Fabrications and con-scripts

Three different kinds of false

It is worth separating these, because they call for different responses.

Forgery is deliberate deception: an object or text made to pass as ancient, by someone who knows it is not. The Kensington Runestone is the standard case.

Sincere error is a claim made in good faith on bad reasoning. The medieval Ogham tree alphabet is this. The scribes of the Auraicept were not defrauding anyone; they had a system that required every letter to be a tree, and they made it so. Most of the false claims in this field are of this kind.

Fiction that escaped is invented material that was never meant to deceive, and got loose anyway. Robert Graves's tree calendar is the clearest example: The White Goddess is a poet's book, Graves did not present it as scholarship, and it is now the source of more Ogham correspondences than every medieval manuscript combined.

Calling all three hoaxes flattens something useful. A forger is dishonest; a medieval glossator was mistaken; a poet was writing poetry.

The Kensington Runestone

A slab found in 1898 near Kensington, Minnesota, by a Swedish immigrant farmer, Olof Öhman, carrying a runic inscription dated 1362 and describing a party of Norse explorers who found ten of their number dead.

The case against it is not one thing but a stack.

The language. The Scandinavian scholars who examined it early rejected it, and the linguistic problems have not gone away: the text mixes forms, contains constructions that look nineteenth-century rather than fourteenth, and uses vocabulary that had not developed by 1362.

The runes themselves. Several characters are not attested in medieval Scandinavian usage at all — a crossed l, a dotted v, an o struck through, a p with undotted loops. For a century that was purely negative evidence: nobody could say where they did come from. In 2003 they were traced to the papers of Edward Larsson, a tailor's apprentice from Dalarna, who in 1883 and 1885 wrote out a twenty-seven letter runic alphabet for modern Swedish containing exactly those forms — along with the pentadic numerals used to write 1362 on the stone, and a Masonic pigpen cipher. The letters are real and were genuinely taught; they are just four hundred years too late. The full account is on the Dalecarlian runes page.

The context. No corroborating Norse material has ever been found in the region, in over a century of looking, in a landscape that has been extensively farmed and excavated.

The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that it is a modern creation, and since the Larsson identification the question of which modern tradition produced it is answered too. It remains on display, it retains committed defenders, and the arguments recur.

What makes it worth studying is why it exists. It appeared in a Scandinavian immigrant community, in a period of intense argument about who had reached America first, and it says: we were here, before the others. Forgeries answer questions their communities are asking.

Invented scripts

A second category invents an entire writing system rather than an object.

The Book of Veles is the significant case. It surfaced in the 1920s as a set of wooden planks said to carry a ninth-century Slavic pagan chronicle in an otherwise unknown script. The originals conveniently disappeared during the Second World War, leaving photographs and transcriptions.

Slavists have been essentially unanimous since: the language is a mixture of Slavic forms from different periods and regions that never coexisted, the script is unattested anywhere else, and the whole thing is a twentieth-century composition. It nonetheless continues to circulate as authentic scripture in some Slavic Native Faith circles.

The Oera Linda Book is the Frisian equivalent: a manuscript presented in the 1860s as an ancient chronicle of Frisian history and religion, now understood as a nineteenth-century composition, which was taken seriously in Nazi Germany precisely because it supplied a flattering ancient past.

The Armanen Futharkh belongs in this category too, though it is rarely filed here. Guido von List's eighteen-rune row of 1902 is an invented script presented as the original from which the real ones degenerated. That it came from a claimed vision rather than a forged object does not change what it is.

And Slavic runes in general: there is no attested Slavic runic alphabet. The material sold under that name is modern, and this site's index says so.

The tree calendar

The most successful fabrication in this field was not intended as one.

In 1948 Robert Graves published The White Goddess, a book about poetic myth. In it he constructed a thirteen-month Celtic Tree Calendar, mapping Ogham letters to months and trees, and built an elaborate mythic system on top.

It has no historical basis. There is no thirteen-month Celtic calendar; the medieval Ogham tree-lists are themselves a later imposition, as the Bríatharogam kennings show; and Graves's system does not correspond to those lists either.

Graves was not deceiving anybody. He described the book as a work of poetic intuition, and it reads as one.

What happened afterwards is the interesting part. The calendar escaped the book. It is now the single largest source of Ogham correspondences in circulation, it appears in an enormous number of otherwise-reasonable places, and it is regularly cited as ancient Celtic tradition by people who have never heard of Graves.

That is the pattern worth watching: fiction with a strong internal logic outcompetes a messy historical record, because the record is full of a rune meaning slag in one country and drizzle in another, and the fiction is tidy.

How fabrications are caught

The methods are consistent and mostly boring, which is why they work.

The language is wrong for the date. Languages change constantly and in documented ways. A forger has to get the state of a language right for a specific century, and this is where almost all of them fail — the Kensington stone, the Book of Veles and the Oera Linda Book were all caught primarily this way.

The letters are wrong for the date. Scripts also change. A character attested in a nineteenth-century almanac and nowhere medieval is a strong signal.

It is too tidy. Real traditions are inconsistent. The Ogham letters name an ingot, a field and a colour alongside four trees; the rune poems contradict each other; the same rune is an aurochs, slag and drizzle in three countries. A system where every letter is a tree and every tree has a month is a system somebody designed.

It answers a contemporary question suspiciously well. Who was here first, whose ancestors were noblest, which nation's spiritual heritage was stolen. Forgeries are documents of the period that produces them.

The original is unavailable. The Veles planks vanished in the war. It is a recurring feature.

Why this belongs on the site

A section on runes could reasonably leave this out. It is here for two reasons.

The first is that the fabrications are more widely believed than the evidence. More people can describe the Celtic Tree Calendar than can name a single Bríatharogam kenning. More people have seen a Vegvísir called Viking than know what a rúnakefli is. Anyone approaching this subject will meet the inventions first, and it is more useful to be able to place them than to be told to avoid them.

The second is that the real material is better. An alphabet whose letters mean an iron ingot, a weaver's beam, sulphur, terror, a bondmaid's grief and the reddening of a face is stranger and more interesting than a tidy calendar of sacred trees. The Bryggen sticks — six hundred wooden tallies about debts, cargo and sex — tell you more about the people who used runes than any invented tradition could.

The fabrications are not the enemy of the subject. They are its most popular version, and the argument for the real thing is that it repays attention more.