Seeking Runes in Myth & History (Live in New Mexico)

Modern ideas and misconceptions about runes and their supposed magic properties distract from the biggest mysteries and most fascinating facts about them. An invited talk given March 7, 2023 for the Religious Studies Program at the University of New Mexico (religious-stud....
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawfo... (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
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[@mrjones2721]

“This is my least favorite thing I’ve seen apart from violence committed in front of my face.” As someone who likes a lot of historical things that have been New Aged, I felt that.

[@PRKLGaming]

You're actually the first result that comes out on a logged out KZbin when I search for "runes"

[@ragnarosthefirelord8662]

Jackson making a Pepe Silvia reference made my day. I appreciate how you don't take yourself too seriously while presenting real scholarship.

[@ulfrtheviking]

This is where I live!! Oh man I totally would've showed up to ask you to sign my Edda..

[@beepboop204]

🙃

[@JenksAnro]

Hope that's not a euphemism idk if he does that sort of thing

[@beepboop204]

@@JenksAnro is your Edda more prose, or more poesy, ifyouknowwhatimsayin

[@ulfrtheviking]

Yall freaks lmao. I have a copy of his translation of The Poetic Edda 🤣🤣

[@JenksAnro]

​@@beepboop204 idk, which one is shorter?

[@jesseholcombe3347]

Very glad I got to see this in person.

[@motherlavenderbone]

Dr. Crawford is a badass

[@astridhaze9627]

Time and time again you provide such quality work that helps me to better understand topics I struggle to get accurate information on. Thank you for your research and dedication to these topics. You, sir, are a gem. Till the next video, saying thank you from humid Louisiana!

[@fredblonder7850]

Regarding your comment about finding runes on objects, labelling those objects withtheir names (spear, rock, &c.), I think this makes perfect sense. When we tech children to read, we use picture books where the objects in the pctures are labelled withtheir names, so the child can read the name and see it applied to the object. The Norse didn’t have inexpensive paper books, so it would be simpler to label actual objects with their names, as a means of teaching someone the runes.

[@cloud819]

Thanks for visiting our state. Come back anytime.

[@garrettbates2639]

Oh man, I would have totally made the hour and a half commute for this.

[@peterciszewski1034]

An idea why "spelling out the alphabet" may have been done so often: in software engineering, computers will often exchange information about the protocol and its version before they start to communicate information using that protocol. Perhaps "writing out the alphabet" was done in the past to let the reader know which "version" of the writing system the author was using in their work?

[@BarbaricYawp]

Being a Tolkien nerd I can't help but think of Gandalf outside the Doors of Durin. Befuddled by his own cleverness, trying to invoke magic, instead of just saying friend.

[@gamejenk8206]

Thanks Dr Crawford, you make learning super fun and easy. I have trouble reading books so I got your audiobooks and watch your channel and it is freaking awesome!

[@Henrique-wy6cv]

Runes are indeed a fascinating subject, hope someday we can have more findings about them! Oh, and that SW reference at the end was brilliant lol!

[@weepingscorpion8739]

2023 is already shaping up to be a historic year in runology. So we do have interesting times ahead.

[@theangryginger7582]

It seems like his classes must've been quite fun

[@stumccabe]

Excellent talk - very interesting.

[@adammiller4122]

Thank you for uploading this Dr. Crawford.

[@eliastandel]

36:28 obviously the writer's cat just walked over his keyboard. Mistery solved.

[@anotherelvis]

Great talk

[@LadyValkyri]

Interesting, entertaining, informative, and wonderful! Thank you! Hugs

[@ziasurvivor3526]

Wish I would have known. Would have been there. Hopefully next time.

[@cloudninetherapeutics7787]

Bringing some of that chilly Colorado weather with you to New Mexico. Hope you had a good time while you were here. Thanks for the video on the runes, loved it.

[@impunk13]

Well done

[@ChrisRyot]

Now that I have graduated a couple of years ago already, it's so nice to just listen to lectures without any pressure of studying for an exam, vigorously collecting credit points or following the entire tiresome catalogue of university torture.

[@Xandara]

Fascinating lecture. Thank you!

[@DazaiTakeyama]

Love your work ♤♡♤

[@mrjones2721]

Regarding alu, presumably scholars have already looked for phrases that started with A-L-U? That’s where my mind immediately went. Medieval scribes routinely reduced common phrases to abbreviations, so it would make sense that people writing on surfaces more difficult to write on than parchment would abbreviate, especially when the phrase is incantatory. Or maybe they just really liked beer.

