Origin of the Runes (A New Intro.)
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- Опубліковано 2 вер 2021
- A new introduction to the very controversial question of where the rune alphabet came from.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawford.com/ (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
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Jackson Crawford’s translation of Hávamál, with complete Old Norse text: www.hackettpublishing.com/the... or www.amazon.com/Wanderers-Hava...
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Audiobook: www.audible.com/pd/The-Saga-o...
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As of Feb. 2023 this video (from Sep. 2021) does not reflect all of my most current views. I have a current summary of what I think is the most likely derivation for the rune alphabet (and its individual letters) at ua-cam.com/video/NwEIqeJaNLY/v-deo.html
that tree branch getting all fresh with your hat really rustles my jimmies
The things this man will go through just so that we get that view.
Hahaha that was funny
Damn lucky tree branch.
at 16:00 it pulls itself out of the way ;)
@@wiredrabbit5732 "just the tip"
Excellent work, Dr. Crawford! I agree: northern Alpine alphabets make for the most plausible origin of the Runes.
Remember to land the helicopter dirty side down, Latin boy! 😇😇😇
@@mjackstewart rude
I love that researchers who find stuff like this are basically history detectives.
One of the oldest runic inscriptions ever found has just been announced in the Norwegian media. Krister Vasshus at the University of Bergen has a welcome break-down of the major points of the find in a Twitter thread that starts at twitter.com/KristerVasshus/status/1615236531689607169
For what it's worth ... while maybe you didn't know about the Alpine connection the other year, and it was hard to learn about unless you spoke Italian or German, you have sure as heck made it easy for English-speaking audiences to learn about this. If that knowledge had been inadvertently bottled up before, you've popped the cork off that bottle.
Your translation of the Havamal spells it out: "At the end I peered down, I took the runes---screaming I took them---and then I fell."
Beyond that it is a mystery and thus my inquiry is satisfied.
I applaud your reinvestigation into the origin of the Runes and look forward to tagging long via this channel. Thank you, as always, for sharing.
From the uncomfortable chair of my lifeless work environment, I'm wishing you...all the best.
Having watched this, I can now watch some cat videos with a clear conscience. I have eaten my vegetables.
You made me smile:)
I literally have to write and present an abstract on runes in my uni this is convenient
I really do appreciate the backdrops you choose for your videos. I have always been in awe of rivers, from their sound, to the channels they cut through stone over time. Wyoming does truly look beautiful, and I can see why it has such a special place in your heart.
I always enjoy hearing a well thought out disagreement to common scholarly opinion, and even as someone who has no linguistic background, I can appreciate many of your arguments thanks to your clear explanations of such a deep subject.
Superb content as always Dr. Crawford.
Your analysis suggests to me a contact point such as an alpine or south German trading post where perhaps a Celtic tribe using an Etruscan-derived script were the most common traders, but where there were some Roman and Greek merchants as well. one interesting idea I have had is that the Ing rune, admittedly from its later attested Anglo-Frisian form, derives from the Greek practice, also copied by Wulfila, of just doubling G to indicate a velar nasal, though the Anglo-Frisian Ing would be two G runes stacked on top of each other rather than written side by side. I can see that rune then developing a variant that lops off the upper and lower arms, which could explain why the diamond-shaped ing rune is often written smaller than the others.
You always have the best classrooms. 💚
The way you said ‘came upon’ made me play woodstock in my head.
“Came upon a child of god, he was walking along the roooad”.
I am definitely intrigued. Thanks for the clear explanations.
Such an interesting mystery to explore. Thank you for the insight!
We need to see a video on that six-shooter in the intro
you can amplify the volume for specific frequencys so that your voice is audible over banground noise, might mess with the senic noises though
Excellent material….. takk for det!
Der sehr gut ist.
@@swyjix Das ist sehr gut?
