Minnesotarunor

Minnesotarunor, the Minnesota runes, are the runic writing of the Grand Duchy of Minnesota and the Upper Mississippi: a complete alphabet of thirty-three characters, taught in every school in the Grand Duchy, readable by nearly everyone in it, and used alongside the Latin alphabet rather than instead of it.

They are not a revival, an invention, or a piece of heritage decoration. They are the ordinary folk script of the Swedish province of Dalarna, carried across the Atlantic in the middle of the nineteenth century by people who had never stopped using it, and kept in use here after it fell out of use at home. The Grand Duchy therefore writes in a script that its own ancestral country abandoned, which is a reversal that Swedish scholars have found interesting for a century and Minnesotans have found unremarkable for longer.

The row

Twenty-six characters carry the consonants and the plain vowels, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet, because the row long ago settled into a one-for-one correspondence with the Latin writing it sits beside. Every character is built on a vertical stave and cut with straight strokes only, which is a memory of the knife: the row was carved for two centuries before it was ever set in type, and the shapes still refuse a curve.

The marked vowels

Here the row does something no Scandinavian futhark ever did. Swedish needs three vowels the old rows had no characters for, and rather than invent three unrelated shapes, Minnesotarunor marks them above the stave, exactly as the Latin alphabet marks the same three letters: a ring for the first, two dots for the others.

This is the single most distinctive feature of the row and the one that most clearly dates it. No runic writing before Minnesota carried a systematic diacritic. That the innovation copies the Latin alphabet is not a weakness and was never felt as one; the two scripts had been sharing a page for generations by the time it settled.

Engelskrunor

The same principle solved the harder problem. English has sounds the Scandinavian languages do not, and a row used every day inside an English-speaking Realm has to be able to write English: names, places, titles, quoted words, the whole apparatus of living beside another language. That the tongue itself resisted English far better than its neighbours did, treated in the article on Nordmålet, did not remove the problem. A script must write what is put in front of it. Four characters were cut for the purpose, each the nearest existing rune with a dot at its shoulder, and they are known as the engelskrunor, the English runes.

The two positions do not overlap, and this is the whole grammar of the system in one sentence: a mark above the stave changes a vowel, and a mark beside it changes a consonant. A child learns that in an afternoon and never has to be told twice.

Where it came from

Runes were dead writing across most of Scandinavia by the sixteenth century. In Dalarna they were not.

There, in the parishes above the lake, runes remained in ordinary domestic use for centuries after they had become antiquarian everywhere else: cut on house beams and roof timbers, on tools and looms and grain measures, on the marks by which a family identified its own property, and on the wooden calendars that carried the year’s feasts. They were not sacred and were not scholarly. They were the writing people used for the things people write on wood.

The emigration of the middle nineteenth century took a great many Dalarna families to Minnesota, and it took the script with them, in the only way a script ever travels: in the hands of people who could already write it and saw no reason to stop.

What preserved it here was the same thing that preserved the language’s grammar. An emigrant community freezes what it brings. The homeland kept modernising and Dalarna’s runes gave way, over the later nineteenth century, to ordinary schooling and ordinary Latin type. Minnesota’s did not, because Minnesota’s had been carried out of reach of the schooling that displaced them, into a country where nobody had any opinion about them at all.

What it is for

Minnesotarunor is a true dual script. Anything that can be written in one alphabet can be written in the other, and the choice between them is a matter of occasion rather than of capacity.

In practice the division is settled and everybody knows it.

The Latin alphabet does the business of the Grand Duchy. Statutes, the proceedings of the Estates, the courts, the newspapers, the schools’ own textbooks, correspondence, commerce, and every form a citizen will ever fill in are in Latin type. This is not a concession and is not resented. It is simply what a modern administration runs on, and Minnesota’s runs on it.

The runes carry the ceremonial instruments. The Great Seal of Minnesota, the instruments of appointment, the coinage, the oath, the foundation stones of public buildings, the doors of the Estates, war memorials, boundary stones and a great many gravestones are cut in runes. The rule of thumb, stated in almost these words by the Chancery, is that anything meant to outlast the person who made it goes in runes, and anything meant to be dealt with by Thursday goes in Latin.