[@knightl3y]

I am more biased towards "alu" being beer as in Estonian beer is "õlu" which is close enough to think that Estonian word might have evolved from "alu", but its just a theory - a rune theory! (albeit without any evidence)

[@denntombstone7004]

You are a huge inspiration on my studies keep doing god's work brother

[@RockandrollNegro]

04:28 Ovdalską mentioned! Thank you for remembering the ~3000 Swedes who still speak their own language.

[@Mr.Patrick_Hung]

Were there any good questions asked after the talk? If so we might like to hear them.

[@oneukum]

Greek letters could be used for numbers. The comb with the alu looks suspiciously like a receipt or a bill for beer signed by a literate witness.

[@njordmannen]

Im going to start making runes on bones that just say ale. 😂😂😂 great video Dr. Crawford!

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

About the vimose comb: 'harja', might it be considered the naming of af comb (toothed element dragged through or over something) coming from the farming tool a 'harrow' for tilling the ploughed field, 'harve' in modern Danish, 'Harja' in moderen Swedish? Just a thought.

[@eepeep7571]

Could you please do a video on the eggja stone.

[@DevsStoryForge]

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of references you made to runes being used for magic as they are mentioned in the literature. But, I guess I shouldn’t be, given that your main focus is language and by extension literature. Overall, a very fascinating lecture.

[@lauraisabella2513]

Hi Jackson! Are you doing any presentations like this one at CU any time soon? I’d love to attend one of your presentations.

[@CaptainBohnenbrot]

Could it be that the rune alphabet was reordered (compared to other alphabets of the time) as a simple mnemonic device. The word "Futhark" itself shows that the first 6 runes were pronouncable as one word, hence easy to remember. The greeks for example wouldn't care about that, since their letters had names that just forced them to remember the alphabet completely. (As far as I know we have no reason to assume runes had names as early as the earliest found Futhark alphabets.) That was the theory of a layman, there are already more than enough of those on the internet, so sorry for that.

[@weepingscorpion8739]

I believe Dr. Crawford has mentioned this hypothesis in one of his videos but we don't have any evidence of this. So there's no either full or partial mnemonic phrase which would explain this order that we know of.

[@mindyschaper]

Runic yoga. How entertaining.

[@stocktonjoans]

The fact that different alphabets from around the world have some similar looking characters may mean something, or it could just be due to the fact that there are only so many ways you can make pictograms out of lines before they all start to look the same

[@wanhaliitto]

Harja still means comb in contemporary Finnish.

[@rohasfin]

Check it out, Crawford's going John Wick on fluff-atru, and he'd even dressed the part.

[@AnnBehemoth]

😍

[@HessianLikeTheFabric]

I like the comically squat water bottle

[@VanaheimrUllr]

28:15 where do I find this?! Thorr viki dik!

[@jasperowens]

Every new age wicca yoga goofball needs to see this. They probably still wouldn't understand.

[@YolayOle]

Dinkquistics - the study of how dual income, no kids couples communicate in the modern world.

[@terhitormanen]

The word "harja" in Finnish means a brush...

[@beepboop204]

😛

[@KissSlowlyLoveDeeply-pm2je]

I respect Jackson, but he spends way too much time whining about what others are doing. He doesn't own the rune topic. People are free to use them for whatever they want.

[@leocomerford]

If people were being clear and up-front about the fact that their rune-uses were just stuff they'd made up themselves, or riffs on ideas about runes that date to the 16th-19th centuries at the earliest, that would be one thing. But they won't do that because, as we all know, by and large the only reason anyone cares about someone's modern rune interpretation or rune-magic is because of the suggestion that it has or might have a connection to beliefs and practices in the ancient or early medieval world.

[@ThePykeSpy]

If I were an expert in a field confronted with an infinite amount of quacks that keep regurgitating the same pseudo-scientific, unhistorical diarrhea (and who probably get on my case for telling them that), then I'd start "whining" too. People can do and believe whatever they want, but as long as weirdos on the internet make money off of shilling literal non-sense to the unsuspecting, it needs people like Dr. Crawford to "whine".

[@mrjones2721]

@@leocomerford This. People have been misled into thinking modern rune magic is authentic Viking practice, and there's so much garbage out there that it's hard to get a signal through the noise. Plus it's a lecture on modern misconceptions about runes. THE TOPIC IS WHAT MODERN PEOPLE GET WRONG. It's not "whining," it's the topic of the lecture.

[@KissSlowlyLoveDeeply-pm2je]

@@VndNvwYvvSvv Who decides what is a wrong use? Why are you gatekeeping this knowledge? Should we only listen to academics about this?

[@ThePykeSpy]

@@KissSlowlyLoveDeeply-pm2je If your choices of authority are "I've studied this topic scientifically for decades" academics and "It came to me in a dream" gurus... yes, listen to the academics.