Awesome backdrop on this one, Jackson!
you just keep on being interesting. thank you
Something I learned from reading Looijenga is that our ancestors loved mirroring runes, flipping runes and so forth. I think the ᛞ that we see in runes for example is an already mirrored D. Perhaps the same happened for ᛗ and ᛈ. M mirrored from left to right and P from up to down. And ᛚ and ᚢ are then flipped upside down L and U.
Sidenote, would be great if we get an older find of the Futhark, I feel like the oldest Futhark is probably a few hundred years older than the oldest Futhark inscription we know of.
Thank you🌻
Thankyou for doing this work
Might a future video in this series cover the rune shapes in regards to the manner in how they are written? (What I'm referring to is how the runes seem to be composed of only straight lines, versus round lines present in some Roman or Greek letter shape and whether this is related to, or implies the way that they were inscribed)
I too would appreciate that being covered; I thought I'd heard that theory, like cuneiform, they were mostly straight out of practicality.
Lacking pen, paper and ink, and having knives and axes in abundance, the straight lines of Runes makes sense for the Germanics.
Great video, the branch or vine poking in your ear was driving me nuts.
Another excellent video, complete with a persuasive theory!
Also about the possible connection between Proto Celtic and Old Norse and the Runes, the letter in the middle of the word for mother is Identical in both Proto-Celtic and Old Norse.
On the systematic argument re V and I: there would be nothing to stop someone adopting the Roman alphabet deciding those distinctions were important for Germanic (just as the Romans *eventually* decided they needed G). But the arguments for an Alpine alphabet + maybe bits of other things make a lot of sense nevertheless.
I can understand the Etruscan alphabet not passing on O - If the Etruscans pronounced it as 'U' then the North Italians and Lepontic Celts may have thought "Oh no, here we go again" and not considered it useful. There's a very old layer of Celtic loan words in Germanic so a model in something Lepontic-ish is really tempting to my uninformed eye.
Answering questions with questions if honest and properly scientific - vastly preferable to people pretending they know the unknowable.
Very interesting! Thanks!
The runes deeply fascinate me and I appreciate your insight
Another very insightful video.
I love the Etruscans.
Possibly a fully pre indo european people that obviously had a lot of influence on our now mix of Indo Europeans and native European population.
Who else has their full focus on the branch , thinking “ how can you not notice that!? It’s like a naughty branch
Hes tapped into the branches ancient knowledge i knew it
Languages and their dialects are so fascinating to listen to, and as a swede it is very interesting to hear old norse. About runes and old norse, I assume you, Jackson Crawford, may be familiar with a swedish dialect called älvdalsmål and the runes called dalrunor?
That's usually called Elfdalian in English and is considered to be a separate language from Swedish.
@@julianfejzo4829 Älvdalsmål is the Swedish word for Elfdalian.
fascinating indeed
Doesn't that tree in your ear bother you? ahaha Love your videos!
is there a list or a "compilation of all of these? Going through the videos, I cannot tell what the order is or if I have all of them. It would be helpful to have a list of all of the these videos so we can watch them all. This is very interesting and informative. Thank you for doing this!! HAIL!!
Fascinating topic and nicely put together.
But, uh...Da Fuq is it with that tree twig in your ear?
Just take a step away from the tree.. one step...lol. Love your videos!
What everyone else said...and I love the new intro!
I find a striking similarity to old Turkic "göktürk" alphabet, although the phonetic values are not the same.
Great channel. I really appreciate all the info you put on here. Do you believe that there is any credence to theories that the runes came west and north from the Iberian peoples? Such as those that used the Alvao writing system? Thanks
I love this intro
There is a stick in your ear. Haha. Love the video.
So both the D and the O sound/letter would point to Lepontic, with the source you found later. Interesting.
Intriguing, i was not aware people still thought the runes were directly from Latin
Interesting... greatings from germany
The earliest known runic inscription is the Kitteredge Stone, found in Colorado. It's been dated to 150 420 069 BC, and even mentions a diplodocus (an early proto-norse loan).
Has anyone done a plausible sketch of the proto-germanic phonological inventory for the time period we think Elder Futhark came into being?
