Early writing among ancient Vikings and today’s pre‐schoolers: a cognitive developmental perspective on reading acquisition and alphabets as effective artefacts¹

¹ The author would like to thank Åsa Dahlin Hauken at the Museum of Archaeology, Stavanger, Norway, for valuable help regarding the Reve stone and Leila Kantola for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Abstract

The present paper reports some observations on pre‐school children’s spontaneous as well as adult‐supported spelling behaviour and makes comparisons between aspects of these early literacy activities and some features of spellings from mostly twelfth‐ to fourteenth‐century Norwegian runic inscriptions. The runic inscriptions originate from a post‐Viking time period where formal schooling was rare and exclusively based on the Latin alphabet. It is argued that runic literacy was serving several important functions in the society and that runic literacy skill was learned in an everyday sociocultural context and that this learning process in a critical way was supported by one major artefact – the runic alphabet itself. It is concluded that there are fundamental similarities between the learning activities among the children of today and the thirteenth‐century self‐supported print explorer. The basic commonality is alphabetical knowledge and it is concluded that primary knowledge of the actual alphabet is, and has always been, essential for the initial stage of reading acquisition.

¹ The author would like to thank Åsa Dahlin Hauken at the Museum of Archaeology, Stavanger, Norway, for valuable help regarding the Reve stone and Leila Kantola for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Keywords:

• reading acquisition
• runes
• phonological awareness
• early literacy
• name writing
• futhark inscriptions
• informal schooling

Notes

¹ The author would like to thank Åsa Dahlin Hauken at the Museum of Archaeology, Stavanger, Norway, for valuable help regarding the Reve stone and Leila Kantola for helpful comments on the manuscript.

² David C. Geary, “Principles of evolutionary educational psychology.” Learning and individual differences 12 (2002): 317–45.

³ W.H. Teale and E. Sulzby, Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986); C.G. Wells, “Preschool literacy‐related activities and success in school,” in Literacy, Language, and Learning: The nature and consequences of reading and writing, ed. D. Olson, M. Torrance and A. Hildyard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

⁴ Liv Kari Bondevik Tønnessen, Norsk utdanningshistorie: en innføring (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1995) Early medieval Scandinavia seemed to have two parallel script systems with different functions and different contexts and existing relatively independently from each other. See also, Terje Spurkland, “Literacy and ‘Runacy’ in Medieval Scandinavia,” in Scandinavia and Europe 800–1350: Contact, Conflict and Coexistence, ed. Jonathan Adams and Catherine Holman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). See also the case study of a skilled digraphic (rune‐and‐roman) writer still in late medieval time, in Jan Ragnar Hagland, “Runic writing and Latin literacy at the end of the Middle Ages: A case study,” in Runes and their Secrets: Studies in Runology, ed. M. Stoklund, M. Lerche Nielsen, B. Holmberg and G. Fellows‐Jensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006).

⁵ J.R. Hagland and R.T. Lorentzen, “Skrift med runer i lys av forsking på tidleg skriving hos barn” (Runic writing in the light of research on children’s early writing; in Norwegian), in Runor och ABC, ed. S. Nyström (Stockholm: Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia. Opuscula 4, Riksantikvarieämbetet, 1997).

⁶ The fishing sinker (fishing‐weight) from Reve, now at Stavanger Archaeological Museum, Norway. Magnus Olsen and A. Liestøl, eds., Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer (Norwegian younger runic inscriptions; in Norwegian), vol 3 (Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskriftinstitutt, 1954), 162–7.

⁷ Terje Spurkland, Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005).

⁸ J.R. Hagland, “Runer frå utgravingane i Trondheim bygrunn 1971–94: Med eit tillegg av nyfunne innskrifter elles frå byen” (N774–N894) (Runes from the excavations in Trondheim; in Norwegian). Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. The work is the preliminary manuscript for publication in the corpus edition Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer, vol. 7, ed. James E. Knirk. http://www.hf.ntnu.no/nor/Publik/RUNER/RUNER.doc (accessed February 28, 2007).

⁹ Spurkland, Norwegian runes, 174.

