, Magnus Olsen, from 1891–1924; the work is outdated and has been supplanted by supranational editions of the older futhark corpus. Magnus Olsen began publication of Norway’s inscriptions with younger runes (NIyR) in 1937–41 and was assisted after 1948 by Aslak Liestøl, who was responsible for the Norwegian Runic Archives. The five volumes published by 1960 were initially intended to be a complete corpus publication. However, archaeological excavations after the fire at Bryggen (‘the [Hanseatic] Wharf’) in Bergen in 1955 ultimately produced almost as many new inscriptions as had been published in the first five volumes and since then there have been many more new Norwegian finds. At least six further volumes will be needed to accommodate this additional material; one has appeared and another is nearing completion. The series is well illustrated, extensively indexed and in general restrained, although in the first five volumes Magnus Olsen could on occasion indulge in speculation and even flights of fantasy.
The history of corpus editions of the inscriptions in the older futhark dates back to the 1800s. The editions diverged into two strands on the basis of the linguistic and geographic classification of the texts: the Scandinavian “Ancient Norse” inscriptions, which were always treated as part of the corpus of the Scandinavian countries, and the “Gothic” and “German” ones, later also referred to as the “Continental”, “South” or “East Germanic” inscriptions, which from Rudolf Henning’s 1889 edition on were the main focus of German-language runological study. Wolfgang Krause brought both strands together in his comprehensive edition of one hundred of the main older futhark inscriptions in 1937. His revision, supplemented by new finds and with archaeological contributions by Herbert Jankuhn, appeared in 1966 as Die Runeninschriften im älteren Futhark. This at the time complete corpus edition has long been considered the standard work on these inscriptions. The large number of finds uncovered in the following years was for a long time only presented in individual publications or summarised in collections with a limited focus. Not until the new millennium were the first steps taken towards a new edition to succeed Krause’s 1966 edition, initially in the form of the digital collection of the Kiel Rune Project, subsequently as planned editions by Göttingen and Kiel universities, and finally within the scope of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences project Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS).
The inscriptions of England and Frisia attest to the expansion of the older rune-row, chiefly with a set of additional vowel runes. Further developments in England from the later 600s suggest a systematic reform of the writing system. The extant corpus of English epigraphical inscriptions contains over 100 objects, although the large number of coins with runic legends raises problems for any attempt to collate all the material. While a number of handlists or catalogues have been produced over the years, there has been no fully detailed corpus edition until the forthcoming volumes produced by Gaby Waxenberger. The corpus of inscriptions associated with Frisia or (Pre-)Old Frisian language is much smaller, comprising up to twenty-four objects. The status of this material as a distinctly “Frisian” corpus in contrast to the English one has been challenged. Like the English inscriptions, the Frisian ones have been described and studied as a group in many publications, but a dedicated corpus edition has only recently been published by Livia Kaiser. The present article includes a historical overview of the published work on these corpora leading up to the recent corpus editions, and discusses some of the methodological difficulties in defining the corpus. It concludes with a summary of the arguments for studying them as a single corpus defined at least in part by innovations in writing practice around the North Sea.
This article begins with brief mention of two significant early attempts at editing Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the British Isles. It goes on to explain how the modern scholarly corpus editions of these inscriptions came about. It describes the genesis and content of the four works that together present and elucidate the total corpus: The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney (1994), The Runic Inscriptions of Viking Age Dublin (1997), The Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions of Britain (2006) and The Runic Inscriptions of the Isle of Man (2019). The circumstances in which each of these editions was conceived and brought to fruition are discussed, and the way they are structured and set out is examined in some detail. The advantages and drawbacks of different ways of presenting the runic material are considered, though no overall conclusions on these questions are offered.
The runic inscriptions from Eastern Europe lack a dedicated corpus edition, but here the best attempts to describe these inscriptions are discussed. Unfortunately, the main work in this field, Elena A. Mel′nikova’s Skandinavskie runičeskie nadpisi (‘Scandinavian runic inscriptions’), lacks a clear method for distinguishing between runic, rune-like and non-runic inscriptions. For this reason, many of its inscriptions should be treated with great caution and some are here deemed not to be runic.