But where did the Etruscan alphabet come from? I have heard that the runes have their origin in ancient Phoenician areas which could trace to ancient Egypt.
Where is that? That river flowing into the side of a mountain is absolutely amazing to me!
Looks like Sinks Canyon State Park, near Lander, WY.
It's a pretty spectacular swallow.
Boustrophedon sounds like a type of dinosaur.
Noiisyy waterfall🎶🎶
Sorta exciting discovery, thanks for sharing!
Seriously! The more I think on it, the more plausible it is, and monumental!! It may become known as the Crawford discovery! So. Cool.
This is a really great piece. It makes me want to know whether, when Caesar says that the Gauls used Greek letters, he meant the classical Greek alphabet or something like the Lepontic alphabet discussed in the video.
Owing to the significant and lengthy Greek presence in southern Gaul with colonies like Massalia, I think it's likely that proper Greek was used, at least in that region. In the alpine regions these scripts might have been encountered; the known characters are near identical, so even Greek-literate Romans might not recognize a distinction without closer examination.
Hi, great introduction to the topic. You should look up Theo Vennemann, if you haven't already. Most of his publications are in German, some in English. Great channel!
I have a grammar question; I know that the same rune doesn’t usually repeat twice in a row, but what about for a set of letters that does repeat in two different words that are next to each other? For example “last star” the last two letters in the first word are the same as the first two in the second word, so would that just be written as “last star” or would it be written as “lastar”?
They would be repeated: so "last star".
The whole double consonant not being repeated only applies because the whole double consonant thing was invented for the purposes of indicating long and short vowels after dropping the final "R" in proto Norse. However, along with many other things, runic inscriptions didn't bother indicating that.
Woden was the one discovered the runes right? And he was a wanderer? So he wandered around, found a bunch of alphabets, and put them together! lol
Hay, are you going to write a paper on this?
Any idea how the Ingwaz-rune can be derived?
He has a whole cowboy vibe haha, really nice 🤠
Pretty view on the right side of the screen is marred by persistent distraction of twig in ear on the left side.
The lines in the cave, background frame right, look somewhat wolfish. As though the creature is whispering to the good Dr. Crawford.
This was absolutely fascinating (as all your videos are). Do you know of anywhere where I could find a good overview to the evolution of the Cyrillic alphabet? Are you planning on doing anything like that yourself? (I realise that that may be a little outside your area of expertise and As such you may not be comfortable producing such content yourself.)
Yeah all I can tell is that looots of the letters are obviously straight up greek, but that would be very interesting to see from someone knowledgeable. I wonder if the start is the catholic/orthodox split, like literally what alphabet different bibles are written in
@@metallsnubben I think the Cyrillic alphabet started life as an adaptation of the Greek alphabet that was in use in the early middle ages so that the Bible could be translated into Bulgarian. I'm not entirely sure though so would appreciate input from an expert.
I'm definitely not an expert but "St. Cyril and St. Methodius", and "the Glagolitic script" are some good key-terms to search. It was made in Bulgaria by students of Cyril's school, and borrows heavily from Greek - the interesting part (and the part I know little about) is the origins of the letters that aren't from Greek, and the origin of Glagolitic's letters. (It seems St. Cyril knew about many different alphabets, so it's hard to pin down where he got the inspiration for any one letter). I agree it would be nice to here from someone who's spent a lot of time looking at these different scripts.
Jackson Crawford and some young pup graduate student see one another in a coffee shop in the Old West.
As one does in a coffee shop in the Old West, Jackson explains why he believes the Elder Futhark comes from an Alpine alphabet.
The pup, who wouldn’t know Elder Futhark from Elder Price, continues to espouse the origin as being from the Roman alphabet.
“Alpine!”
“Roman!”
“Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”
What I personally am led to believe more and more as of late, is that the Etruscans were not the first people that adopted the Greek alphabet, but that there were many tribes spanning from Jutland to Lombardy, who were in close contact with the Greeks, and there existed an alphabet continuüm, meaning that the runes and the Roman alphabet are distant cousins, with the Etruscans only forming one small part of a bigger puzzle.
