Turkic Scandinavians

An interesting thing about the various bracteates found in Poland is how quickly people are ready to ascribe them to various Scandinavian cultures. This is so even in instances where you have runic writing on them which fails to at least is hard to square with any known Germanic language.

We have the runes of Soschychne written SDIRALIT (compare Russian сдира́ли, Polish zdzierać, etc.) which has been read backwards (right to left) to produce TILARIDS and invent a Germanic word not attested anywhere else. The possibility of the Suavic is ignored.

As Oskar Bandle, ‎Lennart Elmevik, ‎Gun Widmark note in “The Nordic Languages”:

“tilarids has been taken to be an East Germanic form and is etymologically more obscure. Its meaning is supposed to be ‘goal-rider’ or ‘attacker’, hence containing the same verbal root as ON rida ‘ride’, or less probably tilraedi n. ‘attack, assault (cf. Lehmann 1986, 345).'”

We have the rune on the spear from Dahmsdorf-Müncheberg which supposedly reads RANJA where the possibility of a connection with the Suavic ranić (to wound) or the Suavic tribe Rani are each ignored.

We have the Rozwadów spear where something that may read RPAs has been read as KRLAS or IK ERULS.

However, my personal favorite is the writing on a bracteate from Wapno, Wągrowiec district, Greater Poland Voivodeship:

What does that say? Well, reading right to left it says SABAR. Now what does that mean? This has been interpreted by Elmer Antonsen (a rather controversial runologist) as “SABA” which, apparently, could be force read to refer to the “Wise One” in some language or other so that must mean Odin. There are a number of issues with this, not the least of which is that the writing (if, indeed, reading it right-to-left is the correct way) is SABAR not SABA.

So what could SABAR mean?

Assuming you eliminate the Sabar people of Indian Bengal (Odisha though earlier Udra and Odra), a reference to a follower of Rāma from Ramayana and the idea that this refers to a Senegalese drum, you have one very interesting possibility that this is a reference to the Sabir (Σάβιροι) people, a Turkic group that lived north of the Caucasus between the 5th and 7th century – perhaps later absorbed by the Khazars. They are mentioned by Priscus as well as by a bunch of Byzantine authors. The Syriac translation of Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor’s Ecclesiastical History refers to them as people who “live in tents, earn their living on the meat of livestock and fish, of wild animals and by their weapons (i.e., who plunder).”

But this is a problem because the rider here is typically interpreted as Odin (note the popular swastika that is found on many bracteates and, incidentally, on the very first attested Polish coin). Of course, we know that Odin came from the East… Of course this raises the question of who the Scandinavians really worshipped in Roman times. After all the earliest mention of Odin – if that is the sane person as Wadon or Wodan – is in Jonas of Bobbio’s “The Life of Columban“.

As a side note, the Suavic zbir refers to a “ruffian” but… supposedly comes from the Italian sbirro (same meaning, compare with Spanish esbirro – “henchman”. Of course, there is the question of how these words came to Italian (Spanish) – perhaps from Latin birrus (a cloak that a ruffian would wear) but were there any Sabirs in the Hunnic horde? Is there any attestation of this word prior to the Hunnic invasion? Honestly, we do not know. Was the word borrowed from Gaulish as some claim?

The bracteate was found in 1850 in a clay urn together with three other bracteates (one like the SABAR bracteate and two others made from another stamp) and a bunch of rings. They “found their way” to Berlin’s Charlottenburg Museum from which they “disappeared” after WWII only to magically “reappear” in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. One of the SABAR bracteates was then reacquired by the Germans.

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