RE: Books By Norse Pagans?
August 19, 2012 at 11:48 pm
(This post was last modified: August 19, 2012 at 11:49 pm by jonb.)
Beowulf; English written down by monks, but it shows how there was to a great extent a shared culture. There are no works that I know of written before christian influence, because in runic script the story would at best only be hinted at, and latin script only came in with chistianity.
I think you might like to know a few details about runes.
People generally were not as illiterate then as is generally presumed now. This is some information I have picked up over the years
Under Alfred the Great, all children were educated to know their letters by law and that went on to the Norman Conquest when the practice seemed to have just dwindled away. Although educated by the church the letters they learnt included some runes, such as thorn which was the letter for 'Th' sound.
When gothic script came in the letter looked like a backwards facing Y thus 'Ye olde pube' was always 'The Old Pub' the es on the ends of the words denoted a hard O like that in on, rather than a soft oo, and a hard U sound like that in up, which I think shows that peasants were to some extent literate even in late medieval times, in that pub signs would need to be spelt correctly, and that thinking people spoke saying Ye was a latter misinterpretation when the thorn letter was no longer used
I think you might like to know a few details about runes.
People generally were not as illiterate then as is generally presumed now. This is some information I have picked up over the years
Under Alfred the Great, all children were educated to know their letters by law and that went on to the Norman Conquest when the practice seemed to have just dwindled away. Although educated by the church the letters they learnt included some runes, such as thorn which was the letter for 'Th' sound.
When gothic script came in the letter looked like a backwards facing Y thus 'Ye olde pube' was always 'The Old Pub' the es on the ends of the words denoted a hard O like that in on, rather than a soft oo, and a hard U sound like that in up, which I think shows that peasants were to some extent literate even in late medieval times, in that pub signs would need to be spelt correctly, and that thinking people spoke saying Ye was a latter misinterpretation when the thorn letter was no longer used
