Welcome to the Endless Nod. Today, a two-parter in which native Lang and I are exploring ancient Germanic rooms. 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 Runeck writing system, from Vikings scratching graffiti on a church and constant anopul to tales of Odin and magical words. The Runeck 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 as in modern English either and the voiceless 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 die graph, that's two letters together making one sound, TH, or simply as the letter D, but eventually a die critic 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 Runeck characters, the thorn as it was called in Anglo-Saxon, or THURS meaning giant or ogre in old Norse. You see, though the Runeck writing system is an alphabet representing sounds, not an idio-graphic system, the characters have meaningful names. These two characters, either ETHs or the Runeck 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 Runeck character was pressed into service as well. The WIN meaning joy, to represent the WOOT sound. In Latin, the letter U was used for both the vowel U and the consonant WOOT. Actually, in the earlier Old English manuscripts, the letter U was used for WOOT, but eventually to avoid confusion between the vowel U and the consonant U, the Runeck WIN was adopted. Of course, to our modern eyes, the Runeck 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 to V's or to U's, the W. 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 Runeck 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 diagram had mostly replaced it, with the Thorn being used in common words like the, often represented in text as Y standing in for Thorn with a superscript E. So what looks like Y E, E, was actually Thorn E, V. So it should really be pronounced the old shop, but that's not nearly so quaint. One last way that Runeck were worked into English back in those old Anglo-Saxon manuscripts was as a type of secret code. A few individual Rune 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 Kunowulf. It's no coincidence that Rune's were used in this secretive way, since Rune itself is not only old English for Runeck character, but also mid, secret or mystery, and council or consultation. It comes via proto-dermanic probably from an Indo-European group, meaning roar or murmur, which also gives us the words rumor, riot, and raucous. The word mostly faded from the language along with the Rune's 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 ruins. But there is at least one hidden remnant of the word in the place name, Runemead. You see, Runemead in Suri was where Anglo-Saxon kings held council meetings with their various nobles, alderman, thanes, and so forth. Remember the council meeting of Rune? The so-called Witina Yamat, literally meeting of the wise men, which, by the way, inspired JK Rowling's council of wizards, the Witina Yamat. So Runemead literally means Rune Island Meadow, and it's therefore appropriate that in the year 1215, the feudal barons of England, who were, I suppose, Rokas and Ready to Riot, button-hold King John and 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 Rune's themselves, for the most part, they're used faded with the Middle Ages, but they were later revived with Goffisism 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 Rune's were a part. Furthermore, the Rune's fed into the esoteric and occultist fascination of figures such as Austrian mysticist Guido Formlist, who developed the Arminin Rune's, and inspired by them, Karl Maria Villagut, who developed his own version of the Rune's 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 Natsio cultists, particularly Heinrich Himmler, who incorporated these Rune's into various Nazi insignia, most famously the insignia of the Schutz Staffel, the so-called SS. Another script-related thing that the Natsio were into, at least at first, was the old black letter or fracture-type face, 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 Natsis eventually decided to dump the fracture-type face in favor of the Roman script, claiming, mandatiously, 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 Natsis were the only ones to favor the fracture-type face. 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 ruins, called The Book of Signs. This book brought many of these old symbols and ruins 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 symbolise two parents in a child. It also happens to be similar to the company logo of the 400-year-old German industrial Krupp family dynasty, known for steelworks, and, for, believe it or not, a German heavy metal band called De Krupps, who called themselves after this old German family name. The company logo was actually based on the seamless railway wheels the company manufactured, but, lest you think this is all a bit of a tangential connection, the Krupp family ties into our story in another way. You see, the company manufactured weapons for World War II, for which they gone 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 Eris Bertha Krupp. Actually, there's a long history of giving guns women's names, such as Maun's 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 canon at Windsor Castle called Domina Gonylda, or Lady Gunhilda. Gonylda is an old Scandinavian name, the two parts Guna and Hilder, 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 Gonylda, daughter of Harold Bluetooth. She and her husband were apparently killed in the St. Price's Day Massacre in 1002, when all the Danes in England were ordered killed by King Athle Red the Unready, in retaliation for which her brother Swain Fortbeard retook England, which Harold Bluetooth had held before Athle Red, 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 Roonstone 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 Roonick symbols for the initials of Harold Bluetooth. Now that you've seen the later history of Roons, 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 Fuddark. 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 a liturative. You can also read more of my thoughts on my blog at the liturative.net. Still here? Don't forget to check out the other part of this video at native Lang. It's got Vikings!