So to better put that into words...
Let's say the Greeks came into close contact with a tribe (or junction of tribes) from or nearby the Alps that they had good relations with, maybe had a solid trade route going. Because of this, many of these people started to partly assimilate with the Greeks, while not entirely giving up on their (likely Celtic, non-IE, Pre-Germanic or Italic) language for them to adopt a very conservative variant of the Greek alphabet that has most of the features we find in the Alps, Tuscany, Greece itself, Rome and Germania. I'm thinking what we think we know (based on sparse evidence) barely scratches the surface. I'm fairly positive a whole lot more was written, but only what was written on hard surfaces remained, since natural weathering (and rebellious wars, ransacking and crusades) erased 99% of everything that was recorded. There's too much writing that must have occurred that is not attested in any form. That would further explain why the Germanic people and the Romans both have a similar looking letter for the voiceless labiodental fricative. The Etruscans are just one piece of the picture, and they were not the only ones the Romans had contact with.
I agree it most likely has Mediterranean influence, But in My Heart, I have a conviction that they come from the Ancient Runes, Maria Gambutas wrote about, The Lithuanian Professor, And some of it is from Vanir ! I know
I have a question about the word "mediated." Is that a linguistic term? I'd really like to know, for an unrelated reason. It might be the key to a puzzle I've been working on for years.
Maybe they placed F at the beginning of the alphabet because they knew it was the oldest letter in the alphabet. Or it was added to an already existing teaching aid but the end of that aid has already been added an omega so for symmetry they added it the the beginning
I write calligraphy almost every day, I have a reprint of a book from 1880, I use it for refrence when I play with diffrent alphabets, there's a Chapter about runes, they write that the runes did not derive from the roman/ greek alphabet. I'm wondering where that idea originated from. I never heard that.
I suppose the order alfa, beta gamma to omega is documented some were in the history. But the fu th ark, where do that order come from?
Thank You! ! !
I may not be a linguist, but 'i' and 'o' are the only "untourtoured" (pardon my spelling) correlations.
This was really fascinating. I assume you've looked into Turkic Runes, and I'd be curious if you have any comments to make on their similarities to Futhark
Well, I'm not sure about Dr. Crawford's opinion, but I just looked them up and am slightly irritated at how similar the shapes of the runes are to Germanic/Norse runes because the sounds are drastically different, lol
@@squidking762 right?! First time I saw them, I automatically tried to read what they said before getting *very* confused
@@drbuttocks Turkic runes are derived from the Sogdian script, but with sharp angles as opposed to the more rounded shape of Sogdian. The Sogdian script itself is derived from Bactrian, which is derived from Aramaic, which is derived from Phoenician.
@@elimalinsky7069 Funny :))) Because they are totally different.
Could visual elements of the Runes have been influenced by the Roman Alphabet? Some shapes work better in writing.
Here is a guess pulled completely out of my ansuz-sowilo-sowilo: what if the "F" was added to the front of the alphabet, by a guy who was in the habit of writing the alphabet backwards? Then he thought he was putting it at at the end.
Here, take a look: "In the Íslendingabók Yngvi Tyrkja konungr 'Yngvi king of Turkey' appears as father of Njörd who in turn is the father of Yngvi-Freyr, the ancestor of the Ynglings."
Dear Mr. Crawford, thank you for providing well worded and scholarly founded information. I must note however, that for people with hearing disabilities, it is not a good idea to present a lecture with the sound of running water in the background. I have hearing loss from 6 khz upwards, plus chronic tinnitus. For me, background sounds like running water or traffic only serve to make it harder to hear the words you're saying. As far as I know, intelligence officers sometimes have secret meetings near river and fountains, to make it harder for spies to eavesdrop. Hjarteleg helsing frå Noreg.
