The Runes, and What They Might Mean

A substantial minority of bracteates carry runic inscriptions in the older futhark, and they matter out of proportion to their length, because there is very little runic writing this early. Some are names, presumably of makers or owners. Some appear to be meaningless sequences, which may be a die-cutter copying letters he could not read, and which is itself informative about how far literacy extended. And a small group carries short words that recur across many objects and across other early inscribed finds: alu, laukaz, lathu.

None of the three has an agreed meaning. Alu has been connected to ale and so to ritual drinking, to a root meaning protection, and to a term for ecstatic or altered states, and the argument has run for the better part of a century without resolution. Laukaz means leek or garlic, a plant with protective associations, and is usually read as a charm word. Lathu is generally taken as an invitation or summoning. These are positions held by identifiable scholars against each other, which is the ordinary condition of a difficult text, and the sensible thing is to record that the words are formulaic and that their sense is disputed rather than to choose. What the inscriptions do establish beyond argument is that the objects were not merely ornamental: somebody thought it worth putting writing on them, in a society where writing was rare.