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form a part of the oldest glosses, they seem to be proof that styli were the
most important writing instruments of the early old High German glos-
sators.16 Even more remarkable, and even rarer, are Old High German dry
point glosses in runic alphabets. andreas nievergelt found four instances
of such runic Griffelglossen;17 they are perhaps best understood as an ex-
pression of the glossator’s erudition, as a form of display script, or even
as an experiment testing whether runes were a useful writing mode for
glossaries.18
although occurrences of dry point writing are today mostly found in
manuscripts, styli were often used to write short notes or letters in dry
point writing on wax tablets from antiquity up until the Middle ages.19
Styli were, in fact, “the primary instrument of writing” in the Middle ages:
Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 4 (Zurich: Chronos, 2008) 160–161.
Such ciphers were found in old norse-Icelandic manuscripts, too, see finnur Jónsson,
“Lønskrift og lejlighedsoptegnelser fra et par islandske håndskrifter,” Småstykker 1–16
(Copenhagen: Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur, 1884–1891), 185–187.
16 Andreas Nievergelt, Althochdeutsch in Runenschrift: Geheimschriftliche volkssprachliche Griffel-
glossen. Zeitschrift für deutsches altertum und deutsche Literatur, Beiheft 11 (Stuttgart:
Hirzel, 2009), 191–192.
17 In addition to these glosses, there are six instances of dry point runic inscriptions, ibid.,
30–73.
18 Ibid., 52.
19 Bernhard Bischoff, Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters,
4th ed. Grundlagen der Germanistik 24 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2009), 28–30.
Figure 3a: Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Boreal 91, fol. 83v, outer margin. © Silvia
Hufnagel and Isabella Buben, with friendly permission of the Bodleian Library.