Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/33

Rh tomb on Knockmany, Tyrone, details of which are given in my volume on "Menes the First of the Pharaohs."

Col. 18. Runic letters of the Goths, British, Scandinavian and Eastern. None of the ancient monuments and objects on which this script is engraved are believed to date earlier than the third century A.D. The British or "Northumbrian" or "English" runes appear to have comprised twenty-four letters. They are found from the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, of about the seventh century in the north, to the Isle of Wight in the south. The Scandinavian runes are found on great numbers of monuments and on weapons, etc., in Denmark (especially Jutland or Goth-land), Sweden, Norway and Iceland, also in the Orkneys, Isle of Man, and some other parts of England. The number of letters tended to be reduced in the Scandinavian till only eighteen were left in the so-called "Futhark" alphabet, but about the end of the tenth century four of the dropped letters, G, E, D and P were restored by suffixing a dot to their cognate letters K, I, T and D, the so-called "dotted runes." The Eastern runes are found chiefly in Rumania and S.W. Russia or Scythia, the old Goth-land.

The latest English coins bearing Runic legends are found in East Anglica and Northumbria in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. Runic inscriptions on British monuments also cease about this period, when Christianity became widespread, and the Christian clergy stigmatized the runes as "pagan" and "magical" and abhorrent to Christianity, just as they tabooed the Ogam script of the Irish Scots. Runes continued in Scandinavia for several centuries later, as Christianity was later in adoption there. And in the remote fastnesses of Iceland, where Christianity was not introduced till the eleventh century, were fortunately preserved the fragments of the great Gothic national epic,