AUDIOBOOK: Viking Runes: More Ancient than Imagined.

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Viking Runes: More Ancient than Imagined.

Taking a New Look at these Enigmatic Messages from a Forgotten Past.

BY FRANK JOSEPH
The well-known “runes” used by medieval Scandinavians make up
a syllabary known as Futhark from its first seven letters. It is composed
of phonetic symbols belonging to an all-purpose alphabet,
with commemorative, recording, identifying, as well as magical purposes.
Runes have been found from Iceland and Greenland to the Isle of Man, Athens, and the Black Sea. Some were carved into the floor of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia Cathedral. About a dozen others, far more controversial, appear in North America. Foremost among these is the Kensington Runestone, a long inscription which recounts the early 14th century voyage of Christian Vikings to Minnesota, and Oklahoma’s Heavener Runestone, emblazoned with a single name: Gnomedal, possibly “Valley of the Gnomes,” perhaps a deprecatory reference to local tribal Indians a thousand years ago. Scholars have identified about five hundred runes in Denmark, compared to an estimated seven hundred fifty in Norway. Sweden has the largest collection, with approximately three thousand examples. More than a thousand runes may be found in the province of Uppland alone. Virtually all of these inscriptions date from the late 8th to the mid 13th centuries, mostly commemorating the deeds and deaths of royalty.