"Runic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the alphabet to the Greek—the key to the interpretation of the language is gone beyond recall. In an age that has unravelled the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the cuneiform characters of Assyria, and the runic inscriptions of Northern Europe, the Etruscan language presents almost the only philological problem that refuses to be solved. Thus when the air and the light of modern investigation penetrated into the mystery which ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... national profession of heathenism ended before our literature began, unless the annals mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are exceptions. The facilities of writing must have been very limited if the only alphabet in use was the Runic. It is, perhaps, a little too rigid to assume that the use of the Roman alphabet is to be dated strictly from the Conversion. As the use of Runes did not then suddenly terminate, but gradually receded before the superior instrument, so perhaps it is most reasonable to suppose that the adoption ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... The letters used in old Icelandic and similar languages are called runic characters. When written letters were first known in the north of Europe they were supposed to have magic powers, and gradually the word "rune" came to mean any spell, or even any wisdom which was beyond ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... touch the earth, while their huge trunks form a strong contrast with the dense green of the foliage. Kingsley and his wife are buried in the churchyard on the side nearest the firs. The graves are marked by a simple Runic cross in white marble bearing the names, the date, and the legend, "God is Love." Eversley and its surroundings are thoroughly typical of rural England. A quieter and more retired little place could hardly ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... with its pillars and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the Ampelopsis quinquefolia, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... hold it!) Devils held me for the inkstand and the pen; Now the days of grace are o'er, (Ah, Lenore!) I am but as other men; What is time, time, time, To my rare and runic rhyme, To my random, reeling rhyme, By the sands along the shore, Where the tempest whispers, "Pay him!" ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... that peered forth from the flood and said, 'This shall be Zealand!' I saw them become the dwelling-place of birds that are unknown to us, and then become the seat of wild chiefs of whom we know nothing, until with their axes they cut their Runic signs into a few of these stones, which then came into the calendar of time. But as for me, I had gone quite beyond all lapse of time, and had become a cipher and a nothing. Then three or four beautiful falling stars came down, which cleared the ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... favourite son who had died in early youth. "Let me lie," he said, "beside my dear Alick." His desire was gratified. He was buried beside his son in St. Cuthbert's churchyard, under the grandest portion of the great basaltic rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands. His grave is marked by a fine Runic Cross, admirably sculptured ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... time of Philip II., at the north end of the island; we had the satisfaction of sending a copy of it to Humboldt, though it turned out to be only a Latin inscription clothed in uncouth Greek characters, such as have long passed for Runic in the Belgian churches and elsewhere. The Phoenician traces yet remain to be discovered; so does a statue fabled to exist on the shore of one of the smaller islands, where Columbus landed in some of his earlier voyages, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... to a number of Runic-looking stones, all over hieroglyphical inscriptions, and placed round an elliptical aperture; where welled up the sacred spring of the Morai, clear as crystal, and showing through its waters, two tiers of sharp, tusk-like stones; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... calls, in her sublime Old Erse or Irish, or it may be Punic;— (The antiquarians[424]—who can settle Time, Which settles all things, Roman, Greek, or Runic— Swear that Pat's language sprung from the same clime With Hannibal, and wears the Tyrian tunic Of Dido's alphabet—and this is rational As any other ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of runic inscriptions, not only as curatives, but also to banish melancholy and evil thoughts. After their conversion to Christianity, biblical texts were substituted for the runes, and the art of composing the former was studied with as much care as had been devoted to the heathen ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... earliest coins which can be identified with certainty are some silver pieces which bear in Runic letters the name of the Mercian king AEthelred (675-704). There are others, however, of the same type and standard (about 21 grains) which may be attributed with probability to his father Penda (d. 655). But it is clear from the laws of AEthelberht that a regular silver coinage was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... present is undergoing repairs—a Scottish king was killed before its walls in the old time. At about twelve I started for Edinburgh. The place is wonderfully altered since I was here, and I don't think for the better. There is a Runic stone on the castle brae which I am going to copy. It was ...
