Sociocultural Theory and the leub Inscriptions

Runology can be a strange business. Recent years have seen the corpus of runic texts expand in a manner unparalleled in any other branch of Old Germanic studies. Yet this growth in evidential terms seems almost perverse—it stands in quite a reverse manner to the impact that the discipline has had on other areas of antiquarian and medievalistic enquiry. It is hard to point to a field (or subdiscipline) where the findings of runologists have had much theoretical or methodological (let alone empirical) influence. Runology remains a rather queer subsection of Germanic antiquarian studies, more a backwater than anything else.

Indeed, German runology appears especially to suffer from an atheoretical malaise, one which seems comparable to that noted by critics of German archaeology.¹ The Faustian bargain of the German runologists of the 1930s, however, did not lead to a reassessment and recasting of the methods which underpinned their discipline in the postwar years.² If anything, postwar runology seemed substantially unreformed in Germany. It is hard otherwise to explain the works of a Karl Schneider,³ the man taken by Ray Page as the paragon of what he dismisses as “imaginative” runology.⁴ Heinz Klingenberg⁵ was similarly excoriated as Elmer Antonsen’s (magical) straw man in his Runes and Germanic Linguistics⁶—and similar criticisms might be levelled at other postwar scholars of a comparable Germanophile bent. Yet the “skeptical” reaction against the romantic runology of the 1960s and 1970s represented by the works of Klingenberg and Schneider has hardly seen the discipline advance other than in terms of a renewed focus on empiricism: it is as if Leopold von Ranke has become a key theorist of modern runology, the intellectual pin-up boy of the neo-empiricists who now police the gates of an increasingly inward-looking antiquarian field.⁷

In 2006 a new approach to runology was presented in a work which sought (in part) to provoke a renovation of the methodologies presently used in the field.⁸ The key principle of this new approach is epigraphic formulism, a notion which is informed by the literary concept of intertextuality⁹—that is, that no inscription is an island, but instead reflects broader discourse. Earlier investigators had attempted to shed light on some of the more obvious examples of runic formulism,¹⁰ but the efforts of such scholars did not lead to the development of a broader understanding of runic intertextuality. Anyone who visits a modern graveyard—one of the key areas where modern observers may still experience traditional epigraphic practice—can witness for themselves how repetitive and mannered monumental epigraphy often still is today. Yet notions of textual type, formula, and genre are almost absent from recent runological handbooks. Klaus Düwel’s Runenkunde,¹¹ for example, is now in its fourth edition but remains completely lacking any sense of textual (or epigraphic) theory. But that is not all that his epigraphic textbook is lacking.

One of the most characteristic features of the South Germanic or properly German runic corpus is the prevalence of forms of the term leub (or related expressions such as leuba, leubo, and liubi). Clearly developments of love or lief, such terms have received a mixed interpretation over the years. Compare OHG liob, liub ‘love’, ‘luck’, ‘salvation’, ‘dear’, ‘pleasant’, ‘graceful’; lioba ‘love’; liobo ‘beloved’, ‘friend’, ‘disciple’, ‘friendly’, ‘pleasantly’; liubi ‘joy’, ‘affection’, ‘pleasure’, ‘love’; Goth. liufs ‘beloved’, ‘dear’; ON liúfr ‘beloved’, ‘dear’, ‘mild’, ‘gentle’, ‘kind’; OS liof, liab ‘dear’, ‘kind’; OE lēof ‘desirable’, ‘pleasant’, ‘beloved’, ‘dear’, ‘friend’, ‘loved one’; OFris. liāf ‘dear’; Lat. lubet, libet ‘it pleases’; OCS ljubŭ ‘dear’; ljubiti ‘love’; Gaul. lubi ‘love’; and Skt. lúbhyati ‘desires’. In our recent monograph on runic amulets, the leub inscriptions are treated as amuletic poesy finds.¹² Yet despite accepting that leub, etc., must occasionally mean ‘love’ or ‘beloved’, Düwel still clings to the interpretation which maintains that (at least some of) these forms are names (cf. OHG Leoba, Liuba, Lomb. Liupa).¹³ Düwel does not seem to accept (with Ute Schwab)¹⁴ that taken as a whole, the leub inscriptions look to...