A 'proto-Lepontic' inscription has been found in eastern France dating from the late 7th to mid 6th century BC: Verger 1998, Note sur un graffite archaïque provenant de l'habitat hallstattien de Montmorot (Jura)
Another Lepontic inscription from northeastern France dates from the 5th century BC: Olivier et al. 2010, Un graffite en caractères lépontiques du Ve siècle av. J.-C. provenant de la nécropole gauloise de Montagnesson à Bergères-les-Vertus (Marne)
They really just advertised Kubb 😂😂😂 that’s so funny a really common game here in Sweden especially in the summer, in fact we played it at a party not even a week ago 😂 didn’t know it was from Gotland tho 🤔
What river is that?
I didn't here anything about publishing about this? No research paper coming?
I have a question. Is it possible the the shape of the runes are based on star constellations? There's a guy, David Warner Mathisen, that seems to be able to show a lot of old shapes and patterns all around the world, including in art, are based on the shape of star constellations. Then, the other question is about the little-known theory I heard years ago that the Greeks and Etruscans were actually, Norse and that it was Norse culture that migrated down over land and by sea that was the foundation of ancient Greek and Etruscan. Many claim that nothing in Homer's Odyssey matches up with Greek culture, including seasons, climate, types of boats described, housing, geography. But it does match up with ancient Norse culture.
They claim the old ruins and such things as all of the Troy Towns and places named Troy in Scandinavia matches up better and may have been the origin of Greek, The Odyssey, and of Greek culture; and that it was Ancient Norse who were the ancient Greeks. They also claim that in the oldest Greek ruins the home design matches Norse home design and only in the earliest periods before they were known as Greek are there found amber jewelry, which is Norse and associated with Norse culture. This is all only theory, but some are speculating things may be all mixed up and backwards, which may also explain the alphabet issue.
Everyone wants to be first or claim they are the home of Homer and The Odyssey. I've heard we may have tipped things the wrong direction and that Ireland may be Odysseus home, Ithaca. I've head that the word, Kirk, Church, is the same as Circe who kept Odysseus captive awhile, and perhaps, the battle of Troy was in Scandinavia. Who knows? But why are there so many circles called Troy Towns in Scandinavia? Why so many connections to The Norse and Greeks? And why is Homer depicted so much like Odin? These are my questions.
Edit: That Ship of Theseus and the paradox associated with it may possibly be a remnant of that old culture the people barely remembered and kept a boat from, but like a language, it got rebuilt and caused the paradox, the question of what is real and original?
I would love to hear your take on the possibility of a Semitic superstrate on proto-Germanic. This is a very controversial topic but one that certainly has some ardent support.
Sounds weird enough that I have to look it up :)
After (shallowly) looking it up, I find the Atlantic-Semitic part of the hypothesis extremely speculative, but the Vasconic part more intriguing.
I heard that there were runic scripts used somewhere in eastern Europe. I don't remember where though. Could this be conected?
@@servantofaeie1569 That might have been what I was thinking of. But I feel like their might have been something in Anatoila too.
A ring in the Pietroasele treasure, from Romania, uses the Futhark. It wouldn't be surprising for other Futhark evidence to turn up in other Chernyakhiv-Sintana de Mures sites.
4chan brought me here, im glad it did.
what if the reason they borrowed omega is because Proto Germanic had no short o? Therefore omega representing long o makes more sense.
You can apply a Noise Gate to the audio track (I'm assuming is recorded directly on your camera) to bring down the sound of the river a little bit. You can completely get rid of the river sound altogether or you can bring down the volume of just the river around your voice by finding a nice middle-ground that allows your voice to be at the forefront while also allowing the listener to experience the atmosphere of the environment you filmed in.
I use DaVinci Resolve for my video editing which includes Fairlight audio mixer. It has a Noise Gate filter I apply to my vocal tracks when I'm talking in a noisy environment. Whatever video editor you use there could be a Noise Gate within the program itself or you can process the audio track separately then line it up with your original audio track (and remove the original afterward).
Check out Noise Gates and research how to apply it and if your video program has one.
