Some runic stones. 15 



SA UAR TUtK 1 Litl, pA IS KNUTK SOTO [or possibly SOTI] IKLOT 

 SÄ (he) WAS DEAD (died or f,l1) IN tlu-LlTH (ßnt, army, armament) 



THEN AS (when) KNUT (= CANUTE) SOUGHT (inmded) ENGLAND. 



There is a third example on the Såstad block, Upland (Dybeck, 



8vo, No. 95; folio, II, No. 19): IS SÜTI lüRSALIR, AS (mho) SOUGHT 



(vidted) JERUSALEM. 



8ÂVE has unhappily left no version, at least as far as I know. 

 Most of the words are plain euongli. Some are so much the harder. 

 The order of the lines we shall never know. Probabl}- Säve's is as good 

 as any other. We can at once read K instead of H, if we follow Bugge. 

 With regard to this last question, it seems to me that Säve's 

 transliteration is more exact than Bugge's. I know nothing of the rea- 

 sons which led Save to fix upon H as the value of the mark. Nor can 

 I anticij^ate the arguments which will be brought forward by Bugge for 

 his K. But in my eyes all these Helsing nuies are simply »short-hand)), 

 a salient jiart of the stave being taken to repressent tlie whole. All the 

 other letters show this. Why should the K be an exception? The I in 

 y is no distinctive mark, and is besides used in these Helsing-runes 

 for itself, the vowel I (I). It is the ^ which gives y its character. Should 

 K therefore ever be found among these »short-hand» signs, it will pro- 

 bably be as ^ or something like it. But to say that 4^ and ^ and ^ . 

 (8 variations, the one a little simpler than the other, of the same type, v») 

 can represent f^, — is to me too hard. If the K-sign had been 1 , there 

 might have been some bare possibility, by cutting off the foot and length- 

 ening it instead upward (from 'I to ■J/- and then to X). There would 

 at all events have been the v somewhere. But \ is not the rune for K, 

 it stands for M. 



Consequently >r seems to me quite clearly short for ', which is 

 itself short for ♦ , which is H. I therefore look upon X as H, not K. 



In late middle-age Scandinavian stave-rows, made to imitate the 

 Latin alphabet, 4 (as short for <]>) is H; but ■■■ , X^ (as a variation of J^i 

 8) is used for C. 



And in fact H occurs very frequently (in both runic and Roman 

 letters) with a strong guttural power, neither so bare as G nor so sharp 

 as K. It is this local dialectic sound of H, which I believe to be here 

 given on these Helsing stones. Runic H has frequently been transliter- 

 ated as GH or GYl. The wellknown Runic MS. of the Skåue-law has 

 crowds of this ♦ for GH, in addition to the common runes for G and K. 

 Prof. Thorsen, in his edition in Latin letters (Kjöbenhavn 1854) repre- 



