RUNES, A.D. 1000.
This cut is of some of the oldest runes known, giving two lines in Danish and the rest in Latin, as the transliteration shows. It is copied from The oldest yet found Document in Danish, by Prof Dr. George Stephens (Copenhagen, 1888,—from the Mémoires des Antiquaires du Nord, 1887). The author says that the leaden tablet on which the runes were cut was found in Odense, Fyn, Denmark, in 1883, and he places the date of it about the year a.d. 1000.
George Stephens’s Handbook of the old Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England is a condensation, preserving all the cuts, and making some additions to his larger folio work in 3 vols., The old-northern Runic monuments of Scandinavia and England, now first collected and deciphered (London, etc., 1866-68). It does not contain either Icelandic or Greenland runes. He says that by the time of the colonization of Iceland “the old northern runes as a system had died out on the Scandinavian main, and were followed by the later runic alphabet. But even this modern Icelandic of the tenth century has not come down to us. If it had, it would be very different from what is now vulgarly so called, which is the greatly altered Icelandic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.... The oldest written Icelandic known to us is said to date from about the year 1200.... The whole modern doctrine of one uniform Icelandic language all over the immense north in the first one thousand winters after Christ is an impossible absurdity.... It is very seldom that any of the Scandinavian runic stones bear a date.... No Christian runic gravestone is older than the fourteenth century.”
On runes in general, see Mallet, Bohn’s ed., pp. 227, 248, following the cut of the Kingektorsoak stone, in Rafn’s Antiq. Americanæ; Wilson’s Prehist. Man, ii. 88; Wollheim’s Nat. Lit. der Scandinavier (Berlin, 1875), vol. i. pp. 2-15; Legis-Glueckselig’s Die Runen and ihre Denkmäler (Leipzig, 1829); De Costa’s Pre-Columb. Disc., pp. xxx; Revue polit. et lit., Jan. 10, 1880.
It is held that runes are an outgrowth of the Latin alphabet. (L. F. A. Wimmer’s Runeskriftens Oprindelse og Udvikling i norden, Copenhagen, 1874.)
Everywhere else where the Northmen went they left proofs of their occupation on the soil, but nowhere in America, except on an island on the east shore of Baffin’s Bay,[523] has any authentic runic inscription been found outside of Greenland. Not a single indisputable grave has been discovered to attest their alleged centuries of fitful occupation. The consistent and natural proof of any occupation of America south of Davis Straits is therefore lacking; and there is not sufficient particularity in the descriptions[524] to remove the suspicion that the story-telling of the fireside has overlaid the reports of the explorer. Our historic sense is accordingly left to consider, as respects the most general interpretation, what weight of confidence should be yielded to the sagas, pre-Columbian as they doubtless are. But beyond this is perhaps, what is after all the most satisfactory way of solving the problem, a dependence on the geographical and ethnical probabilities of the case. The Norsemen have passed into credible history as the most hardy and venturesome of races. That they colonized Iceland and Greenland is indisputable. That their eager and daring nature should have deserted them at this point is hardly conceivable. Skirting the Greenland shores and inuring themselves to the hardships and excitements of northern voyaging, there was not a long stretch of open sea before they could strike the Labrador coast. It was a voyage for which their ships, with courageous crews, were not unfitted. Nothing is more likely than that some ship of theirs may have been blown westerly and unwillingly in the first instance, just as Greenland was in like manner first made known to the Icelanders. The coast once found, to follow it to the south would have been their most consistent action.
FROM OLAUS MAGNUS.
Fac-simile of a cut to the chapter “De Alphabeto Gothorum” in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Romæ, M.D.LV.).
We may consider, then, that the weight of probability[525] is in favor of a Northman descent upon the coast of the American mainland at some point, or at several, somewhere to the south of Greenland; but the evidence is hardly that which attaches to well-established historical records.
The archæological traces, which are lacking farther south, are abundant in Greenland, and confirm in the most positive way the Norse occupation. The ruins of churches and baptisteries give a color of truth to the ecclesiastical annals which have come down to us, and which indicate that after having been for more than a century under the Bishop of Iceland, a succession of bishops of its own was established there early in the twelfth century. The names of seventeen prelates are given by Torfæus, though it is not quite certain that the bishops invariably visited their see. The last known to have filled the office went thither in the early years of the fifteenth century. The last trace of him is in the celebration of a marriage at Gardar in 1409.
The Greenland colonists were equipped with all the necessities of a permanent life. They had horses, sheep, and oxen, and beef is said to have been a regular article of export to Norway. They had buildings of stone, of which the remains still exist. They doubtless brought timber from the south, and we have in runic records evidence of their explorations far to the north. They maintained as late as the thirteenth century a regular commercial intercourse with the mother country,[526] but this trade fell into disuse when a royal mandate constituted such ventures a monopoly of the throne; and probably nothing so much conduced to the decadence and final extinction of the colonies as this usurped and exclusive trade, which cut off all personal or conjoined intercourse.