Beneath both of those the old domestic use continues, unlegislated and unremarked: property marks, initials on tools, dates on barn beams, names inside the covers of books, and the marks by which two farms distinguish their stock. Nobody thinks of this as ceremonial and nobody thinks of it as literature. It is what the row was for in Dalarna and it is what it is still for here.

Learning it

Rune literacy in the Grand Duchy is universal, and it is universal because it is taught.

Every school in Minnesota teaches the row, in the first years, alongside the Latin alphabet and with no more ceremony attached to it. A child learns both and is not told that one is ancient and the other modern, because from inside they are simply the two ways of writing that the child sees around them every day.

The consequence is a population that can read runes without effort and writes them rarely, which is not a decline but a division of labour: nobody writes a shopping list in an alphabet that takes longer. The people who write runes fluently and constantly are the ones whose work requires it, which means the carvers, the monumental masons, the clergy, the Chancery, and a surprising number of ordinary people once a year, at Christmas, on the things they make.

The two communities

Minnesota received Norwegian settlement on much the same scale as Swedish, and the relations between the two are the Grand Duchy’s oldest domestic argument, running through the dynasty, the churches, the place names and the question of whose Scandinavia the polity is.

The runes are the exception. Norwegian Minnesota uses the row, teaches it, cuts it on its own gravestones and its own church cornerstones, and has never disputed it.

The reason usually given is that the runes are older than the quarrel. A script that predates the separation of the Scandinavian languages by many centuries cannot easily be claimed by one of them, and the row as it stands is demonstrably a Minnesota object in any case, marked and extended here for sounds that neither homeland needed. It belongs to whoever is holding the knife.

This is stated plainly by both communities and is one of the very few things about which they agree without qualification. It is also, by common consent, the strongest argument that the two Scandinavias of Minnesota are in fact one thing that has not finished arguing.

The oath

The instrument on which the row is most carefully cut is the ducal oath, the hertigeden, sworn at accession and cut in runes on the day it is taken.

The Grand Duchy’s motto, We Keep Faith Beneath the North Star, comes out of this text and not the other way round. The oath supplied the keeping of faith; the star was added later, by people who wanted a line that would fit on a banner. The oath itself does not mention the north star and never has, which surprises visitors who assume the motto must be quoted somewhere inside it.

It is not an old-sounding text and does not try to be. It was drafted by lawyers at admission, it has four clauses and a second sentence, and it reads like what it is: an instrument written by people who expected it to be litigated. The Grand Duke alone swears it. No minister, deputy, judge or citizen of the Grand Duchy swears anything resembling it.

The presiding officer of the Estates answers, and nobody else does.

What the second sentence is doing

The structure is the whole of Minnesota’s constitutional position, and it was built deliberately.

The first sentence is the Grand Duchy: the land, the people, the constitution, the Estates. It is long, it is specific, and it contains everything a Grand Duke is actually for. The second sentence is the Realm, and it is one clause, placed after, and phrased as a limit rather than as a loyalty.

That ordering has been read two ways for a century and the Grand Duchy has never had to choose between them. On one reading the second sentence is subordinate because it is secondary, and the oath tells you plainly where a Grand Duke’s first duty lies. On the other it is subordinate in the way a saving clause is subordinate, which is to say that it governs everything above it: nothing sworn in the first sentence may be read against the Charter, which makes the short sentence the stronger one.

Constitutional lawyers in New Westminster favour the second reading. Constitutional lawyers in Saint Paul are content to observe that both readings have been available since admission and that no case has ever required a court to pick.

The Swedish that will not sit

Both texts bind, which is the source of the one genuine defect in the instrument.

In right of America is a common-law expression with no natural Swedish equivalent, and the admission draftsmen rendered it as a calque, i Amerikas rätt, which in Swedish reads more like in America’s law than like the constitutional idea it is carrying. The Swedish oath therefore says something slightly different from the English oath, and both of them are binding.

