Williams,
Henrik. Read what’s there: interpreting Runestone Inscriptions, Futhark international journal of runic
studies: Lancaster, 2005.
It has been assumed that a lot of
rune stone texts have writing errors. Some times catching these writing errors
are obvious, for example in words like ‘raise’ or ‘stone’ but runologists also
look for and find spelling errors in runes writing things as obscure as names.
These writing mistakes take the form of erroneous runes, (using one rune when a
different rune would be more appropriate) arbitrarily omitted runes, and
superfluous runes.
The subject
of miscarving has long been contentious, philologists have a tendency to want
to assume few, or no miscarvings. They try to explain the phonetic misspellings
by suggesting some form of ancient grammar and language that we simply can’t
understand at this point. In 1913 Otto von Friesen conducted a study on some
forty runestone inscriptions in upland among which he found between thirty and
forty certain or probably miscarvings.
It is the
opinion of Henrik that this negative attitude by otto Von Friesen and many
other runologists has given runology a bad name. early runologists such as carl
save, Richard dybeck and George stephens did a great deal of work towards
publishing or illustrating rune stones, they did a great deal of damage also
though by adding their own very fanciful translations. This can in part be
forgiven because of the great difficulty and ambiguity of runestone
transcribing, but transcribing should be conducted more scientifically.
Henrik
feels that many of the early runologists were under the impression that they
understood how to write runes better then the earliest runic inscribers. This
idea and way of transcribing was probably something left over from
neo-colonialism, the idea that the native population does not understand the
proper way of doing things. The fact that Friesen would look at a runic
inscription and decide that it was transcribed poorly is quite preposterous,
there is so little we understand of the proto Germanic that was spoken, and the
way that runic values changed over time.
The danger
of misinterpretations regarding miscarvings is we trick ourselves into judging
the competence of runeographers, which has huge implications of our view of
rune readers, runic literacy, and rune function. If we want to understand the
people who carved the runes, and the culture they lived in, we must try to look
past words that we regard as miscarved and try to find meaning beyond that.
Scholars
run into the danger of taking a word that they suppose to be a miscarving, and
adding their own meaning to it. This is obviously dangerous because it changes
the entire meaning of a text.
There is a
monumental stone dating from the late Viking age with an inscription bearing
the word tekr it has been assumed by
scholars that this is a miscarving and probably means trekr. Judith Jesch (1998) suggests that trekr is a word draengr, having strong connotations of an in group,
and intimacy within that group. The danger with this supposition is that it is
a supposition based off of what we assume to be an error. It is a hard thing to
make a historical argument based entirely off of what we think is an error.
Other scholars have suggested that the word is a delabilized version of ‘alert,
adept’ giving an entirely different meaning to the text.
A number of
runic sequences have been interpreted by assuming that the orthography is not to be trusted.
Even though there are clear examples of misspellngs and errors in runic
transcriptions, we should remember that we don’t have an answer book, we must
exercise care when interpreting runes, and not fall into the trap of assuming
mistakes, there is still too much that is just unknown about proto Germanic and
the writing tradition of the time.
