Runic and Mediterranean Epigraphy examines the past 100 years of runic scholarship to show that previous investigations on the origin of the runes have been hampered by a series of ad hoc postulates, the greatest being that the runes cannot have come into existence before the birth of Christ. If one examines the runic, Greek, and Latin alphabets on the basis of letter shapes, graphic-phonological correspondences, direction of writing, the orthographic...