This has been written about at length, chiefly by people who enjoy that sort of thing, and it has never mattered in practice. It is the standard illustration, in Minnesota law faculties, of what happens when a common-law realm is joined by a polity that does its serious thinking in another language.

Never amended

The text has not changed since admission and every proposal to change it has failed.

There have been several. The most serious came in the 1920s, from members who wanted the Treaty Nations named in the first sentence, and it failed narrowly and for a reason that is still quoted: that an oath which had to be amended to include somebody would go on advertising, permanently, that they had been left out of it. The Grand Duchy has instead written Treaty Nation representation into everything around the oath and left the oath alone.

The carving is also unchanged, including its one oddity. The cut oath omits the marks, writing every vowel bare, without ring or dots. The Chancery holds this to be the older practice. Nearly everybody else holds it to be a carver’s shortcut that hardened into a rule, on the grounds that the marks are difficult to cut cleanly and impossible to correct. Neither side has produced anything decisive and each instrument is cut the same way as the last.

The row of them

The carved instruments are kept in the Estates, all of them, in the order they were sworn.

There are six, one for each Grand Duke since admission, and the row is the point precisely because it is short enough to walk in a few paces and long enough to outlast anybody in it. It is displayed as a single object rather than as a series, in a corridor that members walk through rather than a chamber they assemble in, and the effect it produces is the one intended: a Grand Duke on the day of his accession walks the length of every oath sworn before his, and then swears the same words, and then his instrument is added to the end. The last was added in 2003, for Olav.

Nothing in the constitution requires the row to exist. It is simply what the Estates started doing, and it has become the part of the ceremony that visitors remember.

The stone at Kensington

In 1898 a farmer clearing land near Kensington, in the west of the Grand Duchy, turned up a flat stone carved with runes, and the find was reported, examined, catalogued and very largely forgotten.

It attracted attention outside Minnesota for a time, from people who wished to establish that it was medieval and from people who wished to establish that it was a fraud. Both were regarded locally as having missed the point. The stone is cut in the ordinary row that the district’s own families had been using continuously since they arrived, and its language and its letterforms are those of the people who lived there. A stone found in a Minnesota field carved in Minnesota runes is not evidence of anything except that somebody had a knife.

What the episode is remembered for in the Grand Duchy is the reaction of the outsiders, who assumed that a rune-carved stone in America required an extraordinary explanation, and who were slow to accept the ordinary one on offer from every farm within ten miles. The stone is held today with its provenance and its date recorded, and without a controversy attached, and visiting scholars who arrive expecting one are gently disappointed.

Sweden looks at it

The Kingdom of Sweden takes the row seriously, and the interest is genuine rather than sentimental.

Dalarna’s runic tradition is thinly documented at home, because it died in the decades before anybody thought to record it properly, and a good deal of what is known about how the script was actually used in ordinary life is known from Minnesota, where the use never stopped. Swedish runologists have worked in the Grand Duchy since the 1920s, the two countries maintain a standing scholarly exchange on the subject, and the Grand Duchy’s own archive of cut objects is the largest in existence.

There is a mild awkwardness in this that neither side presses. The living tradition is in America and the scholarship is largely Swedish, and the Grand Duchy is periodically reminded that the thing it does without thinking is, elsewhere, a subject. Minnesotans are unfailingly hospitable about it and privately find it very funny.

Trivia

See also

• The Grand Duchy of Minnesota and the Upper Mississippi, the polity whose script this is
• Olav, whose oath is the sixth and last instrument in the row
• Daily Life: Minnesota, the culture the row is cut into
• The Kingdom of Sweden, where the tradition came from and where it died
• The Scandinavian Union, the union the homeland belongs to
• Wisconsindeutsch, the other immigrant tongue of the northern polities

Categories

Society & Daily Life · Minnesotarunor · The Grand Duchy of Minnesota · Language · Writing Systems