runicadj.n.

Etymology: < post-classical Latin runicus (1631 in the passage translated in quot. 1632 at sense A. 1a) < runa rune n.² + classical Latin -icus -ic suffix. Compare French runique (1644), and also (compare -ish suffix¹) Swedish runsk , †runisk (c1600), German runisch (1668 or earlier), Dutch runisch (1723), Danish runisk (1729). Compare also runish adj.²In the 17th cent. the Latin word, and hence the English one, was extended in meaning by antiquarian writers, to refer not only to the characters themselves but also to the earliest stage of the North Germanic languages (by early scholars sometimes regarded as being identical to the language of the earliest surviving Old Icelandic literature), to the earliest surviving literature in these languages (regardless of which script it was written in), and to the society and culture of ancient or medieval Scandinavia in general. A key figure in this development was the Danish scholar Ole Worm (or in Latinized form Olaus Wormius), who used Literatura Runica as a name for ancient Scandinavian literature (as e.g. in the subtitle of his Antiquitates Danicae (1636)), and who published in 1650 an Old Icelandic–Latin dictionary (compiled by Magnús Ólafsson) under the title Specimen Lexici Runici in which the Old Icelandic headwords were printed both in runes and in Roman letters. On more recent views of the language of the early runic inscriptions see note at sense B. 1. In sense B. 3 after scientific Latin runica (1775 as a specific name).