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Grammarians, Skalds and Rune Carvers II
Edited by Michael Schulte and Robert Nedoma
[NOWELE 69:2] 2016
► pp. 155–190

Óláfr Þórðarson and the ‘Norse alphabet’

A thirteenth-century Icelandic grammarian’s account of runic writing

The present study deals with those sections of the so-called Third Grammatical Treatise, written by the Icelandic scholar and poet Óláfr Þórðarson around the middle of the 13th century, in which the author describes a variety of the Scandinavian runic alphabet and compares it with the Latin alphabet. The investigation is part of a long-standing and comprehensive study on Old Icelandic grammatical literature, to which I have devoted the greater part of my scholarly work. The paper aims to define the type of runic alphabet used by Óláfr in the context of medieval Scandinavian runic writing. A proposal for interpretation of an obscure runic pangram, included by Óláfr in his discussion of runes, is also provided.

Published online: 29 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.69.2.03ras
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