NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 69, Issue 2, 2016

While in the High Middle Ages runic literacy appears to have been very much alive in urban centres such as Bergen, interest in runes appears to have been of a different nature in learned circles and in other parts of the Scandinavian world which had adopted widespread textual production of the Latin alphabet. This paper examines a number of runic phenomenon from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Denmark and Iceland to argue that they belong to a cultural revival movement rather than forming part of a continuous runic tradition stretching back into the early Middle Ages. Some of these runic texts show some connection with the Danish royal court, and should rather be seen as forming part of the changes in literary culture emanating from continental Europe from the late twelfth century and onwards: they all show a combined interest in Latin learning and vernacular literary forms.

This paper will see Bjarni Kolbeinsson as a representative of the new kind of skaldic poetry that had developed around the turn of the thirteenth century. By then, formal skaldic poetry had become an art form cultivated by men who had received schooling and clerical ordination. Skalds such as Bjarni had turned their attention from the praise of kings of the present or the near past towards subjects of the more distant past and religious themes. In Jómsvíkingadrápa, Bjarni brushed aside the Odinic mead hailed by former skalds and preferred to apply techniques of poetic composition that he had learned through the formal study of Latin poetry. A tongue-in-cheek rejection of the traditional exordial topoi and a sensibility for love poetry allowed him to compose a poem that not only rejected the past but also pointed towards the future.

The present study deals with those sections of the so-called Third Grammatical Treatise, written by the Icelandic scholar and poet Óláfr Þórðarson around the middle of the 13th century, in which the author describes a variety of the Scandinavian runic alphabet and compares it with the Latin alphabet. The investigation is part of a long-standing and comprehensive study on Old Icelandic grammatical literature, to which I have devoted the greater part of my scholarly work. The paper aims to define the type of runic alphabet used by Óláfr in the context of medieval Scandinavian runic writing. A proposal for interpretation of an obscure runic pangram, included by Óláfr in his discussion of runes, is also provided.

Medieval Icelandic grammar and poetics based their analysis, to a great extent, on traditional Nordic scholarship. In poetics, Snorra Edda was central, but insights from Classical learning were used to supplement it in the Third and the Fourth Grammatical Treatises. A comparison between Snorri’s description of metrical form in Háttatal and Latin metrics reveals fundamental differences. In the Nordic system, the emphasis is on alliteration and rhyme, but in the Latin one rhythm is central. Furthermore, there are significant differences in the kind of phonological terminology and analysis presented in the grammatical treatises respectively, the First providing the sharpest insights, but the Second perhaps being the most original, seeking inspiration from music. The Third Treatise shows input from runic learning as well as Latin doctrine in its grammatical part, and a healthy mixture of native and Classical learning in its poetics.