Bracteates
Thin gold pendants, stamped in the fifth and sixth centuries, are where a startling share of all Elder Futhark writing survives, and they are the reason we know the alphabet had groups at all.
A bracteate is a thin, single-sided gold pendant, usually two to four centimetres across, stamped from a die and worn on a cord. They were made in Scandinavia and neighbouring parts of northern Europe during the Migration Period, roughly AD 400–550, in imitation of the Roman imperial gold medallions that had been arriving from the south.
They matter here for a reason that has nothing to do with how they look. Nearly a thousand bracteates survive. About a fifth carry an inscription, and around 133 of those are in the Elder Futhark, more than a third of the entire surviving Elder Futhark corpus.
One class of small gold object, made over roughly 150 years in one region, accounts for over a third of all surviving Elder Futhark text. Any general statement about "what Elder Futhark inscriptions say" is, to a very large extent, a statement about bracteates.
Why the alphabet has groups, and how we know
The division of the Elder Futhark into three ættir is not a modern classification. It is marked on the objects, and essentially only on these objects. Three bracteates carry the futhark row with the groups separated by dots: the Vadstena bracteate from Östergötland, the Mariedamm bracteate from Närke, and the Grumpan bracteate (Vg 207) from Västergötland. Three objects, but two dies: Vadstena and Mariedamm were struck from the same one, so the ættir have two independent witnesses rather than three. See the other early futhark rows.
None of the three is perfectly preserved, and it matters which part of each is missing. Vadstena's last rune sits under the moulded suspension loop and cannot be seen; it is supplied from Mariedamm, which is legitimate precisely because the two share a die. Grumpan is damaged near its eyelet, so the z and s that close its second group are no longer readable. What survives on all three is the thing being claimed: the dots, and the grouping they mark.
They also carry much of the evidence in the long-running argument about the order of the alphabet. They agree with each other and disagree with the Kylver stone in two places: over eihwaz and perthro, and over dagaz and othala. The order every modern chart uses, including this site's, follows the bracteates in one of those places and Kylver in the other. See where runes came from for the detail.
The formula words
Bracteate inscriptions are short, and a striking number of them are not sentences. Three words recur across the corpus with no grammatical context, and they are the strongest evidence anywhere that runic writing was sometimes used for something other than recording language.
| Word | Apparent sense | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| alu | Possibly "ale", possibly something like "protection" | The commonest of the three. Its meaning is unresolved. |
| laukaʀ | "Leek" | Also the basis of a rival reconstruction for the name of the laguz rune, which is how an argument about pendants ends up deciding a rune name. |
| laþu | Something like "invitation" or "summons" | Often paired with laukaʀ on the same object. |
What alu, laþu and laukaʀ meant, and whether they were understood as words at all by the people stamping them, is not settled. They are usually read as apotropaic or invocatory. That reading is reasonable and it is an inference from distribution, not something any source states.
What this does to the evidence
Bracteates are gold. Gold survives, gets hoarded, and gets excavated. Wood does not. So the fact that a third of the Elder Futhark corpus sits on expensive jewellery may tell us that early runic literacy was confined to an elite, or it may tell us only that we have lost everything that was written on cheaper material.
This is the same problem set out on who used runes, and bracteates are the clearest case of it. Keep it in view whenever you read a confident generalisation about the earliest period.
How they are catalogued
Questions this guide answers
- What is a bracteate?
- A thin single-sided gold pendant, stamped from a die, made in Scandinavia and northern Europe roughly between AD 400 and 550. Around a thousand survive, and about a fifth of them carry inscriptions.
- Why are bracteates important for runes?
- Because around 133 of them carry Elder Futhark inscriptions, more than a third of everything that survives in that alphabet. They are also the only objects that record the division of the futhark into ættir.
- What does alu mean on a bracteate?
- Nobody is certain. It may be the word for ale, or something closer to "protection". It recurs across many objects without grammatical context, which is why it is usually read as a formula rather than as ordinary writing.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.