Runes

 

 

Runes are letters used by ancient Germanic people. When I was a graduate student, my vice academic adviser was an authority on studying runes in Japan.

For my generation, “rune” was a popular word. We loved fantasy novels and animations. Some of these used runes as mysterious letters. For instance, some spells and secret words were written in runes.

My academic adviser told me this story. One day, one of the crew members of Gammera visited him. Gammera is a Japanese movie series about a huge turtle of the same name, similar to King Kong and Godzilla. My generation loved Gammera very much.

The crew member told my adviser about the next story of Gammera. In this story, people find an ancient document in ruins, upon which secrets about Gammera are written in runes. So the crew member wanted to know about runes.

My academic adviser was a nice person. He read the secrets about Gammera in Japanese. He translated the document to Proto-Germanic and wrote it down in runes. He also wrote down the document in Japanese so that an actor could read it out loud. Then he sent it to the crew member.

When he saw the movie in a theater, there was no scene where an actor spoke Proto-Germanic, but the paper that he had sent was shown on the screen from the back. They didn’t show the front of the paper. Only my adviser knew that the crew had used that paper.

I couldn’t resist my curiosity and asked, “How much did they pay for that?”

My adviser laughed and answered, “They gave me a box of snacks.”

Apparently, a real academic’s word doesn’t pay off financially.

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Picture by SuccessfulWitch