 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, a two-parter in which native Lang and I are exploring ancient Germanic runes. After you've learned here about the word rune and how runes are intertwined into the modern world, head over to native Lang to find out about the development of the runic writing system, from Vikings scratching graffiti on a church in Constantinople to tales of Odin and magical words. The runic system that was used in Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia before the arrival of Christian missionaries was rarely employed for writing extended texts, mainly just inscriptions and such like. Once the missionaries arrived, though, it didn't take long for the new converts to come up with the idea of using the Latin alphabet for writing down not just Latin, but also their own language. Just one problem. Or maybe a couple, actually. There were some sounds in the various Germanic languages that just didn't exist in Latin, so there were no letters to use to write them down. For instance, both the voice v as in modern English either and the voiceless f as in ether didn't exist in Latin, though a similar sound from ancient Greek was represented as th in Latin contexts. In early Old English manuscripts, the sound was represented as the digraph, that's two letters together making one sound, th, or simply as the letter d, but eventually a diacritic stroke was added to that letter d to differentiate it from a regular letter d to make a symbol we now refer to as eth. And a little later, another solution to this missing sound also began to be used, one of those old runic characters, the thorn as it was called in Anglo-Saxon, or thurs meaning giant or ogre in Old Norse. You see, though the runic writing system is an alphabet representing sounds, not an ideographic system, the characters have meaningful names. These two characters, either eths or the runic thorn, could be used for either th or th. Old Norse manuscripts followed suit with first the letter thorn, and a little later the eth, with the added twist that thorn came to be used only as the initial letter in words, an eth in other positions, whereas in Old English, the letters were used interchangeably. Another runic character was pressed into service as well, the win meaning joy, to represent the w sound. In Latin, the letter u was used for both the vowel u and the consonant w. Actually, in the earlier Old English manuscripts, the letter u was used for w, but eventually to avoid confusion between the vowel u and the consonant u, the runic win was adopted. Of course, to our modern eyes, the runic win looks an awful lot like the letter p, so modern printed editions of Old English texts replace all the wins with our modern w, a character that came about a little later by joining up two v's or two u's, the double u. But if you're reading actual manuscripts from the period, you have to mind your p's and, well, wins. Actually, we're kind of prone to mixing up those Old Runic characters and Roman letters. That's what happened with those ye oldy shop signs, in fact. You see, the thorn hung around for a while after the Old English period, gradually becoming less and less common, and as it did so, the form of the character became less and less distinct, with the ascender, that perpendicular line on the side, becoming shorter. So the thorn looked more like the win, which by the 14th century had disappeared, and like the p. Confusing. And by the 15th century, it looked a lot like the letter y, so that when the printing press came along, printers would often use the y in place of thorn, though by that point, the th-digraph had mostly replaced it, with the thorn being used in common words like the, often represented in texts as y standing in for thorn with a superscript e. So what looks like y-e-e was actually thorn-e-the, so it should really be pronounced the Old Shop, but that's not nearly so quaint. One last way that runes were worked into English back in those Old Anglo-Saxon manuscripts was as a type of secret code. A few individual runes signs were dropped into the otherwise Latin script, which would be put together to spell out the answer to a riddle or the name of the author, as in this poem by Cunowulf. It's no coincidence that runes were used in this secretive way, since rune itself is not only Old English for rune character, but also meant secret or mystery, and counsel or consultation. It comes via proto-Germanic probably from an Indo-European root meaning roar or murmur, which also gives us the words rumour, riot, and raucous. The word mostly faded from the language, along with the runes themselves, after the Anglo-Saxon period, only to be added back in by scholars in the 17th century and later, who were studying those Old Runes. But there is at least one hidden remnant of the word in the place name runemede. You see, runemede in Suri was where Anglo-Saxon kings held council meetings with their various nobles, aldermen, thanes, and so forth. Remember the council meeting of rune? The so-called Witana Yamat, literally meeting of the wise men, which, by the way, inspired J.K. Rowling's Council of Wizards, the Whizengammet. So runemede literally means rune island meadow, and it's therefore appropriate that in the year 1215, the funeral barons of England, who were, I suppose, raucous and ready to riot, Buttonhold King John had forced him to accept the Magna Carta, which limited the powers of the tyrannical king. Not that he kept to his agreement, but rescinded it shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, Magna Carta marks an important milestone in constitutional history. Getting back to those runes themselves, for the most