Livia Kaiser. Runes Across the North Sea from the Migration Period and Beyond: An Annotated Edition of the Old Frisian Runic Corpus

Scholars studying the history of Germanic languages will often find useful information in older studies, sometimes even from the 19 th century, such as the major works by Siebs (1889Siebs ( , 1901) ) about the history of Frisian.They may also discover that the earlier generation of researchers did not refer to the pieces of primary sources, available about the earliest histories of Frisian, English or German: the early runic inscriptions.There is an obvious reason for that: many of the runic inscriptions that we know of now and which we can use in our reconstructions of the earliest history of Germanic languages, were either not unearthed or not identified or not properly interpreted by that time.Much has changed since then.For North Germanic runes, the data are more generous and publications from Krause (1966Krause ( , 1971) ) and Antonsen (1975) provided a full reconstruction of the language of the Nordic runic inscriptions with Nielsen"s ( 2000) opus magnum as a brilliant analysis of the position of this language in the history of Germanic.Frisian runic inscriptions became first part of Frisian studies after 1950, when more and more inscriptions were identified, often on objects excavated long before (e.g.Düwel & Tempel 1968).An effort to provide an exhaustive overview of Frisian inscriptions was made by Quak (1990) and many new insights were discussed in Looijenga & Quak (1996).Looijenga"s (1997) dissertation, published as a book in 2003 gave an exhaustive overview of all the older runic material, not only from Frisia, but also from the UK, from Germany, where also more and more inscriptions had been unearthed or identified, and a summary of the data from Scandinavia: for the first time, scholars had the possibility to consider the earliest primary sources of Germanic in their entirety.Online overviews of Germanic runic inscriptions can be found in the Kiel Corpus (Marold & Zimmermann) and its successor-project, RuneS (Akademie der Wissenschaften, Göttingen 2021).A more detailed overview of the Continental or South Germanic inscriptions was delivered by Findell (2012), recently joined by Düwel, Nedoma & Oehrl (2020a, 2020b) with 1102 pages(!), richly illustrated with photographs and drawings from nearly every object.