+ (AT) Þ(E)R KUEN(E) SINE PRINSINED (B)AD (M)OTO LANANA KRISTI DONAVISTI GARDIAR IARDIAR IBODIAR KRISTUS UINKIT KRISTUS REGNAT KRISTUS IMPERAT KRISTUS AB OMNI MALO ME ASAM LIPERET KRUX KRISTI SIT SUPER ME ASAM HIK ET UBIQUE + KHORDA + IN KHORDA + KHORDAE (t) (M)AGLA + SANGUIS KRISTI SIGNET ME RUNES, A.D. 1000. This cut is of some of the oldest runes known, giving two lines in Danish and the rest in Latin, as the transliteration shows. It is copied from _The oldest yet found Document in Danish, by Prof Dr. George Stephens_ (Copenhagen, 1888,—from the _Mémoires des Antiquaires du Nord_, 1887). The author says that the leaden tablet on which the runes were cut was found in Odense, Fyn, Denmark, in 1883, and he places the date of it about the year A.D. 1000. George Stephens’s _Handbook of the old Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England_ is a condensation, preserving all the cuts, and making some additions to his larger folio work in 3 vols., _The old-northern Runic monuments of Scandinavia and England, now first collected and deciphered_ (London, etc., 1866-68). It does not contain either Icelandic or Greenland runes. He says that by the time of the colonization of Iceland “the old northern runes as a system had died out on the Scandinavian main, and were followed by the later runic alphabet. But even this modern Icelandic of the tenth century has not come down to us. If it had, it would be very different from what is now vulgarly so called, which is the greatly altered Icelandic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.... The oldest written Icelandic known to us is said to date from about the year 1200.... The whole modern doctrine of one uniform Icelandic language all over the immense north in the first one thousand winters after Christ is an impossible absurdity.... It is very seldom that any of the Scandinavian runic stones bear a date.... No Christian runic gravestone is older than the fourteenth century.” On runes in general, see Mallet, Bohn’s ed., pp. 227, 248, following the cut of the Kingektorsoak stone, in Rafn’s _Antiq. Americanæ_; Wilson’s _Prehist. Man_, ii. 88; Wollheim’s _Nat. Lit. der Scandinavier_ (Berlin, 1875), vol. i. pp. 2-15; Legis-Glueckselig’s _Die Runen and ihre Denkmäler_ (Leipzig, 1829); De Costa’s _Pre-Columb. Disc._, pp. xxx; _Revue polit. et lit._, Jan. 10, 1880. It is held that runes are an outgrowth of the Latin alphabet. (L. F. A. Wimmer’s _Runeskriftens Oprindelse og Udvikling i norden_, Copenhagen, 1874.)]