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Runic inscriptions in the older fuþark have so far been the subject chiefly of two types of scholarly investigation. The first may be called corpus presentations or corpus studies, which regard the inscriptions above all from the point of view of their common characteristics. Criteria which establish the inscriptions in the older fuþark as a single and homogeneous corpus have been (a) the use of a stable inventory of graphemes, and (b) — leaving the scattered and controversial evidence of Gothic features in the older runic language aside (cf. Peterson 1998 for a critical survey) — the apparently homogeneous, pre- or supradialectal language which was initially labelled “Spätgemeingermanisch ” (Kuhn 1955), subsequently renamed “Northwest Germanic ” (Antonsen 1965), and — focussing on the long-lasting “exceptional linguistic uniformity ” — is sometimes referred to as a “runic koiné ” (Makaev 1996 [1965], 45). As a consequence of this approach, subcorpora have been sought chiefly among those groups of inscriptions which systematically employ differing forms of graphemes. This is the case, for example, with the so-called South-Germanic or Continen tal inscriptions which, as a subgroup of the runic inscriptions in the older fuþark, are defined by the use of double-barred h, i.e. ¥, for /h/. Another group frequently treated separately are the late Scandinavian inscriptions — first of all the Blekinge quartet and the Eggja stone — which are regularly referred to as “transi tional inscriptions ” (for