From: barth@cbnewsd.cb.att.com (barth.richards)
Subject: Re: Peace Symbol
Organization: AT&T
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 00:09:54 GMT


In article <1993Jan26.001241.19660@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>
comjohn@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Mr. John T Jensen) writes:

>gj156879@alfred.carleton.ca ( gj student 156879) writes:
>
>>It is sort of neat that the peace symbol is an upside down rune from
>>norse mythology.  The rune, (picture a peace symbol upside down)
>>represents the horns of an elk.  It's the "defence" rune, I believe.
>>[He said, being too lazy to go across the room and look it up...]
>
>I don't know what you think runes were, but they were in fact letters,
>representing sounds, not concepts (such as defence).

Actually, they were both.  The runes that most people are now familiar with
were used as letters, but they were also used in divination, so each rune
had a symbolic meaning as well as a phonetic one.  There were also runes
that had only a symbolic meaning and were not used for letters at all.  The
swastika and the symbol we now call a "heart" were two of these.

>Nor were they pictures of creatures.

I'll have to check, but I seem to remember reading about one that was a
stylized representation of a horse.

>Some were derived from Roman letters (such as the rune for
>F), others made up.

No one is positive where they came from, but some evidence points to
Itallic writing as the source, which had the same or similar sources as
the Roman alphabet, hence the similarities.

>They were originally notched into the 90-degree edge of a
>block of wood rather than on a flat surface

I don't remember hearing about that one before, but it's interesting.
What's your source?

>(though later they were carved
>onto flat surfaces -- the famous runestones of Scandinavia -- which
>controlled their geometric shapes.

Actually, the explanation I remember reading is that the shapes were
dictated by their having been originally designed to be carved on pieces
of wood.  If you scratch symbols into wood, in a row that goes along with
the grain, then straight vertical and diagonal lines show up well, as they
cut across the grain.  However, horizontal lines tend to get lost in the
pattern of the grain, and curved lines are hard to scratch into wood.
Therefore, runes generally contained straight vertical and/or diagonal
lines, but no horizontal or curved lines.  Later, this rule was sometimes
broken, especially as runes were increasingly used on stone, metal, and
even paper (or whatever the equivalent at the time was--parchment? vellum?).

>Later generations that could not read
>them may well have infused the, to them, mysterious shapes with ideographic
>meanings and reinterpreted them as pictures, but certainly there was no such
>intention on the part of the inventors.

I don't think that's how it was, but I will have to check my references
and get back to you.  I recall that the phonetic values and the symbolic
values were known and used simultaneously.  Each rune had a name that
(usually) began with the sound that the rune represented, and the name
was the key to the symbolic or divinative meaning.

>Their invention was stimulated by
>Roman writing, amongst the then-pagan proto-Norse.

Actually, runes were used over quite a wide portion of Europe, and I seem
to remember that their early use was pretty pan-Germanic.  Again, I will
check my references and get back to you.


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Barth "|<  |\  |/  | >" Richards
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-- 
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88  Barth Richards                  "Language is a virus from outer space."  88
88  att!ihlpf!barth                           - William S. Burroughs         88
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