The Westeremden yew-stick is a yew-wood stick found in Westeremden in the Groningen province of the Netherlands in 1917. It bears an Old Frisian runic inscription [ broken anchor ], dated to the second half of the 8th century. [1] With a total of 41 letters, this is the longest of the extant Frisian runic inscriptions.
The inscription is divided into three lines, as follows:
ᛅᛞᚪᚳᛗᛚᚢᚦ: ᚳᚻᚦᚢᚴᛅ
ᚢ 
ᛞᚢᚿᚩᛚᛖ:Runes with unfamiliar shapes or uncertain values are:
, a Spiegelrune of ᛒ, similar to a variant of ᛥ stan, transliterated as B below
, a Spiegelrune of ᛈ, similar to a variant of ᛥ stan, transliterated as P below
, like Younger Futhark kaun, transliterated as K belowwith these decisions, the transliteration may be:
Seebold (1990) reads (transliterating g for j, v for B, ë for A, ô for œ):
Looijenga (1997) reads:
This reading gives rise to an interpretation along the lines of
or paraphrased more loosely, "At the homestead stays good fortune, may it also grow near the yew on the terp; Wimœd owns this."
In a controversial suggestion going back to 1937, the sequence æmluþ has often been interpreted as a reference to Amleth ("Hamlet"). [2] The inscription is here interpreted as
and given the translation
The association has led to speculative proposals to the point that Quak (1991) called for a re-examination for the inscription with the ironic caveat "maybe disregarding associations with Hamlet or Amluth". [4]
Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.
Danish is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia, Iron Age Northern Germany and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts.
The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in Northern Europe in Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era Germani who lived in both Germania and parts of the Roman empire, but also all Germanic speaking peoples from this era, irrespective of where they lived, most notably the Goths. Another term, ancient Germans, is considered problematic by many scholars since it suggests identity with present-day Germans. Although the first Roman descriptions of Germani involved tribes west of the Rhine, their homeland of Germania was portrayed as stretching east of the Rhine, to southern Scandinavia and the Vistula in the east, and to the upper Danube in the south. Other Germanic speakers, such as the Bastarnae and Goths, lived further east in what is now Moldova and Ukraine. The term Germani is generally only used to refer to historical peoples from the 1st to 4th centuries CE.
The Lombards or Longobards were a Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Othala, also known as ēðel and odal, is a rune that represents the o and œ phonemes in the Elder Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc writing systems respectively. Its name is derived from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *ōþala- "heritage; inheritance, inherited estate". As it does not occur in Younger Futhark, it disappears from the Scandinavian record around the 8th century, however its usage continued in England into the 11th century, where it was sometimes further used in manuscripts as a shorthand for the word ēðel ("homeland"), similar to how other runes were sometimes used at the time.
Amleth is a figure in a medieval Scandinavian legend, the direct inspiration of the character of Prince Hamlet, the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The chief authority for the legend of Amleth is Saxo Grammaticus, who devotes to it parts of the third and fourth books of his Gesta Danorum, completed at the beginning of the 13th century. Saxo's version is supplemented by Latin and vernacular compilations from a much later date. In all versions, prince Amleth (Amblothæ) is the son of Horvendill (Orwendel), king of the Jutes. It has often been assumed that the story is ultimately derived from an Old Icelandic poem, but no such poem has been found; the extant Icelandic versions, known as the Ambales-saga, or Amloda-saga are considerably later than Saxo. Amleth's name is not mentioned in Old-Icelandic regnal lists before Saxo. Only the 15th-century Sagnkrønike from Stockholm may contain some older elements.
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet used for writing the Gothic language. It was developed in the 4th century AD by Ulfilas, a Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent, for the purpose of translating the Bible.
A rune is a letter in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write Germanic languages before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised purposes thereafter. In addition to representing a sound value, runes can be used to represent the concepts after which they are named (ideographs). Scholars refer to instances of the latter as Begriffsrunen. The Scandinavian variants are also known as fuþark, or futhark; this name is derived from the first six letters of the script, ⟨ᚠ⟩, ⟨ᚢ⟩, ⟨ᚦ⟩, ⟨ᚨ⟩/⟨ᚬ⟩, ⟨ᚱ⟩, and ⟨ᚲ⟩/⟨ᚴ⟩, corresponding to the Latin letters ⟨f⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨þ⟩/⟨th⟩, ⟨a⟩, ⟨r⟩, and ⟨k⟩. The Anglo-Saxon variant is known as futhorc, or fuþorc, due to changes in Old English of the sounds represented by the fourth letter, ⟨ᚨ⟩/⟨ᚩ⟩.
Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as Catalan, German, Dutch, Quebec French, Breton, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents in final position become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in pausa. The process can be written as *C[+ obstruent, +voice] → C[-voice]/__#.
Frankish, also known as Old Franconian or Old Frankish, was the West Germanic language spoken by the Franks from the 5th to 9th century.
ᛈ is the rune denoting the sound p in the Elder Futhark runic alphabet. It does not appear in the Younger Futhark. It is named peorð in the Anglo-Saxon rune-poem and glossed enigmatically as follows:
The Elder Futhark, also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Period. Inscriptions are found on artifacts including jewelry, amulets, plateware, tools, and weapons, as well as runestones, from the 1st to the 9th centuries.
The Franks Casket is a small Anglo-Saxon whale's bone chest from the early 8th century, now in the British Museum. The casket is densely decorated with knife-cut narrative scenes in flat two-dimensional low-relief and with inscriptions mostly in Anglo-Saxon runes. Generally thought to be of Northumbrian origin, it is of unique importance for the insight it gives into early Anglo-Saxon art and culture. Both identifying the images and interpreting the runic inscriptions has generated a considerable amount of scholarship.
A runic inscription is an inscription made in one of the various runic alphabets. They generally contained practical information or memorials instead of magic or mythic stories. The body of runic inscriptions falls into the three categories of Elder Futhark, Anglo-Frisian Futhorc and Younger Futhark.
Lombardic or Langobardic is an extinct West Germanic language that was spoken by the Lombards, the Germanic people who settled in Italy in the sixth century. It was already declining by the seventh century because the invaders quickly adopted the Latin vernacular spoken by the local population. Lombardic may have been in use in scattered areas until as late as c. 1000 AD. Many toponyms in modern Lombardy and Greater Lombardy and items of Lombard and broader Gallo-Italic vocabulary derive from Lombardic.
The Bergakker inscription is an Elder Futhark inscription discovered on the scabbard of a 5th-century sword. It was found in 1996 in the Dutch town of Bergakker, in the Betuwe, a region once inhabited by the Batavi. There is consensus that the find dates from the period 425-475 and that the inscription is either the singular direct attestation of Frankish (Franconian), or the earliest attestation of Old Dutch.
Germanic heroic legend is the heroic literary tradition of the Germanic-speaking peoples, most of which originates or is set in the Migration Period. Stories from this time period, to which others were added later, were transmitted orally, traveled widely among the Germanic speaking peoples, and were known in many variants. These legends typically reworked historical events or personages in the manner of oral poetry, forming a heroic age. Heroes in these legends often display a heroic ethos emphasizing honor, glory, and loyalty above other concerns. Like Germanic mythology, heroic legend is a genre of Germanic folklore.
The Sørup runestone is a runestone from Sørup close by Svendborg on southern Funen in Denmark. The stone has a relatively long and very debated runic inscription, which has been seen as an unsolved cipher or pure nonsensical, but also has been suggested to be written in Basque.
