Material regarding younger runes can be found in Irish, English, continental and Norse manuscripts from the Viking age, the high and late middle ages and the early modern period. They are written both in the local vernaculars and in Latin, and employ a range of variants of the Latin letters: insular script, Carolingian script and blackletter.
| Carolingian | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | ı | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | ſ | ꞇ | u | x |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Insular | ɑ | b | c | ꝺ | e | ꝼ | ᵹ | h | ı | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | ꞃ | ꞅ | ꞇ | u | x |
The Carolingian script differs but little from the modern lowercase
letters, as the latter are modelled on the revival of the former in the
renaissance. For a precise transcription, only three nonstandard letters
are needed: dotless i, long s and tau-shaped
t. For insular scripts, up to a handful more has variant forms.
Blackletter scripts take their general shapes from a combination of
these two, but distort them into narrower and more angular forms.
Several letters are made by repeating the same basic stroke, making the
identification of letters challenging in many instances. In a worn
manuscript, the word minimum
could look like this: ııı ı ıı ı ııı ıı ııı
– only without the space between the letters: ııııııııııııııı. As this is a
rather superficial feature, blackletter scripts are transcribed based on
the underlying Carolingian or insular shapes.
ꝛ – r rotunda, a positional variant of r used after letters with a curved right edge: b ꝺ o p.
Ɛ – a variant of e which is taller and usually open at the top.
s – short s gradually appears alongside ſ, though a regular distribution between them does not appear until the modern period.
ȷ – dotless j is merely a variant of (dotless) i, primarily used as the last of two or more consecutive is (including in roman numerals).
None of the mediaeval vernaculars had a need for a letter for the consonant now written v. For the vowel u and the semivowel w both Carolingian and insular letters primarily used a rounded shape like modern letter, while others retained the earlier v-shape. Later scripts could inherit both forms and used them more or less interchangeably. The consistent use of one form for the vowel and the other for the consonant is a postmediaeval invention.
When adopting the Latin letters to write various vernaculars, it was often necessary to introduce additional letters to denote sounds not present in Latin. Anglo-Saxon in particular introduced several. Most of these were transmitted to Old Norse, where some were retained, some went out of use and further new ones were added.
The Greek letters y and z were often appended to the 21-letter Latin alphabet as presented above. The former was adopted to represent the umlauted vowel /y/ in Anglo-Saxon. It was sometimes written with a dot above, and in some Old Norse manuscripts, it was rendered as a v with a dot above.
The et-ligature which evolved into the ampersand sign and the tironian note ⁊ representing the conjunction and regardless of language were also sometimes counted as supplementary letters; either only one of them or both.
The ligatures æ and œ in Latin were equivalent to writing ae and oe; in Anglo-Saxon they were reinterpreted as separate letters representing umlauted vowels. The latter disappeared at an early stage as the sound it represented shifted further to a long e in most dialects.
Anglo-Saxon also needed to express the pair of sounds written
th in Modern English. Besides the digraph used today, two
different letters developed independently for this purpose. One is
ð, the insular form of d with a distinguishing stroke.
This was given the name eth
following the naming pattern of
continuants in the Latin alphabet. The other is þ, taking the
shape and name from the rune thorn
. Any given manuscript tends to
use one of them exclusively, covering both the voiced and the unvoiced
allophone; using the two variant letters to distinguish between the two
pronunciations is a postmediaeval invention.
In Latin, the letter v was used for both the vowel u
and the semivowel now written w, and its name was u
. This
custom was sometimes retained, otherwise the semivowel could be written
with the digraph vv called double u
, or by the letter
ƿ, taking the shape and name from the rune wynn
. The
open-topped form in which the latter was adopted by Old Norse scribes,
ꝩ, is called vend.
As parchment was expensive, texts were often highly abbreviated to make the most out of this resource. As the conventions used varied between regions and time periods as well as between Latin and the various vernaculars, it would take an inordinate amount of space just to cover what is used in the material quoted in this work. I will point out the most frequently encountered conventions below, but first a detour on the various ways of presenting source texts, including how abbreviations are treated:
Facsimile: This covers photographs representing the original as it truly looks, ultraviolet or multispectral images, photographs that are manipulated to enhance text that has become difficult to read, and tracings of the text. Each individual letterform and abbreviation sign is preserved as on the page, as is the layout of the text.
Diplomatic: A typographical approximation of the original as precise as the typography allows. Each type of letterform or abbreviation sign is preserved, as is significant variations in size and position of the characters. In blocks of text, line breaks are preserved; smaller quotations inline indicate linebreaks with a vertical line. Vertical lines might also be used to denote breaks in the text such as when intersecting a part of an illustration. Marginal and interlinear annotations are presented in their original positions. Corrections in the form of underdotting letters that are to be disregarded or replaced are left as written.