Just a random idea without any knowledge about alphabets: The fact, that the Latin f is attached at the beginning as opposed to the end could mean that it was included earlier, i. e. already at the point of time in which the order of the letters was defined.
this guy dealt with a branch rubbing against his ear so he could tell us about his new thoughts on runes, applause anyone?
He simply wouldn't let the branch rune his day.
Just a guess but runes look like they are specifically designed for carving into wood. This would explain a lack of early attestation, as most written things would have been in wood.
I feel as though we often try to put the puzzle together from the things we know, which makes enough sense.
But I think we have to imagine that there is a structure, a branch on which some of these alphabets sit PARALLEL to eachother, as being of the same origin, rather than that they all descend from eachother.
Aka, there might be an ancestor alphabet carried by the indo-europeans that would explain all of this, but we simply have never seen it.
So perhaps we should attempt to make a reconstructed proto indo european alphabet based on all of these alphabets we know of.
There is a common ancestor script for all of those European scripts: Phoenician. Maybe some early Archaic Greek preform, but any older and it's just straight Phoenician. Unless one wishes to argue that the Semitic scripts were borrowed from the Indo-Europeans, then there's not much reason to question the current thinking, which certainly does place Eastern Greek (Greek, Cyrillic, Gothic, Coptic) and Western Greek/Italic (Latin, Etruscan, Runic) in parallel. Now, there is room for something between Runic and the Alpine Italic alphabets discussed in the video; a sort of para-Lepontic Proto-Runic...
@@williamramsey9140 Hey I'm getting into it again and I think you're right from what I can tell so far.
The last three letters in the older futhark is ᛜ =i(ing), ᛞ=d (dagr) and ᛟ= o(óðal). If one reads the old futhark from end to beginning we get ᛟᛞᛜ=odi. Since i is called ing we get, using a little imaginination, oding. Streching it a bit further, perhaps; Odin.
As beautiful as the location is . Makes it hard to hear
Hey Jackson, I really think that the background sound makes it really difficult to hear your voice man.
Is the tree coming out of your ear some symbolism ??
When it comes to the suggestion that Runic *fehu could be an addition from another alphabet, I think it is worth noting that Celtic (by the recorded period) lacks an /f/ sound (be that labio-dental or bilabial). Thus, if the Runes derive from an Alpine-based alphabet used to write specifically a Celtic language, then it would make sense that the Germans would have to import another character to write that sound.
Also, I do not think it is too much a stretch of the imagination to suggest that somebody looking to write a language with both a labio-velar [w] and bilabial [ɸ] might borrow another alphabet's labio-velar character as a bilabial character, especially if it was used in certain digraphs to represent a similar fricative sound.
Fuaim is an Old Irish word. Aberfoyle is the Anglicized form of a Pictish place name. Some Celtic languages of the period did not have the ' F ' sound. But there are at least 3 Celtic Languages from that period and before that have the ' F ' sound. Including Proto-Celtic.
@@navigator5426 I do not know why I did not specify 'Continental,' but I should have, that is on me. Insular Celtic languages do develop an /f/ sound, but they are not the point of transmition being discussed, an Alpine dialect would be the point of transmition. Proto-Celtic did have bilabial *ɸ > PIE *p, but that sound disappears in, to the best of my knowledge, all recorded Celtic languages (Old Irish 'athair' > Proto-Celtic *ɸatir).
I am not a Celtic expert, so there may well be a confirmed, or even contested, attestation of a Continental Celtic /f/ sound, I just have not seen anything to suggest that in my limited reading on the subject.
@@navigator5426 Also, 'of the period' is incorrect when speaking of Old Irish, which refers to a stage of Goidelic development between the sixth and tenth centuries A.D., whereas the transmition of a potential Alpine alphabet to the Germans would take place at the latest during the beginning of the second century A.D.
In Harigast- the r (P) is like in Russian. It is pronounced with a trill in Russian.
I take it, you're not seriously considering the possibility that Odin acquired the knowledge of the Runes by impaling himself to the world tree for nine days? (Sigh) Okay, Northern Alpine influence it is. Thank you, Dr Crawford.