The Vikings are best known for their bloody raids, bawdy gods and buried ships. But they are also famous for the runes – the Nordic branch of the spiky north Germanic alphabet still so familiar today.

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Though Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, runes were the chief exception, lying at the intersection between text and object. In the same way that the word ‘alphabet’ is derived by combining the Greek letters ⍺ (alpha) and β (beta), the Nordic equivalent, ‘futhark’, is derived from the first six letters of the writing system: ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u), ᚦ (th), ᚬ (a), ᚱ (r), ᚴ (k).

Surprisingly, because they represent such a recognisable and well-known form of ancient writing, no one knows for certain where runes came from. It’s probably no coincidence that many of the oldest interpretable runic inscriptions discovered – dating from the second century AD – were found in a context that shows evidence of contact with the Roman empire.

The shape of runic characters are similar to many letters of the Latin alphabet, but with an angular shape more suited for carving into hard materials such as wood, bone and stone. It’s likely that knowledge of the Roman writing system travelled north with people who had spent time on both sides of the imperial frontier along the Rhine, whether as mercenaries, traders or craftspeople.

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This might also explain one possible meaning of the word ‘rune’ itself: something secret or hidden, originally reserved for a particular segment of society – an elite group. As the centuries passed, though, knowledge and use of runes spanned an ever-broader proportion of society.

The Viking Age is typically considered to encompass roughly the years 750–1100 AD – the period during which people of Scandinavian origins and heritage took part in overseas raiding, trading and settlement. At its height, the Norse diaspora they created stretched from Arctic Greenland in the west to the Eurasian waterways of the east.

Designating dates for a ‘Viking Age’ is a useful way to situate ourselves in time. But runes remind us that any historical age rarely has neat edges to mark its beginning and end. Runes were used in the Norse world several centuries before the infamous international raids started, and their use continued for centuries afterwards.

From the intimacies of daily life to the grand sweep of history, runes were used to record lives and deaths, preserving people’s names, their emotions, their humanity. Through them we come within touching distance of the people of the past, with their kaleidoscope of voices, experiences, emotions, relationships and beliefs.

Here, we will see how deciphering runes allows us to catch glimpses of five key aspects of Norse culture, spanning the commemoration of death, love and lust, drinking, word games, and the realities of travel in the Viking Age world.

Remembering a life

Many runestones were carved to mark the passing of beloved individuals, recording details of their lives and travels

The Norse inscriptions most familiar to us today are probably official runestones, typically commissioned to commemorate departed loved ones.

If you’ve passed through Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, you might have walked straight past one such monument. Looming above the bustle of modern-day travellers, this incongruous lump of stone features the fading outline of two carved snakes arching round the edge and looping back on themselves. The bodies of the snakes are adorned with runes that translate as: Gunnar and Bjorn and Thorgrim raised this stone in memory of their brother Thorstein, who died in the east with Yngvar, and made this bridge.

This runestone was originally erected in the mid-11th century alongside a road and the bridge mentioned in the inscription, where it could be admired by travellers passing along the busy route. Commissioning such a stone was an expensive act that not only commemorated Thorstein’s life but also immortalised his three brothers.

The runestone mentions that Thorstein “died in the east with Yngvar”. In the region around Lake Mälaren, near Stockholm, are many other runestones that commemorate husbands, fathers, sons and brothers who, like Thorstein, went on that same eastern expedition – possibly in the direction of the Caspian Sea – and never returned.

Some of these runestones still stand where they were erected. Others have been built into the walls of churches and cathedrals. In all, some 20 names survive on various stones: Thorstein, Gunnleif, Harald, Saebjorn, Baggi, Gunnvid, Ulf, Gauti, Belgir, Hrodgeir, Tosti, Hugi, Thorbjorn, Skarf, Skardi, Bjorstein, Osnikin, Orm, Onun and, of course, Yngvar himself. Each runestone is a public testament to private family loss, grief and pride.

