THE NEW HUNGARIAN VOICE FALL 2003 (Read-Only)

There is an old form of Hungarian writing that is presently
going through a rebirth in scholarly circles and among code and
runic enthusiasts. Rovásírás (from rovás ‘incised’ and írás
‘writing’) predates Hungary’s adoption of the Latin alphabet
and is a descendant from the Kök Turki script used in Central
Asia.
Many believe that the Christianization
of Hungary promoted the disuse
of rovásírás. It was considered rather
important at the time to absolve the
country of its old pagan beliefs and
practices in order to continue to gain
favour from the rest of Europe. It is
therefore reasonable to believe that
pre-European Hungarian relics are the
key to our awareness and understanding
of this ancient form of communication.
Interestingly, the opposite is
true. It was largely Christian monks
and priests that continued the use of
rovásírás as the Latin alphabet’s adaptation
to the characteristics of the
Hungarian language was not immediate.
A religious order of monks called
the Pauline Order (Pálos) lay claim to a
proprietary form of rovásírás. The pálos rovásírás was widely
used by the order from its establishment during the reign of
tribal leader and Hungarian conqueror, Árpád, until the XIVth
century. It was especially useful in the letters of Pauline
missionaries sent to South America. They would report home
on the abuses of the natives at the hands of the Spanish and
Portuguese using rovásírás as a form of code. As with the Latin
alphabet, pálos was written left-to-right. Pálos rovásírás was
not developed as a complete and detailed form of communication
and fell completely out of use by the XVIth century.
The second form of ancient Hungarian runic writing is called
székely rovásírás. It originates from the Székely Magyars in
Eastern Hungary (Székelyföld), currently the land of the
Hungarian speaking Székelys of Transylvania. While this form
of rovásírás has been written both left-to-right and right-to-left,
the latter is more prevalent – perhaps because writers would
typically hold a small piece of wood in their left-hand, and
carve the letters with their right. When they reached the end of
the stick, they turned it around, so the next line is upside-down
compared to the first.
In the XIIIth century, a strong interest in székely rovásírás
grew and it gained popularity in the royal courts and by the
intelligentsia. The Hungarian Renaissance ruler, King Matthias,
often used this form of rovásírás and while the Latin alphabet
was considered the official way of correspondence, rovásírás
was highly fashionable. In the 1500s, when Hungary was
devastated by the Ottoman Turks, the independent Transylvanian
Principality wanted to make székely rovásírás the official
ROVÁSÍRÁS
THE HUNGARIAN RUNIC ALPHABET
Transylvanian Church ceiling panel
with Székely rovásírás.
12
form of correspondence. Rovásírás continued to be used
throughout Hungary until the mid 1800s.
The ancient writers of rovásírás wrote on hard materials
(wood and stone). This obviously made writing lengthy and
difficult and therefore, several shorthand features developed.
One is the concentration or melting
together of two or more neighbouring
letters. These combined characters
have been referred to as ligatures. The
writer has relative freedom in deciding
which characters will be ligatures
based on space and decipherability.
Another shorthand feature was omitting
some of the vowels – the letter ‘e’
was most commonly omitted. There
were also sound characters that were
bug-like symbols strongly resembling
Egyptian hieroglyphs. The bug
symbols are age-old Székely characters
that point our origins to the
nations of the ancient Middle East.
The rovásírás numbers resemble roman
numerals – this is due to the fact that
they evolved from the same root, the
Etrusk numbers.
Rovásírás relics have been found throughout Hungary,
Transylvania and to a lesser extent Asia and other parts of
Europe but the most famous is a 181kg piece of sandstone
found in Nova Scotia, Canada in the 1700s. The 78cm x 70cm x
50cm stone had ancient runes carved into it, of which a portion
had been worn down. Although the text was unidentifiable
using Scandinavian runes, it was strongly believed that it was a
Viking relic left from an expedition of Eric the Red or his son,
Leif Ericsson. It wasn’t until 1984 that Silvia Luis, a Hungarian
runic writing expert, happened across and deciphered the text -
it read: “…son járt e hejen is sok társával” (“…son traveled
through this area with many of his companions”). It is widely
believed that the worn portion originally read ‘Erics’-son
referring to Leif Ericsson. It has been long contended that one
of Leif Ericsson’s men, referred to only as ‘Tyrker’, was an
Árpádian Magyar. Experts have established that the name
Tyrker came from a Byzantine, Arab and European designation
of the early Magyars as Tourks – this reference was due to the
Kök Turks of Central Asia. An additional theory exists stating
that after his expeditions with Ericsson, Tyrker returned to
Hungary with maps and knowledge of the ‘new world’.
If all this is true, we Hungarians have an amazing claim of
having a fellow countryman explore North America long before
Christopher Columbus ‘discovered it’.
Lajos S. Miklós Jr.
To read more about rovásírás on the Internet, check out
http://fang.fa.gau.hu/~heves/runic.html.