Meldorf fibula
A brooch from Schleswig-Holstein carrying four punched characters, about a century older than any inscription accepted as runic. Whether they are runes at all has been argued since 1979, and that argument is the whole of its significance.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- Date
- First half of the 1st century AD
- Found at
- Meldorf, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
- Now
- Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig
- Signature
- None given here. English, Frisian and Continental material is catalogued outside the Rundata tradition altogether; elsewhere a signature is left off only where we could not verify one. Either way the object is cited by name and findspot.
The text
Why none is reproduced here.
Not reproduced. This inscription is either too long to quote in full or its reading is contested enough that printing one transliteration would suggest a settled text where there is not one. Look it up under its name in the standard catalogues, where the readings are given with their apparatus.
Discovery
Found in 1979 at Meldorf in Schleswig-Holstein, probably from a woman's cremation grave, and now at Schloss Gottorf. The four characters are punched into the foot of the brooch rather than cut into it. Archaeological dating puts the object in the first half of the first century AD, roughly a hundred years before the Vimose comb, which is the oldest inscription anyone accepts as runic.
Why it matters
Everything turns on four marks. If they are runes, runic writing is a century older than the accepted record, and the awkwardness of the earliest accepted inscription being already competently cut has at least a partial answer: there would be something earlier after all. If they are Latin capitals, this is a piece of provincial jewellery that says nothing about runes whatever. Very little else in the corpus carries so much weight on so little.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
The disagreement is not about what the inscription says but about what kind of writing it is. Düwel and Gebühr read four runes, hiwi, "for the spouse"; Odenstedt and Seebold read Latin capitals, IDIN, taken as a personal name; Bernard Mees, in a paper of his own rather than in the amulets book cited below, reads runes again, iṛiḷi. Those are not three translations of one text. They are three answers to a prior question: whether this is runic writing, Latin writing, or marks that are not writing at all.
It turns up regularly as "the oldest runic inscription" with the qualification quietly dropped. The qualification is the entire point: this object is the reason the Vimose comb is described as the oldest *datable* runic inscription rather than simply the oldest.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.