“This is my least favorite thing I’ve seen apart from violence committed in front of my face.” As someone who likes a lot of historical things that have been New Aged, I felt that.
Time and time again you provide such quality work that helps me to better understand topics I struggle to get accurate information on. Thank you for your research and dedication to these topics. You, sir, are a gem. Till the next video, saying thank you from humid Louisiana!
Regarding your comment about finding runes on objects, labelling those objects withtheir names (spear, rock, &c.), I think this makes perfect sense. When we tech children to read, we use picture books where the objects in the pctures are labelled withtheir names, so the child can read the name and see it applied to the object. The Norse didn’t have inexpensive paper books, so it would be simpler to label actual objects with their names, as a means of teaching someone the runes.
Thanks Dr Crawford, you make learning super fun and easy. I have trouble reading books so I got your audiobooks and watch your channel and it is freaking awesome!
Being a Tolkien nerd I can't help but think of Gandalf outside the Doors of Durin. Befuddled by his own cleverness, trying to invoke magic, instead of just saying friend.
An idea why "spelling out the alphabet" may have been done so often: in software engineering, computers will often exchange information about the protocol and its version before they start to communicate information using that protocol. Perhaps "writing out the alphabet" was done in the past to let the reader know which "version" of the writing system the author was using in their work?
Bringing some of that chilly Colorado weather with you to New Mexico. Hope you had a good time while you were here. Thanks for the video on the runes, loved it.
Now that I have graduated a couple of years ago already, it's so nice to just listen to lectures without any pressure of studying for an exam, vigorously collecting credit points or following the entire tiresome catalogue of university torture.
Regarding alu, presumably scholars have already looked for phrases that started with A-L-U? That’s where my mind immediately went. Medieval scribes routinely reduced common phrases to abbreviations, so it would make sense that people writing on surfaces more difficult to write on than parchment would abbreviate, especially when the phrase is incantatory. Or maybe they just really liked beer.
I am more biased towards "alu" being beer as in Estonian beer is "õlu" which is close enough to think that Estonian word might have evolved from "alu", but its just a theory - a rune theory! (albeit without any evidence)
I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of references you made to runes being used for magic as they are mentioned in the literature. But, I guess I shouldn’t be, given that your main focus is language and by extension literature. Overall, a very fascinating lecture.
I've managed to memorize all of Völuspá in Swedish - Erik Brate's translation from 1906 (I think), so it's quite old-fashioned Swedish but very different from Old Norse or Icelandic. I very much prefer it to Hávamál; one of my favourite parts is the insane list of dwarves that just goes on forever - a lot of those names appear in Tolkien. So I am much more fond of Völuspá than Hávamál - it's also much shorter, even though it still takes me about 25 minutes to recite... I don't really understand people who prefer Hávamál to Völuspá, or any other song in the Poetic Edda to it; for me Völuspá is by far the best song.
Could it be that the rune alphabet was reordered (compared to other alphabets of the time) as a simple mnemonic device. The word "Futhark" itself shows that the first 6 runes were pronouncable as one word, hence easy to remember. The greeks for example wouldn't care about that, since their letters had names that just forced them to remember the alphabet completely. (As far as I know we have no reason to assume runes had names as early as the earliest found Futhark alphabets.) That was the theory of a layman, there are already more than enough of those on the internet, so sorry for that.
I believe Dr. Crawford has mentioned this hypothesis in one of his videos but we don't have any evidence of this. So there's no either full or partial mnemonic phrase which would explain this order that we know of.
About the vimose comb: 'harja', might it be considered the naming of af comb (toothed element dragged through or over something) coming from the farming tool a 'harrow' for tilling the ploughed field, 'harve' in modern Danish, 'Harja' in moderen Swedish? Just a thought.
The fact that different alphabets from around the world have some similar looking characters may mean something, or it could just be due to the fact that there are only so many ways you can make pictograms out of lines before they all start to look the same
I respect Jackson, but he spends way too much time whining about what others are doing. He doesn't own the rune topic. People are free to use them for whatever they want.
If people were being clear and up-front about the fact that their rune-uses were just stuff they'd made up themselves, or riffs on ideas about runes that date to the 16th-19th centuries at the earliest, that would be one thing. But they won't do that because, as we all know, by and large the only reason anyone cares about someone's modern rune interpretation or rune-magic is because of the suggestion that it has or might have a connection to beliefs and practices in the ancient or early medieval world.
If I were an expert in a field confronted with an infinite amount of quacks that keep regurgitating the same pseudo-scientific, unhistorical diarrhea (and who probably get on my case for telling them that), then I'd start "whining" too. People can do and believe whatever they want, but as long as weirdos on the internet make money off of shilling literal non-sense to the unsuspecting, it needs people like Dr. Crawford to "whine".
@@leocomerford This. People have been misled into thinking modern rune magic is authentic Viking practice, and there's so much garbage out there that it's hard to get a signal through the noise. Plus it's a lecture on modern misconceptions about runes. THE TOPIC IS WHAT MODERN PEOPLE GET WRONG. It's not "whining," it's the topic of the lecture.
@@KissSlowlyLoveDeeply-pm2je If your choices of authority are "I've studied this topic scientifically for decades" academics and "It came to me in a dream" gurus... yes, listen to the academics.