— Letters to his wife Mary Borrow • George Borrow
... change of faith and conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity, writing, and the materials for writing, first came into the land, about the year 1000. There is no proof that the earlier or Runic alphabet, which existed in heathen times, was ever used for any other purposes than those of simple monumental inscriptions, or of short legends on weapons or sacrificial vessels, or horns and drinking cups. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... and whalebone, besides those of metal. In the British Museum is one of these, of which the cover is illustrated on the following page, representing a man defending his house against an attack by enemies armed with spears and shields. Other parts of the casket are carved with subjects and runic inscriptions which have enabled Mr. Stephens, an authority on this period of archaeology, to assign its date to the eighth century, and its manufacture to that of Northumbria. It most probably represents a local incident, and part of the inscription refers to a word signifying treachery. ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... found untouched, and contained perfect skeletons. In one grave lay the bones of a great lady; buried with her was a beautiful wooden drinking-cup, its staves fastened by bronze bands of an intricate Runic pattern of coiled snakes. Another grave held the skeleton of a warrior giant, his sword lying across him and the boss of his shield upon his foot. Mr. Flower thinks he can add a name. Coulsdon is a corruption ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the attention of philologists Das Gothische Runenalphabet, (or The Gothic Runic Alphabet,) recently published by HERTZ of Berlin. "Before Wulfila, the Goths had an alphabet of twenty-five letters, formed according to the same principles, and bearing nearly the same names as the Runes of the Anglo-Saxons ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... one method, and the "Philostratus" of Blount (who pillaged the "Areopagitica") of the other. And yet, again, how perverse is human nature! how more perverse is literary taste! There is a large class of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and gave out and received its countless messages—if only the fellow-Soul had learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runic Code. Yes, he told himself, as he stood there, thoughtfully, as though bound to the spot by some Power not himself,—yes, consciousness was like that little glass tube which electricians called a coherer, and all his vague impressions and mental-gropings ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... gleamed like the margin of the cloud in the moonlight. Gladly and of good courage, the form arose in splendor and in majesty, and vanished like the glancing of the northern light. Nought was to be seen but the green turfy mound, with the stones on which no Runic record has been graven; but at the last sound of the harp there soared over the hill, as though he had fluttered from the harp, a little bird, a charming singing-bird, with ringing voice of the thrush, with the moving voice pathos of the human ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... "It is a Runic manuscript, the language of the original population of Iceland, invented by Odin himself," cried my uncle, angry ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty born of man's hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna's apotheosis of Mary. And so the river bore me on, past the alien face of antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... sledges with the bells— Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and the tinkling ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I have had an answer," rejoined Nicholas. "They say those are Runic obelisks, and not Christian crosses, and that the carvings upon them have a magical signification. The first, it is averred, is written o'er with deadly curses, and the forms in which they are traced, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the gods have danced with all the goddesses—round dances, too. The lively divinities created by the Greeks in their own image danced divinely, as became them. Old Thor stormed and thundered down the icy halls of the Scandinavian mythology to the music of runic rhymes, and the souls of slain heroes in Valhalla take to their toes in celebration of their valorous deeds done in the body upon the bodies of their enemies. Angels dance before the Great White Throne to harps attuned by angel hands, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... at the conclusion of a weary march, to find yourself in the vicinity of a Runic monument, and discover that you have pitched your tent beside the tomb of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... there is no serpent here,—at worst, only a bumblebee's or yellow-jacket's nest. You soon find out the spring in the corner of the field under the beechen tree. While you wipe your brow and thank the Lord for spring water, you glance at the initials in the bark, some of them so old that they seem runic and legendary. You find out, also, how gregarious the strawberry is,—that the different varieties exist in little colonies about the field. When you strike the outskirts of one of these plantations, how quickly you work toward the centre of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavigate ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Low-German, man; that is to say, that they were more nearly allied to the Frisians, the Dutch, and to our own Saxon forefathers than they were to the ancestors of the modern Swabian, Bavarian, and Austrian. They worshipped Odin and Thunnor; they wrote the scanty records of their race in Runic characters; they were probably chiefly a pastoral folk, but may have begun to practise agriculture in the rich cornlands of the Ukraine. They were essentially a monarchic people, following their ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... points are that the cross occurs upon Runic monuments in Europe long before Christianity was introduced into the regions containing them; that ancient altars to the Sun-God Mithras bearing the sacred symbol of the cross have been discovered even in England; and that the Laplanders ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... real origin of the words are to be sought in the Latin."—Ib., Sec.120. "What sort of an alphabet the Gothic languages possess, we know; what sort of alphabet they require, we can determine."—Ib., Sec.127. "The Runic Alphabet whether borrowed or invented by the early Goths, is of greater antiquity than either the oldest Teutonic or the Moeso-Gothic Alphabets."—Ib., Sec.129. "Common to the Masculine and the Neuter Genders."