Runes, runes, and more runes – Scandinavian Archaeology (2024)

“You must find the runes and read them. Strong symbols, powerful symbols stained by the mighty sage, hewn by the potent Powers, all etched by the runemaster.”
– Hávamál, the High One’s Sayings (trans.JeramyDodds)

Runes are the written language used in Scandinavia during theLateIronAge. The runes are highly associated with the Vikings—but in fact,they were used long before the VikingAge,andpersisted in their use in certain parts of Scandinaviaas late asthe 18^thcentury.The Latin alphabet now used in the western world lived side by side with the runic inscriptions longer than most of us are aware of. Nowadays,only trained experts and a handful of enthusiasts canunderstandthem, but in their heyday, it is probably that most people in the Scandinavian world couldread runes.

As a standard system of writing, runes were used for a wide variety of purposes and in a wide variety of different media—everythingfrom memorials to graffiti, carvedon everything from stone to wood.But inaddition to their mundane function as an alphabet, runesalso have a mythological component, beingheavily associated withmagicand divination,the domainsofOdinhimself.

In this article, we will give you a crash course into the weird and wonderful, dark and mysterious,sometimesevenfunnyorromantic, but always interesting,world of runes.

So, what are runes, more exactly?

Runes are the letters oftheOldNorse alphabet—or, more accurately, alphabets, as there areseveral different versions depending on time period and place. The most common rune alphabets arecalled the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark, the word “futhark”beinga transliteration of the first sixrunesinbothversions of thealphabet,ᚠᚢᚦᚮᚱᚴ(F;U;þ,pronounced like English ‘th’;A;R;K).The Elder Futhark consisted of 24 letters, andwasused from the mid-2^ndcenturyADto around 750 AD.After this,theYoungerFuthark—withonly16letters—developedin Scandinavia,and was used throughout the VikingAge to the Middle Ages.

Runeslikely originated in northern continental Europe,and were used by a wide variety of Germanic peoples in the Migration Period.Itis theorized that thefuthark wasinspired by both the Latin and Greek alphabets, as itwasduringthis time thatGermanic peoples of northernEurope were coming into sustained contact with the Roman Empire.One of the theories is that Norsetraderswhotraveleddown in the continents were inspired by the traders there who could communicate with each otherthrough writing.When they came back to their homelands,they developed their own written languageloosely based onthealphabetusedfurthersouth.

The first known appearance of runes in Scandinaviaison a combdating to the 2^ndcentury AD,foundat the site ofVimosen,Denmark. It wasfoundin a bogalongsidesome2500 other objects,all depositedas offeringsovera period ofroughly300 years.The comb was inscribed with runesreading“Harja”,whichhasbeentaken to bethe name of the owner.In these early days, runes wereoftenusedlike this—to spell outthename of the maker or the owner ofan object—but came to beused inmorecomplexcontexts lateron.

However, there were no runes representing numbers in the futhark. The numeralsthat we use today in the western world are derived from Arabic numerals,not Latin.If one would write a numberin a Norse runic inscription, one would have to spell it out.Because of this,runic inscriptions featuring numbers are rather uncommon.

Rune stones, rune sticks,or rune bones?
The most famous items for rune carvings are thehugerunestonesthat dot the Scandinavian landscape,thanks in great part to stone’s durability and resistance to degradationmaking them the most likely features to survive through time. However, runes were commonlyalsocarved on wood or bone, andin fact,the majority of rune carvings werelikelymade in wood:it is a soft and easily accessible materialthat can be carved with common tools, unlike stone. The shape of the runes, withvertical and diagonalstavesand branches,also flows wellwith thegrain of wood, and it is therefore believed they were specifically developed to be able to be carved with ease into wood. Thedownside of this is that woodis an organic material and thereforedecomposes much more easily,andsothe majority ofrunestickshave long since rotted away.However,they can occasionally be preservedif they are buried in oxygen-proof conditions, such as deep inside acidic bogs. Runes can also be carved on bones, horns, and metal,whichtend topreserve much more reliably than wood.

Rune stones
Theearliest-knownrune stones can be found in Norway,alldating to themid-4^thcenturyAD:theTunestone, theHogganvikstone, and theEinangstone.Buteven thoughit appearsthatrune stones first appeared inNorway,theyaremorecommonly found in Sweden and Denmark.While Norway is home to 137rune stones,Denmark(including certain parts of Sweden that were “Danish” during the Viking Age)has 273 stones;Swedenleads by far, however, witha full2881.The area with the highest density ofrune stones is theMälarValley of central Sweden, and more specifically in the region of Uppland, featuring 1334—nearly half of all Sweden’srune stones.Only ahandful have been found outside Scandinavia itself.The British Isles are home to approximately 60, including one in what is now the Republic of Ireland.Iceland, however,lays claim to only 17rune stones.

Rune stoneproductionreached itspeak duringtheyears 900-1100AD,after which they ceased to be produced altogether. It is believed that the end ofrune stoneproduction is related to the conversion to Christianity,as in most areasrune stones stop being madesoon after the establishment of a local bishopric. Buta number oflatestonesfeatureChristian text and crosses,whichmay suggest that the process of conversion was gradual, with old traditions absorbing new religious elements before being replaced by them altogether.Onesuchis the JellingStonein Denmark, featuring the earliest pictorialrepresentation ofJesus Christ in Scandinavia. This waserectedto commemoratethe baptism, around the year 930AD,of theDanishking Harald Bluetooth, who had begun life as a devout pagan but became the first Danish king to convert to Christianity.In Sweden, where manyrune stones were produced containing Christian elements alongside so-called pagan elements,onehypothesis is that local people had begun to practice their own, localized version of Christianity before thechurch had an official presence in the region. Once a full-timelocalclergywas established,however,official Christian laws might have been administered to put an end to older practices considered non-Christian, and the carving ofrune stones may have fallen into this category.