Love letters

Norse people recorded romantic passions and secret desires in runes

Many runic inscriptions from the Norse world were not meant for public consumption. Rather, they were the equivalent of the scrappy sticky notes, every day text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time. Written on wood, metal, bone and stone, a number of the surviving messages record strong emotions: loves, lusts, rejections.

Some express fluffy sentiments of the sort that might appear in a packet of Love Hearts or on Valentine’s Day cards: “Think of me, I think of you! Love me, I love you!”

Others provide the names of the ones doing the loving and the lusting. Runes on a piece of cow bone from Oslo read: “Asa loves St____”, with the latter word broken off after the first two characters. Asa is a woman’s name, and St____ is likely the fractured remains of a man’s name: Stein or Stefan, perhaps. In this case, Asa’s feelings don’t seem to be much of a secret, because the final runes on the bone spell out the word ek uæit – “I know.”

Other runic inscriptions hint at the sort of messy gossip that goes hand in hand with the human condition but which rarely survives for posterity: hints of same-sex acts, affairs, indiscretions and one-night stands. One carver tells us: “The clever woman lets loose for her lover, but folk still think she’s a virgin.” Another remembers the good times: “Ingibjorg loved me when I was in Stavanger.” Another spills the beans: “Clumsy-Kari and Vilhjalm’s wife are shacked up together.”

Some tell of people who have been unhappily friend-zoned: “I love another man’s wife so much that fire seems cold to me, and I am a friend of this woman.” Others hint at rejection or love affairs gone sour. One such, a 10th-century square weaving tablet made from bone, found in Lund (then in Denmark, now in Sweden), provides two out of three names in what appears to be a love triangle: Sigvor (female) and Ingimarr (male). The unnamed carver of the runes is most likely female, and the runes appear to form a curse, directed particularly at Ingimarr: the translatable part reads “Sigvor’s Ingimarr will have my weeping!”

Runic inscriptions hint at the sort of messy gossip that goes hand in hand with the human condition but which rarely survives for posterity: hints of same-sex acts, affairs, indiscretions and one-night stands

There are examples of runic messages that were hidden in Norwegian stave churches, which tell us that private passions burned in these holy houses. A wooden runestick found in Urnes stave church at Sogn og Fjordane in south central Norway declares: “Arni the priest wants to have Inga.” Whether this was a confession by Arni himself or a scurrilous rumour started by a member of the congregation, we can’t know.

Another stick, found in Lom stave church in the same part of Norway, was inscribed by a man called Havard to woman identified only by the first letters of her name, possibly Gudny or Gunnhild. He is proposing marriage – but it seems that he’s not her only option, because “it is my full desire to ask for you” is followed by “…if you don’t want to be with Kolbein”.

Someone has attempted to conceal the identities of the people involved by scratching out the three names in this potential love triangle and dropping the wooden runestick surreptitiously between the church’s floorboards. Gudny/Gunnhild herself is a possible culprit – the wooden stick was found in the area of the church where women sat for mass – but we can only guess at the emotions that were going through their head at the time.

Booze-fuelled banter

Runes were used to summon errant husbands and make crude jokes

The biggest haul of everyday runic inscriptions was found at the medieval harbourside of Bryggen in Bergen, Norway. There were nearly 700 at latest count, most inscribed on little sticks discovered by archaeologists after some of the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in the 1950s.

One, etched by a woman named Gyda around AD 1200, reads ᚵᛦᛆ:ᛍᛅᚼᛁᚱ:ᛆᛐᚦᚢ:ᚴᛆᚴᚼᛅᛁᛘ – transliterated into Roman letters as gya : sæhir : at þu : kak hæim. In English, that roughly translates as: “Gyda says that you should go home.”. Judging from where the stick was found, it seems likely that Gyda sent the message to her husband down at the tavern, telling him to finish up his drink and come home. On the other side of the stick are a flurry of indecipherable runes – perhaps a reply to Gyda carved by a husband too drunk to hold his knife steady.