¹⁰ I. Sanness Johnsen, “Bryggen i Bergen: Forrettningsbrev og eiermerker” (The wharf district in Bergen: business letters and owner’s mark; in Norwegian), in Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer, ed. J.E. Knirk (Oslo: Kjeldeskriftfondet, 1989).

¹¹ J.W. Bloodgood, “What’s in a name? Children’s name writing and literacy acquisition,” Reading Research Quarterly 34 (1999): 342–67; I. Levin, A. Both‐de Vries, D. Aram and A. Bus, “Writing starts with own name writing: from scribbling to conventional spelling in Israeli and Dutch children,” Applied Psycholinguistics 26 (2005): 463–77; M. Sénéchal, J.‐A. LeFevre, E.M. Thomas and K.E. Daley, “Differential effects of home literacy experiences on the development of oral and written languages,” Reading Research Quarterly 33 (1998): 96–116.

¹² Kari Fjellhammer Seim, “De vestnordiske futhark–innskriftene fra vikingtid og middelalder – form og funksjon” (The west‐nordic futhark – inscriptions from the Viking age and Middle Ages – form and function) (PhD diss., University of Trondheim, Norway, 1998).

¹³ Spurkland, Norwegian runes, ch. 5.

¹⁴ Ibid., 177.

¹⁵ Hagland, Runes from the Excavations in Trondheim, N818.

¹⁶ Fjellhammer Seim, The west‐nordic futhark inscriptions, 368, B592; National Library of Norway. Database of the Bergen inscriptions. http://www.nb.no/baser/runer/fullpost.php?bnr=B592 or via http://www.nb.no/baser/runer/ribwww/english/runeindex.html (accessed August 15, 2006).

¹⁷ Fjellhammer Seim, The west‐nordic futhark inscriptions, 347, Number A24.

¹⁸ Fjellhammer Seim, The west‐nordic futhark inscriptions, 357, Number B100; National Library of Norway. Database of the Bergen inscriptions, Number B100. http://www.nb.no/baser/runer/eindex.html (accessed August 15, 2006).

¹⁹ Hagland, Runes from the excavations in Trondheim, N823.

²⁰ A. Haavaldsen and E.S. Ore, “Runes in Bergen,” Preliminary report from the project “Computerising the runic inscriptions at the Historical museum in Bergen.” Centre Report 71. Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities. Bergen, January, 1997, Ch. 9. Also available at http://www.nb.no/baser/runer/ribwww/english/runeindex.html (accessed August 16, 2006). National Library of Norway. Database of the Bergen inscriptions. ttp://www.nb.no/baser/runer/eindex.html (accessed August 15, 2006).

²¹ National Library of Norway. Database of the Bergen inscriptions. http://www.nb.no/baser/runer/eindex.html (accessed August 16, 2006).

²² G.D. Miller, Ancient Scripts and Phonological Knowledge (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994).

²³ Ibid., 71, note 7.

²⁴ Elmer Antonsen, Runes and Germanic Linguistics (New York: Mouton, 2002), 15.

²⁵ Spurkland, Norwegian Runes, 192–95; Fjellhammer, The west‐nordic futhark inscriptions, 265–72.

²⁶ Sanness Johnsen, Bryggen i Bergen, 118, N651.

²⁷ English translation adopted from Spurkland, Norwegian Runes, 186.

²⁸ Ibid., 200.

²⁹ See Hagland and Lorentzen, Skrift med runer, regarding the association between children and finds with runic inscriptions. There are some finds of children’s toys with runic inscriptions.

³⁰ James Knirk, “Learning to Write with Runes in Medieval Norway,” in Medeltida skrift och språkkultur, ed. I. Lindell (Stockholm: Runica et Mediævalia. Opuscula 2, 1994).

³¹ K.E. Stanovich, Progress in Understanding Reading (New York: Guilford Press, 2000).

³² Å. Olofsson and J. Niedersøe, “Early language development and kindergarten phonological awareness as predictors of reading problems: from 3 to 11 years of age,” Journal of Learning Disabilities 32 (1999): 464–72.

³³ S. Scarr and K. McCartney, “How people make their own environments: a theory of genotype–environment effects,” Child Development 54 (1983): 425.