The Swedish island of Gotland, as usual, provides an interesting counterpoint.Rune stoneswere raised butwere not widespreadonGotland, as the long-standing local tradition was instead the carving of picture stones.Butrunes themselves were still known here,andwereinscribedon gravestones up until the 15^thcentury, long after the disappearance ofrune stones on the mainland. Additionally,lines of runes containing Christian messagescan be found carved into the walls ofmedieval Gotlandic churches.This is an interesting example of the ways in which islands have always developed unique identities within the broader cultural context they inhabit.

Who used the runes and who could read them?

During the VikingAge, it is believed that most people (at least the free ones) could read and possibly even write.This isbelievedfora handful of reasons. One of them is therune sticksthat have been foundcontainingmore everyday text and subjects. Runicgraffitihave also been found, such as the Maes Howe cave in Scotland, which features several of the most banal and crude runic inscriptions you are likely to ever read, certainly not the type of writing thatprofessional scribes are likely to have spent much time on.

Another reason is the rune stonesthemselves:to carvea runestone was something that required skill and expertise,andthe ones who carved rune stonesdid soby profession. They wouldreceivecustomorders for rune stones,with a client dictating what the inscription should read, and then the stone maker would “sign” his work at the end of the inscription(for example:“Öpnimade these runes”). The stones would then be painted and then placedina well-visiblepositionwhere they would be seen by many—and this is where the last argument weighs in. Why would one put a lot of money and effort into making arunestone ifmostpeople could notevenread it?Thus, the implicit assumption is that most people in Viking Age Scandinavia could indeed read runes.

What the language contained in the runessounded likethough,we do not know. There hasbeen a lot of researchonthis topic and a lot of qualified guesses, but truth is, no one knows for sure whatOldNorsesounded like. It isbelievedthat more or less the same languagewasspokenover allthe Viking world,divided into two broad dialects: East Old Norse in Denmarkand Sweden,and West Old Norse in Norway and theNorthAtlantic colonies. Today, modern Icelandicis the closest living languageto Old Norsein terms of grammar, and to a large degree the two languages are mutually intelligible, but they are believed to have slightly different pronunciations.

Runes after the rune stones

Runesremained in use in one form or anotherfor a long time aftertheChristianizationof Scandinavia.The rune sticks alluded to above remained in use for various purposes. While the Latin alphabet came to dominate in court and church documents, at least onemedievalScandinavian law code was put to parchment (vellum, more precisely) in runes; however, the use of runes in manuscripts seems to have been exceptionally rare.But even after the Latin alphabet had been fully adopted by the upper class, runes seem to have been commonlycarvedby people of a variety of social strata for their own purposes, and evencame to be used to represent other languages, including Latin.

Also emerging in the Middle Ages, at least as early as the 13^thcentury(though most date to the early modern period, in the 16^th-17^thcenturies),was a peculiar type of artefact called arunicstave calendar, or “clog almanac”. Carved from wood or bone,stave calendarsusedlines of runestorepresentthe daysof the weekand the weeks of the year,marking outimportant dates and special occasions.They also correlated the cycles of the sun and moon on a 19-year basis.

In the modern era,another type of artefact strongly associated with runes are the small pieces of stone or bone that are carved with a single rune each,andcast on a surface to be interpreted by a fortune-teller(so-called “runecasting”).But despite this being one of the more popular forms of divination today,especially among those practicingÁsatrúorHeathenry,it could well be a largely modern innovation.Noarchaeological examples of such artefacts have ever been found,nor is it ever explicitly described in any Old Norse textual sources;only a handful of ancient and medieval texts make oblique reference to casting “chips” or “lots” carved withsymbols for use in divination. Thus, even if theOldNorse did conduct a similar ritual, it is unknown how closelythismight have resembled the modern version of it.

On a darker note, in the early 20^thcentury, runes(in a modified form)were heavily incorporated into a new form of occultism,calledArmanismby its creator, Guido von List. List believed that runes contained secret magicand teachings linked toWotan (that is, Odin), and that they had been passed down through centuries by secret societiesusing a secret language.Thisbizarre theorymight have been an innocuousonehad it not been tied up inhis explicitanti-Semitism, his views on the superiority of the “Aryanrace”, and hisdream ofthe establishment of amodernPan-Germanic Empire.His theories laid the groundwork for numerous far-right occultist societies, most notoriously the Thule Society.Alongside therunes, List was also responsible for coopting the swastika as a racist symbolof Germanic nationalism; but while the runes have mostly recovered from this despicable misappropriation, the swastika has decidedly not.

Moving forward…

Thusends our whirlwind crash course into the mysterious and checkered world of runes.Ifthis piece has served to whet your appetite, you are in luck: over the next month we will be running a variety of pieces exploring runes in all their strange and wondrous forms in much greater detail (in addition to our usual, rune-less content as well).If there are any subjects you would like to see us cover, please let us know in the comments.

We hope you enjoy the upcoming month!

Text: Christopher Nichols, Lovisa Sénby Posse. Copyright 2021 Scandinavian Archaeology.
Cover Photo: Bengt A. Lundberg. Riksantikvarieämbetet.

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