Other runic inscriptions found in Bergen also bear the hallmarks of inebriation. One carved into a wooden handle reads: “If only I might come nearer to the mead-house much more often.” Elsewhere, a cow bone was scored with runes that proclaim: “Now there’s going to be a fight,” followed by an undecipherable reply in another hand – perhaps scratched by a couple of drinkers about to witness a noisy punch-up, one of them too inebriated to carve a coherent sentence.

Such inscriptions tell us that medieval Scandinavians could be as immature as the rest of us. We can almost hear sniggering across the centuries as someone takes up their knife to carve: “Sit down and interpret the runes, stand up and fart.”

And from toilet-based humour it’s only ever a hop, skip and jump to genital-based jokes. One line of alliterative poetry carved onto a length of wood might be translated as: “The vagina is lovely, may the penis serve it a drink.” Like all groundbreaking forms of technology, humans found a way to make it about bums and boobs.

Playing with words

Norse people enjoyed composing poetry and inventing linguistic games to help pass the time

Wordplay, poems and brain teasers were beloved by people across all strata of Norse society. It’s relatively rare to find evidence of these preserved in runes because such verbal games were predominantly oral rather than written. But some surviving runes reveal the diverse ways those living across the Norse world amused themselves.

One runestick dating from c985–1025 AD in the earliest decades of the settlement in Greenland tells us something about the sort of wordplay enjoyed by those who lived in the farthest-flung Norse communities. The stick involved is a four-sided piece of pinewood around 43cm long, with a natural knot at one end that resembles a birdlike creature.

It was discovered in 1953 by someone from the town of Narsaq who, while foraging for good-quality mud and soil for gardening, found themselves digging in what had been the living room of one of the earliest Norse farms.

Runes are inscribed on four sides of the stick. On one side, transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the runes read: o : sa : sa : sa : is : o sa : sat. Several interpretations of these runes have been suggested, with variations along the lines of “On a tub saw the person, who sat on a tub,” or “On the sea that seemed to be, which you did not see on the sea.”

Whatever the correct interpretation – and perhaps there was never meant to be just one – this is a fascinating example of word play using homonyms: words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings. There are many examples of this in modern Nordic languages, one being the Icelandic sentence Afi á Á á á á á: “Grandpa from Á [a place] has a sheep by a river.”

Travel diaries

Items carved with runes provide evidence of the travels of Norse folk during the Viking Age

The previous example of runic wordplay from Norse Greenland, with its allusions to the sea, reminds us that this was a culture predicated on travel, both on land and on water. Other little scraps of runic inscriptions occasionally provide the names of ordinary individuals who travelled extraordinary distances, sometimes under extraordinary circumstances.

One of these inscriptions was found in a wooden coffin in the Norse graveyard of Herjolfsnes, close to the southernmost tip of Greenland. The coffin contained no body, only a wooden stick carved with runes that read: “This woman, who was called Gudveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.” She died on the voyage west, it seems, so this was as close to a burial as she could be given.

Another example was discovered near the high pass of Lendbreen, in the mountains of south central Norway. This pass lay on an ancient highway – a track along which farming families moved up to and down from their summer pastures, as well as a route used by traders and long-distance travellers bound for other parts of the country and even across the sea.

As climate change bites, glacial archaeologists are racing to recover ephemera that were preserved here in ice for the past millennium. An extraordinary range of artefacts has been discovered, including farming equipment, a woollen mitten, a lot of frozen horse poo – and a relic revealing the name of at least one of the travellers who used this route during the Viking Age. Carved onto a wooden walking stick around AD 1000 are runes that read: “Ivar owns this.”

Wherever Ivar was heading, he had to reach his destination unaided by his stick – which lay frozen in ice for the next thousand years.

Eleanor Barraclough is a broadcaster, writer and historian based at Bath Spa University, and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024)

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This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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