Codex Runicus
A parchment book of 202 pages written from beginning to end in medieval runes. It is the standing exception to the claim that runic writing never carried long texts, and, as most specialists read it, an antiquarian gesture rather than ordinary practice.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Medieval runes
- Date
- c. AD 1300
- Written in
- Scania, then Danish, now southern Sweden
- Now
- Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, Copenhagen
- Shelfmark
- AM 28 8vo
The text
Why none is reproduced here.
Not reproduced. A manuscript of this length is a book rather than a quotation, and there is no short reading to give in place of it. Look it up under AM 28 8vo in the published editions, where the readings are given with their apparatus.
Where it survives
Not a discovery in the archaeological sense: it has been a library book for its whole life, and is now AM 28 8vo in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen. It was written in Scania around 1300 on ordinary parchment, ruled and rubricated in red with coloured initials, laid out exactly like any Latin-script legal manuscript of the period, except that every word of it is in runes.
Why it matters
This is the object that has to be set against the statement that runes were never used for long texts. It carries the Scanian Law, the oldest of the Nordic provincial laws, followed by the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law, a fragmentary list of Danish kings, a chronicle running from the legendary Frothi to Eric VI, and the oldest surviving description of the border between Denmark and Sweden. On the last leaf, apparently as a filler, sit the words and melody of Drømde mik en drøm i nat: both the oldest secular song and the oldest musical notation written in Scandinavia.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
A book in runes is not evidence that runes were ordinarily used for books. Most specialists read the Codex Runicus as a deliberate archaism (a Latin-script legal manuscript in every respect except its letters) rather than as a stage in the passage from runic to Latin writing. It is the exception that demonstrates the rule.
The alphabet here is the medieval futhork, not the Viking-Age Younger Futhark: dotted and extended, with a character for each sound. A book like this is only possible because the medieval reform had given the script an inventory that could spell the language unambiguously, so it is a fact about the medieval system rather than about runes in general.
Runes attested here (1)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
- MaðrYounger
The one runic text of book length, written in the medieval futhork, where this rune appears in continuous prose, page after page, rather than in a memorial formula.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.