Runic inscriptions
The division into Scandinavian, North Sea (Anglo-Frisian), and South Germanic inscriptions makes sense from the 5th century.
In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Elder Futhark script was still in its early phase of development, with inscriptions concentrated in what is now Denmark and Northern Germany.
The tradition of runic literacy continued in Scandinavia into the Viking Age, developing into the Younger Futhark script.
[6] The following table lists the number of known inscriptions (in any alphabet variant) by geographical region:[citation needed] Elder Futhark inscriptions were rare, with very few active literati, in relation to the total population, at any time, so that knowledge of the runes was probably an actual "secret" throughout the Migration period.
The actual number was probably considerably higher, maybe close to 400,000 in total, so that on the order of 0.1% of the corpus has come down to us, and Fischer[8] estimates a population of several hundred active literati throughout the period, with as many as 1,600 during the Alamannic "runic boom" of the 6th century.
The earliest period of Elder Futhark (2nd to 4th centuries) predates the division in regional script variants, and linguistically essentially still reflect the Common Germanic stage.
Their distribution is mostly limited to southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and Frisia (the "North Sea Germanic runic Koine"), with stray finds associated with the Goths from Romania and Ukraine.
There are several legible and partly interpretable inscription that date from the 1st half of the 5th century such as a Silver neck ring found near Aalen with "noru" inscribed in runic alphabets on its inner edge.
The longest known inscription in the Elder Futhark, and one of the youngest, consists of some 200 characters and is found on the early 8th-century Eggjum stone, and may even contain a stanza of Old Norse poetry.
Apart from the earliest inscriptions found on the continent along the North Sea coast (the "North Germanic Koine", Martin 2004:173), continental inscriptions can be divided in those of the "Alemannic runic province" (Martin 2004), with a few dozen examples dating to the 6th and 7th centuries, and those associated with the Goths, loosely scattered along the Oder to south-eastern Poland, as far as the Carpathian Mountains (e.g. the ring of Pietroassa in Romania), dating to the 4th and 5th centuries.
A silver-plated copper disk, originally part of a sword-belt, found at Liebenau, Lower Saxony with an early 5th-century runic inscription (mostly illegible, interpreted as possibly reading rauzwih) is classed as the earliest South Germanic (German) inscription known by the RGA (vol.
Out of about a dozen candidate inscriptions, only three are widely accepted to be of Gothic origin: the gold ring of Pietroassa, bearing a votive inscription, part of a larger treasure found in the Romanian Carpathians, and two spearheads inscribed with what is probably the weapon's name, one found in the Ukrainian Carpathians, and the other in eastern Germany, near the Oder.
