Cryptography Reference
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in stone. Runes are abundant in Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon Britain. (There
are approximately 3500 stones with runic inscriptions found in Europe, mostly
in Sweden and Norway.) However, there is an older runic stone, containing
the oldest extant runic inscription, called the
Kylver Stone
(see Figure 1.6).
1.1
This is a limestone slab
dating to the fifth century,
which was found in the
province of Gotland, Swe-
den. The inscriptions are
of the older runic alphabet,
sometimes called
Futhark
,
which is is both chronolog-
ically and linguistically the
oldest testimony to any Teu-
tonic language. (This earli-
est version of the runic lan-
guage had 24 letters, di-
vided into three sets, called
œttir
, of 8 letters each. The
sounds of the first six letters
were
f
,
u
,
th
,
a
,
r
, and
k
, re-
spectively yielding
Futhark
.) The inscriptions on the Kylver stone are facing
inside the coGn, most likely to protect the gravesite as some incantation. It
contains a
palindrome
(any sequence of symbols that reads the same backward
or forward) on it,
sueus
, presumed to be some magical protection, but it has
not been deciphered.
These enciphered methods of rune writings are called
Lønnruner
in Norwe-
gian, meaning
secret runes
or
coded runes
. It is not clear that the intention
of the carvers was to secrecy, but perhaps, as we saw with the early stages of
writings on Egyptian tombs, the rune carver's only purpose was to demonstrate
his skills for others to admire (perhaps as puzzles for learning Futhark). Known
Ogham writings number nearly 400 in Ireland. These extant examples of Ogham
are principally grave and boundary markers. However, there is some evidence of
its use by the Druids for documenting stories, poetry, etc. (The
Druids
were the
learned class of the ancient Celts, the first historically identifiable inhabitants
of Brittany.
Druid
is Celtic for
knowing the oak tree
. Moreover, Julius Caesar,
who is perhaps the main source of information about Druids, classified Celts
into
druids
as
men of religion and learning
, also
eques
as warriors, and
plebes
as commoners.) It is uncertain if the Druids actually used enciphered oghams
for divination or magical purposes. Any carvings in wood have long ago rotted
away, leaving only the stone inscriptions. However, in the
Book of Ballymote
,
written in 1391 AD, are some fragments of writing, in another system, called
Bricriu's Ogham
, which may be interpreted as an enciphered ogham from an-
Figure 1.6: The Kylver stone.
1.1
This image from
http://www.runewebvitki.com/index.html
, courtesy of site owner, Rig
Svenson.
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