Cut Rather Than Written

The shapes are determined by the tool and the material. Runes are made of vertical strokes and diagonals with very few curves and almost no horizontals, because a horizontal cut along a piece of wood follows the grain and disappears while a diagonal crosses it and stays visible. That constraint is visible in every character in the row and it explains forms that look arbitrary on a printed page.

The surviving corpus reflects the same practical world. Inscriptions are short, usually a name, a statement that someone made or owns the object, or a single word, and they appear on brooches, weapons, combs, stones and the thin gold discs known as bracteates. Continuous text of any length is absent. The earliest generally accepted find, a comb from a bog deposit in Denmark, carries one word and dates from around the second century. That shortness has consequences for interpretation. Many inscriptions cannot be translated with any confidence, some appear to be alphabet exercises or simple repetitions of the row itself, and a number consist of formulaic words with no ordinary meaning that recur across objects and regions. Anyone reading a confident narrative about what the runes were for should notice how little the objects themselves actually say, and how much of the surrounding literature is inference from much later written sources rather than from the inscriptions.