164 The Bishop of Bristol [May 19, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, May 19, 1899. 



The Duke of Northumberland, E.G. F.S.A., President, 

 in the Chair. 



The Right Eev. The Lord Bishop of Bristol. 



Runic and Ogam diameters and Inscriptions in the British Isles. 



I am frequently surprised by the ignorance which I find of the mere 

 existence of such a thing as an Ogam inscription, and of the meaning 

 of the phrase " a Runic inscription." My business this evening is to 

 give some elementary information on both of these subjects. 



The Runic alphabet was the character in which our earliest 

 Anglian ancestors wrote their own language. The use of this cha- 

 racter practically died out early, under the influence of the Latin and 

 the Scottish missionaries, who were ignorant of runes, and probably 

 suspected them of paganism and sorcery. Bede refers to runes once, 

 and in that kind of connection. He tells us that a prisoner who 

 frequently contrived to get loose from his chains was accused of 

 having charms, literse solutoriee, which iElfric translates " rune- 

 staves." We have therefore but a limited number of runic inscrip- 

 tions of the Auglian character remaining in our island. I say 

 "Anglian" rather than "Saxon," because the inscriptions are almost 

 entirely confined to the parts of the island occupied by the Northum- 

 brian Angles, in whom I am accustomed to find the ancestors of our 

 art and literature. The earliest piece of English literature in 

 existence is found cut in deep large runic characters on the shaft of 

 a cross in old Northumbria ; and the earliest and most beautiful 

 specimens of English art in sculpture and in draftsmanship are found 

 on the remains of Northumbrian cross-shafts and in the gospel-book 

 of the Northumbrians. 



While the Ogam symbols arc found only in these islands, Runes 

 are found in connection with Gothic remains in Europe of an early 

 date, and immense quantities of Runic inscriptions are found in 

 Scandinavia. The Gothic runes are practically the same as the 

 Anglian ; the Scandinavian runes show considerable disintegration 

 from the earlier type. 



Several of the characters of the Runic alphabet are at once distin- 

 guishable, from their likeness to our ordinary capital letters. Such 

 are T, I, B, R. Inasmuch as our ordinary capital letters are Latin, 

 this means that some of the Runic characters have much resemblance 

 to the Latin. But the Latin alphabet is only one stage younger than 

 the Greek alphabet, with which in several letters its capitals are 



