Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana. Supplementum - 01.06.1958, Qupperneq 298

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Tues hammer known from other sources, together with parallel interpretations by Arendt of
“inscriptions” on Slav idols, it is pointed out that Arendt with all his learning was a romancer.
On the other hand his drawings of runes indicate such an advance that they mark an epoch.
With Arendt, the scientific approach in drawing runes made its debut. Certainly he sometimes
draws his rune-staves with a ruler, but he is meticulous in giving each symbol its specific char-
acter. In a drawing by Arendt no doubt arises as to whether an inscription belongs to the Helnæs-
Gorlev group, the Jelling type or the Middle Ages. It is also significant that Arendt united in
himself the scholar and the draughtsman. He personally was a practical man who knew how to
take paper casts and rubbings with black wax, insisting that he was 50 years in advance of his
time. In this he was right as far as his methods of examination are concerned, namely those of
personal and constantly repeated examinations later adopted by Wimmer. His great runological
achievement is the reading and interpretation of King Harold’s inscription on the Jelling
stone.
Chapier 16. Rasmus Henrik Kruse, p. 230-236. R. H. Kruse was a landscape painter from Fur,
self-taught, who was born in 1796 and died in 1877. Like Arendt he was awandering antiquarian
(but had a small-holding behind him), and like Mejer he limited himself to Jutland. His unprinted
main works (in the National Museum and in the Royal Library) are “Curiosities of Northern
Jutland” 1843-57, and “Prospects of a number of Northern Jutland’s manor-houses” 1833-69,
with a wealth of fine, meticulous, colourful gouaches showing a steady artistic development as
far as the runestones are concerned. As a reader of runes Kruse is painstaking, balanced (but
also obstinate) and exact; most of his reproductions of inscriptions are good,—he is better than
Abildgaard and on a par with Kornerup—-, but like Skonvig and most of the other draughtsmen
he failed in the face of more difficult inscriptions. In the history of the development of rune-
drawing his gouaches indicate a great step forward towards the naturalistic. He began with the
“typical” pre-Arendt drawing and finished up with the “individual”. In his gouaches he “carves”
the runes into the colourful granite with the help of shading and high-lights, while those in his
earliest drawings are, as it were, laid on top of the stone surface. The study of runes owes to him
new discoveries, topographical information, numerous fruitless searches after stones which have
disappeared, and contributions to the readings of some few lost inscriptions. R. H. Kruse be-
longed to that type of idealistic amateur without which scholarship cannot function.
Cliapter 17. Chr. Zeuthen, Heinrich Hansen and Jacob Kornerup, p. 237-240. These three
painters, professionally trained in contrast to R. H. Kruse, were mainly important in fields other
than rune-drawing. The first and the last were principally connected with the National Museum,
and it was through this connection that they all started to draw runestones. There are 10 drawings
from Zeuthen (1812-90), 12 from Kornerup (1825-1913), and l'rom the hand of Heinrich Hansen
(1821-90) a few splendid gouaches which artistically (although not in accuracy) reach the peak of
subjective rune-drawing. Zeuthen was an unusually meticulous draughtsman, thoroughly capable
like Heinrich Hansen, while with Kornerup there can be seen a development similar to that of
Kruse, although on a somewhat different plane. Less important rune-copvists were Adam Mliller,
Jacob B. Loffler, F. Uldall, E. Rondahl and perhaps A. P. Madsen.