The Early Runic Language of Scandinavia: Studies in Germanic Dialect Geography (review)

Classifying the Germanic languages is one of the classic problems of historical Germanic linguistics. While most scholars today seem to accept the view that the Germanic language family can be divided into three branches—East, West, and North Germanic, and further that the first dialectal split was into Northwest and East Germanic—this view is not undisputed. For instance, East and North Germanic exhibit sufficient parallels that some scholars have argued in favor of an initial split into Northeast and West Germanic. In the volume under consideration here, Nielsen returns to this thorny problem, albeit from a somewhat different perspective, in that he is primarily interested in the dialectal position of the language of the older runic inscriptions of Scandinavia attested from between ad 200 and 500.

Two introductory chapters, (‘The project’, 19–38, and ‘Research history’, 39–75), outline the scope of the project reported on in this book, survey some of the relevant research, and summarize the views of a number of earlier scholars including Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Kuhn, Herbert Penzl, and Theo Vennemann. The project proper gets underway with Ch. 3, ‘The North and North-Sea Germanic sound systems in perspective’ (77–146). In this chapter, N compares the sound systems of the North Germanic languages (Old Norse and Early Runic) with those of the North Sea Germanic languages (Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon), beginning with the unaccented vowels and then proceeding to the accented vowels and the consonants. This chapter leads smoothly into the next, ‘Towards a dialectal profile of Early Runic’ (147–202). Here N examines the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Early Runic. The role of syntactic features in dialect grouping and the onomastic evidence are also discussed.

Ch. 5, ‘Morphological and phonological parallels between North and North-Sea Germanic/West Germanic’ (203–40), considers parallels between these subfamilies. This chapter demonstrates clearly why the classification of the Germanic languages has proved so troublesome. Features found in Early Runic (North Germanic) link North with West Germanic, but there are as well features not exhibited by Early Runic that link North with West Germanic. Also, though, there are other parallels between North and East Germanic, between Gothic, North, and North Sea Germanic, and between North Germanic and Old High German specifically. Ch. 6, ‘Separate morphological and phonological developments: West Germanic, North-Sea Germanic, and North Germanic’ (241–70), surveys the divergent developments found in these subfamilies. Ch. 7, ‘From Proto-Germanic to Early Runic and beyond’ (271–98), offers a chronological perspective on the linguistic developments examined in earlier chapters. Two models for the dialect geographical position of Early Runic are also considered, one more static and one more dynamic.

In Ch. 8, ‘External evidence’ (299–368), N reviews various nonlinguistic sources of evidence in hopes that they will help determine the linguistic position of Early Runic. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the Germanic homeland, which, although it does not exactly fit with the rest of the chapter, is necessary because it has influenced how some scholars have interpreted some of the evidence, especially the onomastic. Other sources of evidence considered in this chapter are place names, ethnological evidence (e.g. Tacitus’s Germania), and archaeological evidence. The final chapter, ‘Conclusions’ (369–83), summarizes the results of the work. There is also an extensive bibliography and a detailed index.

This is an impressive work of scholarship. N has tackled an extremely complex issue and provided an illuminating account of it. It is reasonably user friendly as well (for instance, quotations not originally in English are generally, although not always, translated). Somewhat troublesome for the careful reader are the extensive endnotes which necessitate constant page turning. Moreover, a number of endnotes consist solely of references which presumably could have been eliminated. These are relatively minor quibbles, however, and do not detract from the genuinely high quality of the work.