Semi-diplomatic: Letterforms without semantic distinction are unified, unless the variant forms are among the most frequent. Thus the original distibution of u and v and often of ſ and s is generally preserved, but not of r and ꝛ. Abbreviations are expanded, with the supplied letters italicised. In blocks of text, line breaks are normally preserved; if not vertical lines are used to mark any linebreaks that might be of significance, for example when it is not obvious if two words separated by a line break is to be considered a compound word. Marginal and interlinear annotations are interpolated where intended in the text, marked by symbols. Corrections are shown with text marked for deletion or replacement struck out and any replacement with the appropriate insertion signs.
Normalised: The actual text represented, written with the standard alphabet and using normal dictionary forms if the meaning is clear. Only abbreviations still in common use are retained, and no attempt is made to record incidental features such as line breaks.
At all levels, there are also conventions for how to represent damage and loss. On the facsimile level, it should be possible to see which areas that are physically lost, erased or blotted out. In the diplomatic level, space is left showing the size of gaps, or dots might be used to show the approximate number of unreadable letters. In semi-diplomatic renderings, uncertain letters are written with a dot below, and unreadable letters are represented by dots. Lost letters that can be inferred from the context, from parallel textual evidence or from earlier readings prior to the damage are added in square brackets.
In this work, I use both diplomatic rendering (somewhat limited by the medium) and normalised rendering with the convention from the semi-diplomatic level of showing expanded abbreviations in italics and supplied text in brackets. I use both photographical facsimiles, consisting of or based on images provided by the institutions holding the manuscripts, and tracings of these. If not explicitly specified otherwise, all tracings are my own.
There are three distinct types of abbreviation that may all take the form of a horizontal bar above the x-height of the text, crossing any ascenders.
Nasal bar: This takes the form of a horizontal bar, a
tilde or a reverse tilde
in the form of two short vertical
strokes connected by diagonal from the bottom of the first to the top of
the second. In the latter form, the diagonal may be so thin that the
result looks like two dots rather than a single connected diacritic. It
usually covers only one letter, but might overhang this on one or both
sides, or be displaced so that it is positioned between the preceding
and the following letter, but is normally placed directly above the
preceding one. In differences to the other uses, it is rarely placed
over letters with ascenders. Its value is normally n, or m
when placed over a word-final u; but may also represent a
syllable with a vowel and a short or long nasal sound following
it.
Conventional abbreviation: Very frequent words, names or syllables can be abbreviated by a horizontal bar frequently crossing at least one ascender and frequently covering more than one letter. When used for words, an appropriate inflectional ending may follow the abbreviation. The bar is normally plain, but especially in the nomina sacra it might have slightly ornamented terminals.
Suspension: Words or phrases that are trivially understood from the context, for example if it repeats something written in full shortly before, is often abbreviated by a horizontal bar over the last letters, regardless of whether there are any ascenders. The bar is either plain or with slightly ornamented terminals. Suspensions can also be written with a following full stop as in the modern convention.
Other supralinear signs are letters either in modern-style superscript, or placed directly above the preceding letter. In both cases they generally signify an entire syllable containing the letter in question, but may at times either form a conventional abbreviation or a suspension where the letter or letters mark the inflectional ending, as is still sometimes used: 1st for first, qo for quarto. This class also contains non-letters or modified letters in the same position. In Latin texts, the most common of these represents -us, and is shaped like the numeral 9 where the loop is not fully closed, or like the numeral 2 without the bottom stroke. A sign like two joined reversed commas, or a very flattened u, is used for r, normally followed by a or another vowel. A zig-zag with the longer central stroke horizontal or near-horizontal is used for -er.
Strokes through letters form conventional syllable or word
abbreviations. A diagonal stroke through the bottom right of any
word-final letter represents the inflectional ending -um, most
frequently seen crossing the tail of r rotunda. It often has a
curl at the top, making it look like a comma with a very long
tail
. A stroke with the similar variation in shape through
l is frequent for the Latin word vel, and may be used for
the conjuction or
also in the context of other languages. A
p with a horizontal stroke through the descender is read
per, but with a hook on the left side of the descender it becomes
pro.
The final type worth mentioning is letterlike symbols like the
abovementioned ⁊. A reversed c, sometimes with the lower
part straightened out and extended downwards as a descender represents
the syllable con. A sign like ÷, sometimes rotated,
represents est, while the phrase id est might be expressed
by a (dotless) i with a centered dot on either side: ·ı·
.
A sign varying between something like a semicolon and the letter
ȝ has a value depending on the preceding letter. It is most
frequent following q where it makes -que.