'Alu': A Mystery Runic Word 

People wear company logos all the time that reference their favorite alcohol... so imagine in a pre-capitalist society, just wearing BEER makes more sense, as it has a much broader meaning than “Budweiser” or “Absolut”.

And the one on the rock says Pub!

You could --make a religion-- theorise a conspiracy out of this.

@@andruloni I'd enjoy a comic sci Fi novella based on this

If this isn't a thing, I'd love it if you expanded on that idea

or a Baltic wanderwort

It could be a loanword from Baltic to Germanic or vice versa. I think the Finnish word for beer, "olut", is supposed to be a loanword from Germanic.

Aplu, Lugh. I recently came across an article speaking to the holiday Yule. Claiming that the Welsh/Bretons celebrated Allu-tide.

There are a few inscriptions on runestones of repeating letters and encoded rune staves (which stand for two letters each). We can indeed assume they had initializations. ALU, the triple stacked Tiwaz (that looks like a tree) and repeated Laguz too may all stand for a certain phrase

its just unknown memes

Not Norse per se. Most of these coins are continental. We're talking Pan-Germanic here. Proto-Germanic. Elder Futhark.

That's what I was thinking - perhaps something of the ilk of Roman SPQR or Christian ichthys

This was one of my Whatifs!

Damn. That might just be a solid competitor to the acronym hypothesis.

I was thinking the same thing. Your explanation was put in a much better fashion though than my own.

Something like berserkerjuice, if you survive the battle you can get this trinket to remember it.

i had assumed it was a buzz, or some sort of state where you are knocked out of routine animalistic consciousness

And something about being brothers in a place with really good beer.. kinda like brothers long ago, in a place that valued beer.. you might be onto something…

I second this, I was gonna write the same as you, beat me to it. Grav-alu, or bairn-alu, makes sense to me.

I'm from northern sweden. we have gravöl, barnsöl and barsöl (and more local variations). Never seen barsel though.

I think it's more accurate to just call it a "gathering". I would use the word party, but obviously you aren't exactly partying when you're at a gravöl

@@clanDeCo Barsel is the Danish form, barsöl is the Swedish.

@@clanDeCo Agree. That's why I use the word "banquet".

or just cuz its cool. cultural exchange is fascinating, when you think what it would have been like to be born in the North then grow up to adventure South and East to Byzantium and eventually, maybe, one day return with all sorts of stories and souvenirs

The "thought experiment" led me to exactly this speculation. Everybody is trying to "translate" it as a word, when it could actually be a more symbolic representation of one of the mystery cults. A corrupted form of "Hallelujah," for example.

my first thought was something like Masonic, America membership in something very secretive or private, perhaps cultic

Iesus Nazarenus Rexus Iudeus?

Skol!

we are all much more interrelated in our histories and ancestries than those tribalistic internet folks like to admit

Makes sense to me. When he was talking about the theories one of the things I thought of is how people tattoo foreign words onto their bodies. Figured that in this case it might be a foreign word that they are attempting to properly represent within their own alphabet.

@@AndrewTheFrank some stuff is just cool

I like the thinking, but going by the examples in bosworth-toller, scearu doesn't get the inserted 'w' you'd expect between stem and infection, so that seems unlikely

Coming out of the blue here, I had a random musing thought yesterday when I heard the name Aaron, or maybe it was Erin, or maybe it was spelled some other way, like Aron, which was Elvis Presley's middle name. And then I wondered what "Elvis" means 😂 Totally meaningless rambling musing that would've been forgotten had I not seen your comment.

