What to notice
- The earliest known os-rune ᚩ, the first sign of the English futhorc
- Bind-runes: three ᚷ-runes with vowel strokes added
- Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf, copied from a Roman coin
- medu is the ancestor of English 'meed', a reward
The Undley bracteate is a thin gold disc, 2.3 cm across and weighing just over 2 grams, found in 1981 at Undley Common near Lakenheath in Suffolk, eastern England. A bracteate is a one-sided gold pendant stamped with a die; they were made in large numbers in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany in the 5th and 6th centuries, often imitating Roman gold coins and medallions. The Undley piece is in the British Museum.
The image
The design imitates a Roman coin type of the time of Constantine the Great with the legend Urbs Roma: a helmeted head on one side and the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus on the other. The Undley die-cutter combined both on a single face: a large helmeted head in profile, and below it the wolf with the twins. Romulus and Remus appear again three centuries later on the Franks Casket, so the motif had a long life in Anglo-Saxon art.
The runes
Around the edge, reading right to left and ending at the wolf, runs the inscription g͡ag͡og͡a maga medu. The first word is written with three bind-runes: each is a gyfu ᚷ with extra side-strokes that add a vowel. One of those vowels is written with the rune os ᚩ, the new rune for o that the Anglo-Frisian runic tradition created when the old a-rune split in two. This is the earliest known example of the os-rune used alongside the old a-rune, the first step from the Elder Futhark toward the English futhorc, where the old a-rune was eventually replaced by three runes, os, ac and aesc.
The next two words are generally read as mægæ medu: mægæ "to a kinsman" (Old English mǣg) and medu "reward, payment" (Old English mēd, surviving in archaic English meed). Together they seem to say that the bracteate is a reward or gift for a relative, a natural message for a piece of gold given as a token of loyalty.
Earliest English?
If the language is read as early Old English, Undley is the oldest known text in the language, older than any English manuscript by two centuries. That claim is attractive but fragile. The bracteate is small, portable and of a type made around the North Sea; it may have been made in Schleswig or southern Scandinavia and brought to England by an early settler. Its language, a few words in a stage before the languages of the region clearly separate, can be described as "pre-Old English" or simply Northwest Germanic. The RuneS database classifies the runes as "pre-futhorc".
Why it matters
Whatever its origin, the bracteate shows the sound changes that led to the English rune row already under way in the late 5th century, and it ties the earliest runes in England to the gold-bracteate culture of the North Sea world.
The full reading
g͡ag͡og͡a : maga : medu (read right to left)
- g͡ag͡og͡a (gægogæ) — three bind-runes; meaning uncertain, perhaps a cry or invocation, perhaps a word for "she-wolf"
- maga (mægæ) — "for a kinsman" (dative), related to Old English mǣg, "kinsman"
- medu — "reward, payment" (Old English mēd, English meed)
A cautious translation: "gægogæ — reward for a kinsman."
What scholars agree and disagree on
- The first word. gægogæ has been compared to g͡ag͡ag͡a on a lance shaft from Kragehul in Denmark and explained as a ritual cry or invocation. Hines and Odenstedt (1987), in the first full study, offered a different reading in which the word refers to the she-wolf in the image. No reading is agreed.
- The vowels. Because in this period the old a-rune could stand for several vowel qualities (a, æ, å), RuneS transliterates it neutrally as a; whether to write mægæ or maga is an editorial choice.
- Language and origin. Whether this is "the earliest Old English" (Hines and Odenstedt 1987; Bammesberger 1991) or a Continental or Scandinavian piece in a common North Sea Germanic language is open. Catherine Hills (1991) discussed the archaeology of the find and its context.
- Date. The archaeological date, c. 450–500, depends on the bracteate type; there is no find context to narrow it.
Sources
- RuneS-Datenbank (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities), find no. 677, 'Brakteat von Undley' (PreOE-GB-83, IK 374).
- Hines, John & Odenstedt, Bengt (1987), 'The Undley bracteate and its runic inscription', Studien zur Sachsenforschung 6, 73–94.
- Hills, Catherine (1991), 'The Gold Bracteate from Undley, Suffolk: Some Further Thoughts', Studien zur Sachsenforschung 7.
- Page, R. I. (1999), An Introduction to English Runes, 2nd ed. Woodbridge: Boydell.
- Bammesberger, Alfred (1991), 'Three Old English Runic Inscriptions', in Bammesberger (ed.), Old English Runes and their Continental Background. Heidelberg: Winter.
- Wikipedia, 'Undley bracteate' (for checking).
Readings are given as facts with their source; translations on this page are our own.