The Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions of Britain (review)

This new corpus fills a large gap previously left in both the runic corpus of Britain, and the corpus of Scandinavian runic inscriptions. The 'Britain' of the corpus is essentially England and Scotland, with Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the inscriptions from the prehistoric stone chamber of Maeshowe on Orkney excluded (the other Orkney inscriptions are included). As such this may be considered a companion volume to The Runic Inscriptions of Viking Age Dublin (which includes others from Ireland) by Barnes, Hagland, and Page (1997), and Barnes' The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney (1994). Hopefully a corpus of the many Scandinavian runic inscriptions on the Isle of Man will be forthcoming to complete the picture.

As would be expected from these well respected scholars the corpus is exceedingly rigorous and scholarly, and although some may find the approach too cautious, future scholars working only from the corpus itself will be in no doubt when any translation is considered to be problematic (eg. 'this interpretation is speculative in the extreme and perhaps inappropriate for inclusion in an austere discussion like this', p. 156). The corpus is made up of 56 inscriptions, whilst a further two that are considered to be of doubtful provenance are given in Appendix 1. All entries include the inscriptions' current location, and where possible the national grid reference of the original find spot, the find details, a drawing of the inscription, previous attempts at interpretation, and a description of both the runes and the material they are carved on. Then an interpretation is attempted, including some attempts to date the inscription and place it into an historical context. Appendix 2 consists of transliteration, text, and translation of all entries, which is most useful for those wanting to quickly check an inscription or to compare select inscriptions. Appendix 3 provides a list of the most useful archival sources for scholars wishing to undertake further research. Of further assistance to scholars are 98 plates at the end of the volume showing photographs of all inscriptions available.

A particular strength of the work is the introductory chapters, comprising roughly the first quarter of the volume. Although all of these except 'Modus operandi' are likely to be skipped by many experts who will proceed directly to the inscription/s they are interested in, for scholars from other disciplines who want to use the runic inscriptions as additional pieces of evidence the introductory chapters may prove invaluable. These chapters provide a clear explanation of the problems associated with reading runic inscriptions, and also of then trying to translate them into English, stressing that runology is not an exact science and has an 'Uncertainty Principle' (p. 49).

Of the chapters, 'Establishing the corpus' explains the pragmatic choices made to decide what to include and exclude from the corpus, and also includes useful maps showing the location of each inscription in the corpus. 'Twig runes and the Orkney corpus' suggests that most of the twig runes in Orkney are modern copies after the Maeshowe inscriptions were discovered in 1861 and are therefore excluded from the corpus. 'Examining the inscriptions' discusses the problems of lighting and access when reading inscriptions in an open environment. 'Rune forms and orthography' describes the three Scandinavian runic alphabets (excluding twig runes) used in Britain and the speech sounds the different graphemes are thought to have represented. The issue of punctuation is also discussed. 'Transliteration' describes the compromises often made in rendering runic inscriptions into roman script. The 'Language' chapter is particularly strong, discussing the indicators of dialect, the age of an inscription, and the possible influence of indigenous language on the Scandinavian inscriptions. The authors discuss each inscription in the corpus where such influences are suspected, allowing the reader to then go to the individual inscription for further investigation. A note of caution is also sounded about assuming...