Sociocultural Theory and the leub Inscriptions

Abstract

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