—Ib., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... incapable of possessing such stones; even Scotland, as I shall show, can boast two or three samples, such as the stone of the Keiss broch, a perfect circle, engraved with what looks like an attempt at a Runic inscription; and another in a kind ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... mighty impulse moves; Art plies his tools, arid Commerce spreads her sail, And wealth is wafted in each shifting gale. The sons of Odin tread on Persian looms, And Odin's daughters breathe distilled perfumes; Loud minstrel Bards, in Gothic halls, rehearse The Runic rhyme, and "build the lofty verse:" The Muse, whose liquid notes were wont to swell To the soft breathings of the' olian shell, Submits, reluctant, to the harsher tone, And scarce believes the altered voice her own. And now, where Csar saw with proud disdain [22] The wattled hut and ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... letters. Those same Anglo-Saxons, whose literature at the time of their invasion consisted in the songs mentioned by Tacitus, "carmina antiqua," which they trusted to memory alone, who compiled no books and who for written monuments had Runic inscriptions graven on utensils or on commemorative stones, now have, in their turn, monks who compose chronicles, and kings who know Latin. Libraries are formed in the monasteries; schools are attached to them; manuscripts are there ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Denmark, but her earliest writer. In the latter half of the twelfth century, when Iceland was in the flush of literary production, Denmark lingered behind. No literature in her vernacular, save a few Runic inscriptions, has survived. Monkish annals, devotional works, and lives were written in Latin; but the chronicle of Roskild, the necrology of Lund, the register of gifts to the cloister of Sora, are not ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Monuments may be known to be of a Danish Extraction, tho they carry nothing of a Runic Inscription. Few of their Temples were cover'd; and the largest observ'd by Wormius (at Kialernes in Island) was 120 foot in length, ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... glitters in all the glory of Self-sacrifice on her broad breast. She wears a girdle blue as if woven from the depths of heaven, and as we gaze we see great opals with veiled hearts of fire form into quaint old runic letters upon it, and the God-word LOVE flashes down the secret of her inner life upon us. She is still young as when she woke in Paradise, and, seeing the End, is not yet weary with her long journey of Exile. Brighter gates than those of Eden stand unbarred before her! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Church, in 1642; but its broken fragments were collected, as far as possible, and the cross itself again erected, by the late clergyman of the parish, Dr. Henry Duncan, who published in the Transactions of this Society correct drawings of the Runic inscription on this ancient monument. Two Danish antiquaries, Repp and Finn Magnusen, tried to read these Runic lines, and tortured them into very opposite, and let me simply add, very ridiculous meanings, about a grant of land and cows in Ashlafardhal, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... with the bells— Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight— Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the subject, and has explained this ancient custom as significant of popular law, possibly intimating the close connexion between the property and its owner. I am sorry not to be able to copy out the Professor's collection of runic marks; but I trust that the preceding lines will be sufficient in order to elicit the various traces of a similar custom still prevalent, or remembered, in the British isles; an account of which will be thankfully received at Berlin, where they have lately been informed, that even the eyder-geese ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... gravestone, of some early Saxon chief at one end) had been sacrilegiously placed an altar to Thor, as was apparent both from the shape, from a rude, half-obliterated, sculptured relief of the god, with his lifted hammer, and a few Runic letters. Amidst the temple of the Briton the Saxon had reared the shrine of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this particular one (which by the way I had hardly glanced at), he found quite near the beginning a strip of paper with some very odd writing on it in red and black—most carefully done—it looked to me more like Runic letters than anything else. "Why," he said, "this must belong to my fat neighbour. It looks as if it might be worth returning to him; it may be a copy of something; evidently someone has taken trouble over it. ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... by true men," said, the smith. "I would it were come to that. Thorbiorn, the Danish armourer, spoke of a spell he had for making breastplates, by singing a certain song while the iron was heating. I told him that his runic rhymes were no proof against the weapons which fought at Loncarty—what farther came of it it is needless to tell, but the corselet and the wearer, and the leech who salved his wound, know if Henry Gow can break a spell ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the inscribed tablets, by which the art of writing survived to the race; for what would tablets be without inscriptions? For they talk of "the ancient runes of mighty Odin," that is, of the runic letters, the alphabetical writing. And we shall see hereafter that this view is confirmed from ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... they came to was a vast Runic cavern, covered with dark inscriptions of a forgotten tongue; and sitting on a huge stone they found a dwarf with long yellow hair, his head leaning on his breast, and absorbed in meditation. "This is a spirit of a wise and powerful ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at Constantinople—and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic characters—if you go to Venice you may see them at this day—on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... benefactor, Francis Junius, presented the University in 1677 with a splendid collection of type, consisting of Runic, Gothic, 'Saxon,' 'Islandic,' Danish, and 'Swedish,' as well as founts of Roman, Italic, and other sorts. By the kindness of Mr. Horace Hart, the Controller of the Clarendon Press, we are able to give here examples of several of the founts, both of Fell and ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... on paper, dash off; manifold. take up the pen, take pen in hand; shed ink, spill ink, dip one's pen in ink. Adj. writing &c. v.; written &c. v.; in writing, in black and white; under one's hand. uncial, Runic, cuneiform, hieroglyphical[obs3]. Adv. currente calamo[Sp]; pen in hand. Phr. audacter et sincere[Lat]; le style est l'homme meme [Fr]; "nature's noblest gift - my gray goose quill" [Byron]; scribendi recte sapere ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of ages. We cannot escape the impression that the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized eras. Now first we hear of various ages and styles of poetry; it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic; but the poetry of runic monuments is of one style, and for every age. The bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office. Formerly he was called a seer, but now it is thought that one man sees as much as another. He has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau |
