Old European Echoes in Germanic Runes?

Adrian Poruciuc (Romania)

The aim of this short article is to suggest that the Germanic runic script is worth including in discussions about the Old European script and the beginnings of writing in general. However recent the fuþark may seem to be, it has features that are much more archaic than the alphabetic systems of the Greeks and the Romans.

A number of signs, stylized into abstract shapes, were long ago considered so charged with magic that those shapes were perpetuated, by one or another prehistoric population, from generation to generation, and such signs were even transmitted from one people to another. There is enough archaeological evidence (often confirmed by ethnographic facts) that indicates perpetuation and repeated transmission of signs proper, throughout millennia.

Poruciuc considers that what we can usually discover, by comparing Old European signs (of unknown phonetic values) to the ones of better known syllabaries and alphabets (the fuþark included), is correspondence and continuity in shapes and, often, in symbolism, but rarely in phonetic values.