I was pondering something quite similar. Thinking of mead in a magical context, I thought of Odin's stealing the Mead of Poetry/Mead of Inspiration from the giantess. In this case, then, "alu" might be a blessing or invocation that could loosely mean "may you be inspired in battle". In this regard, the line in Beowulf might not seem so incongruous, if it it's contextual inference is that Beowulf was lacking in battle inspiration - in other words, losing. Odin's ale, however, is also related to the inspiration of words, thought or wisdom, so "alu" that may (or may not) have been some sort of battle invocation could easily have broadened to encompass ecstasy (joy), inspiration or wisdom in any regards of life. It could even be extrapolated to a much more generalized wish for one to receive abundance or success, as one might make a toast over drinks "May your ale barrel always be full". I can also theorize that it might actually be an indication of fraternity, or having been accepted into a group - as a purely hypothetical example, if an unblooded youth survives and does well for himself in battle, his lord or fellow warriors might give the bracteate or whatever object with "alu" as a way to show he's been proven a warrior, that they will gladly share ale with him, or indicating that he/they are now welcome at the lord's table. In this regard, it could be a status indicator, as Dr. Jackson points out that there is a certain indication of "bragging" (my word choice, not the professor's) in the way that the word is displayed in such a way as to prompt others to ask about it. In this hypothesis, it would also explain 'alu' as it appears in Beowulf, which when combined with the sense of lack, might be the author's way of saying "he had no friends or sword-brother's to help him". As a Norse (reconstructionist) practitioner myself, I also see these 'mundane' meanings (as I'm extrapolating, anyway) to easily have evolved from, or evolved into an intentional magical/spiritual blessing of the object or its wearer. Words have great power, but they do also evolve tremendously in form and function - moving from magic to mundane and back again over generations and/or with contact with other cultures and beliefs. An example is the etymology of the term "pagan" itself - originally an English word meaning 'country folk', but with the subtext that they meant "ignorant, uneducated peasants". Its evolution to refer to pagan in a religious/spiritual sense came during the early Christian conversion of Britain by the Catholic Church; the priests and Jesuits focused their conversions first in the cities, where wealth, power, and rulership resided, because generally, the populace would follow the lead of that higher social stratus. But the country folk - largely unbothered by the conversion until the cities were prevalently grounded in Catholicism - stuck to the old ways and practices. By the time the Church concentrated its efforts on eradicating the old ways from the rural regions, however, they found it difficult to persuade (or, frankly, to force) those peasants to change their customs, and so 'pagan' as an "uneducated peasant" soon became parallel to using it to refer to those who clung to old "superstitions" and would not accept the new religion. Thus, the mundane word now has spiritual significance, even if its inference was a negative one at the time. Largely, we've reclaimed the word "pagan" once again, but now as a word we carry proudly, one of power rather than either denigrating or the bogus meaning often believed by the public as "devil worshipper" (gag me) that it started out as. Okay, I'm off the soap box, lol. I'm no scholar for sure, just a modern practitioner that LOVES this stuff. After all, we joke about being "the religion with homework", lol. At any rate, merry meet!

Drinking ale in the hall of Odin may well have been the phrase.

i think a lot of anglo-american scholars like cut and dry, literal meanings to things. but it does seem like there are sorts of fuzzy concepts behind words, with slang and memes being more common in real languages than literal meanings.

I think I get what you're saying. It's as if the oldest word for "ale" wasn't originally the word for the beverage, if it ever had a different one beforehand, but the word that was spoken over it before drinking. So it could be another Frankenstein that way. But that raises a couple of questions: For how many millennia could any number of people, across different cultures and language groups, continue such a tradition without knowing why they're doing it? What would cause every culture to suddenly stop such a tradition within a few centuries of the present if that was ever the case? (which seems very unlikely) I wouldn't know how to pursue those questions myself, but maybe there are researchers who know where to start looking.

@@sirnukesalot24 oh I’m pretty sure alu was probably the word for the beverage, but I wonder if it became a toast or something similar and thereby took on a different usage. Cheers for example is used in modern English for a lot of things that aren’t exactly wishing someone happiness. If people called out ale before drinking or something similar, then over time it might take on a complex suite of meanings. Basically I think they probably still used alu to mean the drink but also could have used it as an exclamation or toast. Like we still uses the word cheer to mean happiness, but we also use cheers as a toast and in British English it’s a farewell or a thank you.

@@clayashford9334 The idea that the word for a beverage and the word spoken before drinking a beverage could be what was perfectly coinciding here caught my attention more than anything. It's certainly a chicken and egg problem, if that's what this undefined inscription is referring to, that is. 🙂

Certainly not if they’re Elder Futhark.

Just checked, and that ain't the case. The word stopped being used on runic enscriptions during the migration period, long before the Christianization of Scandinavia.

This is a joke right? Right?

I had a similar thought -- a cry of "Hallooo" that is, by convention, not usually written into stories or was considered hackneyed by the time the stories were written down. (The fox hunt in Mary Poppins comes to mind.)

If it was a salutation then i'd expect there to be a long lasting tradition of writing salutations on exchanged items existing even into the Roman and Christian times. But it is an interesting idea that its a sign of something being sacred or given as a gift. Writing the letter on the item itself.

memes and sklang!