A wooden comb dated to 150 CE at a Danish site has the oldest known runic inscription, harja, said to be a man’s name. Well, it might be, or not. That’s the trouble with archaeology. Alternatively, the language is Finno-Ugrian or Uralic and simply means “comb”.
Today we think of rune writing as relating to Vikings, and a quick online scan finds a Germanic origin. If so, that’s a problem for the Vimose find, because the Goths, for example, were far more likely to have transmitted runes than invented them.
The word, rune, in archaic Germanic languages means “secrecy”, implying Goths and Nordics came across others using them, and were impressed. Who were the first rune writers? More online searching cites the Etruscans, an ancient people of Italy who wrote in rune-like symbols, drawn in turn from the Greek alphabet of more than 2,500 years ago.
The Goths could not have picked up Etruscan writing in time to drop an inscribed comb in Denmark. They had first to deal to the Roman Empire who wrote in their own alphabet – the basis of my typing and yours - and that was in the early 4th Century CE.
Others had to have made the link, and Uralic peoples - the forebears of Estonians, Finns, and Lapplanders or Sami - are a plausible candidate.
Were the Etruscans themselves Uralic? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. All that needs to be shown is how Etruscan runes, or a version of them, travelled north to Denmark by 150 CE.
Linguistic scholarship boils down to Etruscan being related to Rhaetic, going back to the Bronze Age or earlier. The Rhaetians lived in what are now alpine parts of southeastern Switzerland, western Austria, Bavaria, and northern Italy. (Not to be confused with those Swiss who speak Rhaeto-Romance, derived from Latin.)
The Romans arrived at the Danube in the first century of the Common Era, by which time Rhaetic / Etruscan runes would already have travelled north. The last recorded Rhaetic inscription dates from no later than the first century BCE.
To ask again: Could Uralic language speakers have made the transmission? Were they more widespread than conventionally imagined?
Eesti Ajalugu I, Estonian history, vol. 1 (2020), has a chapter spanning 1750 BCE to 50 CE. The appearance of certain types of artefact combined with carbon dating has the western Siberian ancestors of Finns / Estonians pressing westwards into the Baltic close to 3000 years ago. There were people already there at the time who spoke proto-Germanic or Baltic languages.
One Neolithic culture took over another, including with its language, implying the Finnic invaders were at that time technologically superior. Did they travel further than the archaeological evidence suggests? Could they have been the transmitters of rune writing from the northern bank of the Danube to Denmark? An intriguing thought, but who really knows.
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