While there are a number of scholarly databases which contain information about runic inscriptions, none of them can be considered to represent a corpus edition in the true sense of the word. Such databases are, however, important sources of a limited amount of core information concerning the corpus or corpora they include, and as a rule they build on and at times even supplement or correct information in the printed corpus editions. There exist three scholarly, supranational databases important to runology and publicly available at the present time. These are: (a) the Scandinavian Runic Text Database (Samnordisk runtextdatabas), (b) the Kiel Runendatei (database of the Kiel Rune Project), and (c) the RuneS database (of the research project Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages). The origin, development and future prospects of each are reviewed here, along with their strengths and advantages as well as their weaknesses and limitations.
In Bo Ralph’s recent book on the Rök rune-stone he interprets the sequence sakum (sᴀɢwᴍ) as sāgum ‘we saw’ (Ralph 2021, 907–13), a lexico-morphologically unobjectionable solution. He rejects (pp. 148–54, 899) the previous and almost universally accepted interpretation sagum ‘we say’. This short contribution establishes that sagum is a possible variant of the ninth-century Runic Swedish verb sægia. It belongs to an ē/ja-conjugation where some forms are inflected according to the former paradigm and others to the latter. In Old High German, Old and Middle Dutch, and Old English descendants of both *sagjan and *sagēn are attested. Given the presence in Old Scandinavian of the 2nd and 3rd person present singular segir and the perfect participle sagaðr, which both are ē-inflections, there is reason to expect that even more ē-forms once existed in Old Scandinavian. The sequence sakum (sᴀɢwᴍ) in the Rök inscription may therefore represent sagum, a 1st person form of sægia ‘say’. Whether this or Ralph’s interpretation is the best depends on the contextual understanding of the text.
The rune-stone U 670 is badly damaged, and was when it first was recorded in the 1600s. Its inscription was read by Elias Wessén as follows: …--n : -…s… eftiʀ : aist : sun : sin : kus na-…. This may be interpreted in Runic Swedish and translated as: … æftiʀ Æist, sun sinn …, “… (this stone) in memory of Æistr, his son …”. Wessén suggests that the final six runes may represent a prayer, beginning Guðs nāð(iʀ) …“The grace of God …”. This short notice shows that no such prayer could be expected on a Viking Age rune-stone. Instead, the author interprets this runic sequence as yet another epithet of the deceased: Kūss ne[fa](?) “the nephew(?) of Kūss”. The name Kūss ‘hunch(back)’ written kus is known from three other rune-stones (U 380, U 640, and U 648), all within 30 kilometers of U 670, and all of which quite possibly refer to the same man.
Johan Bureus’s manuscript F a 14 in the Royal Library of Stockholm contains a formerly overlooked reading of the lost rune-stone from Småland Sm 140† which allows the inscription to be reconstructed as follows (the names in the English translation rendered by what would be modern Swedish equivalents): [: eun:iutr : raisþi ... ...asa : eftiʀ suain : faþ... ...], Øyniutr/Æiniutr ræisþi [stæina þ]essa (?) æftiʀ Svæin, fað[ur] … , “Önjut/Enjut raised these stones (?) in memory of Sven, his father … .” Bureus’s drawing of the inscription incorporates five additional runes, allowing us to read the verb raisþi in a form found in only nine other inscriptions from Småland. In addition, the reading þessa suggests the possibility of the stone being part of a monument involving two or more stones. The original location may indicate that it stood by a bridge, although this is less certain.
A late eleventh-century rib-bone from the Slavic town foundations of Starigard/Oldenburg in Ostholstein, Germany, is inscribed on both sides with runes. One side contains the smutty text Kūkr kyss kuntu, kyss! while the other bears the perplexing runic sequence abi : bataba : iestaba, which has not yet been definitively interpreted. The author suggests that this should be read as Api bant apa ī ēnstapa, “An ape bound an ape in bracken”, an apparently nonsensical text with end-rhyme, which makes more sense if we bear in mind that the word api can also mean ‘fool’. It is probably simultaneously a writing exercise and syllable wordplay, indicating that the alliterative text on the other side of the bone also belongs to a learning context.
In inscriptions with Dalecarlian runes from the early 1500s, the same orthographic principles are applied that were used widely during the Viking Age in Scandinavia, where a voiced and a voiceless consonant with the same manner and place of articulation could be represented by the same rune. It is highly unlikely that the Viking Age type orthographic system of consonants so consequently applied could have been derived from a contemporary learned runic tradition. It simply seems to be an archaic feature preserved from the Viking Age, throughout the medieval period and into the early 1500s in Dalecarlia.