New runic translation reveals community ownership of the Galloway Hoard

The Scotsman

New runic translation reveals community ownership of the Galloway Hoard  New runic translation reveals community ownership of the Galloway Hoard On the eve of its unveiling in Adelaide on the first leg of an international tour, the first translation of a runic inscription on an arm ring from the Viking-age Galloway Hoard has cast fascinating new light on who might have owned the famous treasure.

Transcript

00:00I'm Martin Goldberg, I'm the curator at National Museums Scotland who's been working with the

00:06Galloway Hoard for the last 10 years. Today we are looking at the largest armoring from

00:13the Galloway Hoard and it's been the most intriguing because it had a long inscription

00:18on the inside of it that up until now couldn't be translated. But we've been working with

00:25runologists and we've come up with what we think is the best translation we can make.

00:32We've been working with one of the leading runologists, Dr David Parsons, and he of course

00:37could transliterate each one of these Anglo-Saxon runic characters. So we knew what it said

00:44but we didn't really know what it meant and the key to unlocking all of that was the realisation

00:51that the final letter in the inscription was telling us something different because it had

00:56two puncts either side, two points that separated it from the rest of the inscription. It wasn't

01:02clear at first, we could only see this under a microscope, but that then unlocked the rest of

01:08the inscription because the F rune stands for the name of that rune which means wealth or property

01:15and so when you separate that element out it meant that the five letters before it began

01:20to make more sense and can be translated as the community and so you have this is the community's

01:28wealth. And as a complete concept that makes a lot of sense particularly in how we've come to

01:34understand the hoard as something that is owned by multiple people, by a community. Well the other

01:41runic inscriptions that were in this portion of the hoard had much shorter inscriptions, they were

01:48almost like abbreviated name elements and so we think that's exactly what those were doing, they

01:53were signifying parts of the names of individual owners. But this fourth one being longer and not

02:00having a personal name but having a communal signifier to it, the community's wealth, this tells

02:08us something that's really quite important, something that we had previously thought was

02:13important about the hoard, that it seemed to have multiple owners, it wasn't just the wealth of one

02:19person, but this inscription really clinches that idea because it literally tells us this is the

02:26community's wealth. This was a group of material that had been brought together by multiple people

02:32probably over a long period of time but it had that sense of community behind it, it was the

02:40wealth of more than one person.

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