How ‘English’ is the Early Frisian Runic Corpus? The evidence of sounds and forms

Abstract

In my habilitation thesis (Waxenberger 2010) I considered, amongst other things, the earliest runic inscriptions in England, from the period c. ad 400–650. By comparing them to the later inscriptions I found that the English runic corpus can be divided into two sub-corpora: a small Pre-Old English (Pre-OE) corpus (Fig. 6.1) and a larger Old English (OE) one (Fig. 6.2). At the inception of runic writing in England, the Pre-OE inscriptions were written in the pre- fuþorc , which was based closely on the original Common Germanic (CGmc) fuþark (= ‘older fuþark ’) of 24 characters with some enlargement and modifications (which are discussed in the course of this paper) during the period c. ad 400–610/650; that is, down to the time of the Caistor-by-Norwich brooch ( c . ad 610–50). This inscription is of the utmost importance because it shows the new runes with their new phonemic sound-values for the first time. I regard the period of c. ad 610/650 as the beginning of Old English because all the relevant sound-changes were completed by then (Waxenberger, forthcoming, ch. 3). It is crucial to note that the Pre-OE inscriptions reflect early sound-changes that had otherwise only been reconstructed on linguistic principles in handbooks that did not take runic inscriptions into account. Since the academic discussion on the question of whether or not there was ever an ‘Anglo-Frisian unity’ has been rekindled (see Nielsen 1994 for an overview), it seemed methodologically justified to build on the findings for the Pre-OE corpus and see to what extent the Frisian corpus shows congruence with it. Therefore I use the soundchanges of Pre-OE as a framework and examine how the Frisian runes and the soundvalues they represent fit into that frame. I also look at some of the rune-forms in order to shed more light on the characteristics of the Frisian corpus. It is stressed that this is work in progress. The difficulties of such an undertaking need to be made clear from the outset. The periodization of Old Frisian compared to Old English Compared to other Germanic languages such as English and German, the attestation of a historical stage of Frisian is relatively late.