Runes

Runes

‘Pass me the lamp, please,’ said Gunilla as she peered into the phreatic cave.’

Tomaslav handed her the light that was on a long lead from the power socket in the farmhouse.

‘Please be careful with the cable in all that dampness. We’ll have to get proper lighting if we are going to be digging in here for a while.’

‘If we have here what I think it is, we’ll be here for a very long time. How are you on runes?’

‘Well I know a little about most of them but my specialism is the elder futhark. That was before they messed them about and modernised the runic script.’

‘Only a runes man from Macedonia could talk about modernisation that took place before the 8th century,’ laughed Gunilla as she peered at the inscription on the limestone wall of the cave. ‘I think I can count only twenty four characters although it is hard to see with this limited light. Why don’t we pack up for now and come back as soon as we can get some decent lighting rigged up in here?’

It sounded like a suggestion but Tomaslav knew it was really a command. His boss had made it a habit to get her own way.

*****

They returned to Gottland the next summer after a long winter at their home university of Lund where they spent the time attempting to demonstrate the value of their find to the financial research committee, to try and prise some money out of it. They needed  to fund their research during the following summer. They both spent the rest of the time researching deeper into the history of runes and especially the elder futhark - trying to get themselves in the mythical meditative state of ‘Kenning of Runelore’.

The funding was eventually and reluctantly released to allow them to set up an expedition after they explained that their find could be as important as the find of the Kylver Stone in 1903, thus bringing more prestige and fame to their university. The committee members all knew about Kylver - the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of runes.This was the clincher for the committee as they were getting a little fed up with all the astro physicists and cosmologists wittering on about incomprehensible mathematics and possible multi dimensional universes and other stuff about which they had little or no understanding. A rock with old writing scratched on its surface was something they could get their teeth into - metaphorically speaking, of course - as many of the committee had lost many of them.

*****

It was early summer, they were ready. They set off with their gleaming new equipment and an enhanced team. Gunilla Carlsson was the leader. She was now a professor of ancient Germanic languages. Dr Tomaslav Vladic was second in command and they now had a team of four post grad students and one PhD student, Helena Lödqvist, who had an interest in runes and Scanwegian invasions of the UK.

They set up the equipment, including waterproof lighting, in the cave and started work. They started by mapping the cave’s limestone surfaces using a miniature LIDAR system so that they could take the complete data set back to Lund. They could carry on working on it through the next winter. None of them wanted to spend a Swedish winter  in a cave in Gottland.

They modified the LIDAR so that they could map and record each character in great detail under Gunilla’s direction while Tomaslav carried out a search and survey of  the cave  with two of the students. They hoped to find an ancient burial, other  runes written on the walls or, failing that, some animal bones from long ago - hopefully from extinct species. Unfortunately nothing was found to put meat on the bones of the lonely inscription.

*****

The survey of the cave and the detailed LIDAR record of the inscription had been produced. It was now time to pack up all their gear and return to Lund to work on the data that they had accumulated on site. Their final job was to secure a locked steel grid over the invaluable ancient inscription to protect it from any possible vandalism. It was a unique and invaluable artefact and could well include indicators for the elixir of eternal life or the early history of Germanic tribes or…?

*****

Gunilla and Tomaslav had been working on the records from the cave for some three months with little progress. They could identify several characters of the script but they couldn’t identify sentences, phrases that made sense or even words. They both spent several weeks in Stockholm, looking at the Kylver stone in the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities. Nothing really helped until they realised that the word ‘sueus’ at the end of the Kylver inscription was a palindrome. Perhaps that was a clue that meant the elder futhark script could be read from either direction?

*****

They hastened back to Lund, convinced they had a breakthrough in understanding ‘their ‘ inscription. They used the LIDAR scans to reverse the inscription but it still didn’t make any sense. They knew from the style of the characters that the inscription was one of the earliest elder futhark inscriptions ever found so, in desperation, they decided to go back to the origins of the runic system and call in an Etruscan expert, in spite of realising that this would put a rather large dent in their funding.

Dr Anna-Karin Söderström eventually arrived from Stockholm, looked at the inscription, spent several hours humming to herself while poring over it and then called Gunhilla and Tomaslav together to announce her findings.

‘I have come to a conclusion,’ she announced. ‘In my experience you have done the right thing in reversing the inscription so that it is read from right to left. I can now read the inscription to you, I am just rather surprised that you have not realised what it said before this.’

The other two looked at each other, a little shamefaced, and leaned forward to better hear what the good doctor was going to say.’

‘Wha…what does it say, Doctor?

Anna-Karin leaned back with a smirk and pronounced;

‘It says “Kilroy was here”.’

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