part, they're used faded with the Middle Ages, but they were later revived with gophicism and the interest in the ancient Germanic past in the 18th and 19th century. This is a factor in the growing nationalism of German romanticism, which celebrated, and to some degree fabricated, a romanticized version of Germanic history, of which runes were a part. Furthermore, the runes fed into the esoteric and occultist fascination of figures such as Austrian mysticist Guido von List, who developed the Arminin runes, and inspired by them, Karl-Maria Viligut, who developed his own version of the runes in the 20th century. And that's the next link in our chain, because this was exactly the sort of thing that caught the interest of the Nazi occultists, particularly Heinrich Himmler, who incorporated these runes into various Nazi insignia, most famously the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, the so-called SS. Another script-related thing that the Nazis were into, at least at first, was the old black letter or fracture typeface, which had developed from the Gothic manuscript hands of the later Middle Ages, and which by the 19th century had become particularly associated with Germanic culture and language. The Nazis eventually decided to dump the fracture typeface in favor of the Roman script, claiming, mendaciously, anti-Semitic reasons, but actually, because it made practical sense to use the same typeface as the rest of the Latin alphabet using world. The Nazis weren't the only ones to favor the fracture typeface. Many writers in the 19th and early 20th century expressed similar attachment to the script for German nationalist reasons, such as German type designer Rudolf Koch. In addition to typefaces, Koch was also interested in other graphic symbols, such as the old Germanic runes, and published a book on various old symbols, monograms, and runes called The Book of Signs. This book brought many of these old symbols and runes to pop culture notice, including to the attention of rock band Led Zeppelin, who used a couple of the symbols from the book on the cover of their fourth album, which were meant to represent the band members. The one that drummer John Bonham selected was Three Circles, meant to symbolize two parents and a child. It also happens to be similar to the company logo of the 400-year-old German Industrial Family Dynasty, known for steelworks, and for, believe it or not, a German heavy metal band called Die Krupps, who called themselves after this old German family name. The company logo is actually based on the seamless railway wheels the company manufactured. But, lest you think this is all a bit of a tangential connection, the Krupps family ties into our story in another way. You see, the company manufactured weapons for World War II, for which they got into some trouble due to their forced labour practices, as well as for World War I, during which they built the famous heavy gun called Big Bertha, named after, if you'll believe it, Krupp family member and heiress Bertha Krupp. Actually, there's a long history of giving guns women's names, such as Mons Meg at Edinburgh Castle, and also it seems the very first gun, so to speak. At least that's where the word gun comes from, a particular 14th-century cannon at Windsor Castle called Domina Gunilda, or Lady Gunhilda. Gunhilda is an old Scandinavian name, the two parts Gunnar and Hildur, both meaning battle, and both names of Valkyries, the warrior goddesses who collect the souls of the slain warriors from the battlefield in Norse mythology. As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, there weren't any notable women in England at the time by that name, so likely the use of the name for large munitions, before gunpowder and cannons, they be ballistas or other large siege weapons, goes back to Scandinavian times, perhaps after someone like Gunhilda, daughter of Harold Bluetooth. She and her husband were apparently killed in the Saint Bryce's Day Massacre in 1002, when all the Danes in England were ordered killed by King Athelred the Unready, the retaliation for which her brother Swain Forkbeard retook England, which Harold Bluetooth had held before Athelred, bringing it back under Scandinavian control. And speaking of Harold Bluetooth, that's where we get the term for the wireless short-range communication technology that you probably have in your smartphone. You see, Harold was also known for uniting the war in Danish tribes into a single unified kingdom. In fact, the Jellings Runestone I've used as the background for this video was raised by Harold to commemorate his unification of Denmark and Norway. And on that basis, Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson picked his name for a technology that was intended to unify the at-the-time disorganized communications protocols, uniting them into one standard. Oh, and the symbol for that unifying technology? It's based on the runic symbols for the initials of Harold Bluetooth. Now that you've seen the later history of runes, a continuous process of dividing and unifying, head over to Native Lang to have their early history filled in, from the Viking sack of Seville to the mysteries of the elder and younger Futhark. Click here to see that video, and check out his other videos on the history of writing systems while you're there. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. And check out our Patreon page, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. Leave a comment or question, or tweet at alliterative. You can also read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net. Still here? Don't forget to check out the other part of this video at Native Lang. It's got Vikings!