Óláfr Þórðarson and the ‘Norse alphabet’: A thirteenth-century Icelandic grammarian’s account of runic writing

Abstract

The present study deals with those sections of the so-called Third Grammatical Treatise , written by the Icelandic scholar and poet Olafr Þorðarson 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 Olafr in the context of medieval Scandinavian runic writing. A proposal for interpretation of an obscure runic pangram, included by Olafr in his discussion of runes, is also provided.