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Updated: June 26, 2025
The lines shown here are an exact facsimile of what was written on the venerable piece of parchment and have wonderful importance, as they induced my uncle to undertake the most wonderful series of adventures which ever fell to the lot of human beings. My uncle looked keenly at the document for some moments and then declared that it was Runic.
My uncle at once fastened upon this as the centre of interest, and he laboured at that blot, until by the help of his microscope he ended by making out the following Runic characters which he read without difficulty. "Arne Saknussemm!" he cried in triumph. "Why that is the name of another Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebrated alchemist!"
I had been warming my imagination, as we came up the coast, with Campbell's sonorous lines: "Round the shores where runic Odin Howls his war-song to the gale; Round the isles where loud Lofoden Whirls to death the roaring whale;" and, as we looked over the smooth water towards Mosköe, felt a renewed desire to make an excursion thither on out return from the north.
There is a large class of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable.
The quaint carvings relate to the life of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate; but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitchell Kemble puzzled out a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak; and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at Vercelli, near Milan.
As the Morthwyrtha ceased, the fire crackled loud, and from its flame flew one of the fragments of bark to the feet of the sorceress: the runic letters all indented with sparks.
A strange trouble has fallen upon the gods, the oracles are silent, and a dark, woeful foreboding seizes on all things living. Odin mounts his steed, Sleipner, and descends to hell to consult the Vala there in her tomb, and to extort from her, by runic incantations, the fate of his son. This "Descent of Odin" is familiar to the English reader through Gray's Ode.
He copied Runic inscriptions, and took down several fairy tales and a Manx version of the story of "Finn McCoyle" and the Scotch giant. He went to visit a descendant of the ballad hero, Mollie Charane. When he wished to know the size of some old skeletons he inquired if the bones were as large as those of modern ones. As he met people to compliment him on his Manx, so he did on his walking.
The future became to him a dazzling mystery, into which his conjectures plunged themselves more and more. He had not yet stood in the Runic circle and invoked the dead; but the spells were around his heart, and in his own soul had grown up the familiar demon.
Apropos of this matter, Dr Buist says, that while we are digging up antiquities in Mesopotamia, we are neglecting those, not less valuable, which we have at home, particularly the Runic stones found in Scotland. Two hundred of these are known to exist between Edinburgh and Caithness, but some have been used as gate-posts to a church-yard, or, as near Glammis, rubbing-posts for cattle.
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