Corpus Editions of Inscriptions in the Older Futhark

The history of corpus editions of the inscriptions in the older futhark dates back to the 1800s. The editions diverged into two strands on the basis of the lin­guistic and geographic classification of the texts: the Scandinavian “Ancient Norse” inscriptions, which were always treated as part of the corpus of the Scandi­navian countries, and the “Gothic” and “German” ones, later also referred to as the “Continental”, “South” or “East Germanic” inscriptions, which from Rudolf Henning’s 1889 edition on were the main focus of German-language runo­logical study. Wolfgang Krause brought both strands together in his com­pre­hensive edition of one hundred of the main older futhark inscriptions in 1937. His revision, supplemented by new finds and with archaeo­logical contri­butions by Herbert Jankuhn, appeared in 1966 as Die Runen­inschriften im älteren Futhark . This at the time complete corpus edition has long been con­sidered the standard work on these inscriptions. The large number of finds un­covered in the following years was for a long time only presented in indi­vidual publi­cations or summarised in col­lec­tions with a limited focus. Not until the new millennium were the first steps taken towards a new edition to succeed Krause’s 1966 edition, initially in the form of the digital collection of the Kiel Rune Proj­ect, subsequently as planned editions by Göttingen and Kiel univer­sities, and finally within the scope of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences proj­ect Runic Writing in the Ger­manic Lan­guages (RuneS).