Das ist Kokolores. Ich möchte hier zunächst nur auf den Bryggefund in Bergen hinweisen. Ich zitiere dazu zweckmäßigerweise aus der kurzen populärwissenschaftlichen Beschreibung in Terje Spurkland: Norwegian runes and runic inscriptions (Das ist eine Übersetzung aus dem Norwegischen) ab Seite 173:[Runen] dienten nicht zu alltäglichen Kommunikationszwecken und sie waren überhaupt nur einem geringen Bevölkerungsanteil vertraut.
Ein BeispielFire on the wharf in Bergen
On 4 July 1955, a fire broke out in the scenic Bryggen (wharf) district of Bergen. Four of its gabled houses were consumed, leaving a seventy by seventy metre area in ashes. The lost town houses had the illustrious names Gullskogården, Søstergården, Engelgården and Bugården (Golden Shoe Tenement, Sister Tenement, Angel Tenement, Booth Tenement). We can trace their history back via written sources and archaeological considerations to the thirteenth century. Archaeologists hastened to excavate this historic ground. As they literally dug down into the Middle Ages, they discovered all kinds of objects and fragments of objects that had been a natural part of life, for both everyday and special occasions, for those who had lived in Bryggen at that time. There werde ceramics, a great many objects relating to crafts, trade and shipping, a small quantity of glass, leather goods, shoes, metal objects and jewellery. There was also food wast in the form of animal and fish bones, nuts and berries. Not the least valuable were the remains of excrement found in the latrines. The excrement contained traces of fruits and berries, eggs and wild fowl. One might say it gave the inside story on medieval man.
A good deal of the finds were rubbish and fill materials used to expand the wharf out into the water. These deposits contained masses of sticks and wood fragments. One day in the spring of 1956 one of the excavators happened to pick up a piece of wood and look more closely at it, and quite unexpectedly he descovered that there were runes carved in it. This caused a great stir. The inscription could not be deciphered on the spot in Bergen. The stick was sent to the Runic Archives at the University of Oslo, where Aslak Liestøl was the presiding specialist. He was easily able to read the inscription and observed that it was a type of runic object that resembled a small number of other sticks carved with runes that had been found in the past. The text was an everyday message that would have had significance only when and where it was carved. The stick from Urnes about Árni the priest and Inga is very representative of this type [Ein 18 cm langer Birkenstab, gefunden 1905 bei der Restaurierung der Stabkirche in Urnes mit der Aufschrift arni prestr uil hafa ig[u] = Árni prestr vil hafa Ingu = Der Priester Arne will Inge haben]. Now a similar stick hat been found in Bergen.
From then on, excavators began to look more closely at every stick they found, and soon they had a handful of inscriptions. To heighten vigilance and motivation among the diggers, a reward of five kroner was offered for every inscription found. Then the number of runic objects really began to grow. Wooden sticks by the boxful were sent to Oslo and an overjoyed Aslak Liestøl immersed himself in these messages from medieval Bergen. By the time the excavations were completed, about six hundred runic inscriptions had been found. That was more than all the Viking Age and medieval inscriptions that had previously been known in all of Norway!
Until the Bryggen fire, it had generally been believed that runic script gradually died out in the wake of Christianity and the Roman alphabet. To the extent that runes were still carved, they were regarded more as spontaneous scribblings in the manner of graffiti than as functional script. One might think that a collective evaluation of the church inscriptions would have moderated such a hasty assertion. In any case, the finds from Bryggen led to a complete re-evaluation. Here we have a great collection of inscriptions from one area. They date from the end of the twelfth century into the fifteenth, with the greatest concentration around the period 1250–1330. In type, they vary from religious and secular texts in Latin to Old Norse poetry, commercial correspondence, writing exercises and indecipherable hocus-pocus, to everyday messages and intimate communications including pornography and obscenities. Every imaginable sort of thing that could be expressed in writing is represented here. The inscriptions are mainly carved on wooden sticks, a few on animal bones and only a handful on metal or stone. The wood is most often pine.
(Edit: Typo.)
