How to Read Runes

**Contains very strong language/Tavern talk** Were runes really magical symbols used by Viking sorcerers? Or were they the everyday handwriting of merchants, lovers, pilgrims and children? From their mysterious origins and Viking Age memorial stones to medieval shopping lists, love letters and graffiti, runes recorded the lives of ordinary people across Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England, and beyond. Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Professor Tom Birkett to uncover the remarkable history of one of Europe's oldest writing systems. MORE Origins of English Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/origins-of-english/id1564113746?i=1000612259912&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3IInOYoEv1YBN0383KSk66 The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/id1564113746?i=1000595837423&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2t4INcYzp6P6zNx5nUXQ3k Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even more Gone Medieval? Watch Matt and Eleanor's new film Medieval Summer on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Janiger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr Eleanor Janiger, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

• 1:18Eleanor Janega?

  If you've always thought runes are magical symbols carved by mysterious Viking sorcerers, well, you're not alone. But it is time to think again. Archaeologists digging beneath medieval streets of Bergen in Norway in the 1950s were astonished when out of the mud came hundreds of wooden runic inscriptions. There were shopping lists, business records, love letters, insults, even jokes. One stick boasts "I love another man's wife." Another somewhat forward message tells its recipient "Kiss me." It's hardly the solemn pronouncement of Odin's chosen mystics.

• 2:03Eleanor Janega?

  Instead, runes can sound remarkably familiar. They're flirtatious, sarcastic, impatient, occasionally rude, and unmistakably human. Those buddy scraps revealed that runes weren't some secret code reserved for priests, kings, or magicians. They could be used by merchants balancing accounts, craftsmen marking possessions, lovers exchanging messages, pilgrims traveling abroad, and children learning to write. In other words, it's just ordinary folk talking to each other. But those everyday inscriptions are just a hint of a much bigger story. They turn up in pre-Norman England,

• 2:47Eleanor Janega?

  across the Roman frontier, in Greenland, even on the walls of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Follow the runes and you follow the great currents of European history: migration, conquest, commerce, conversion, literacy, and cultural exchange. My guest today is Professor Tom Birkett, professor and chair of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland. He's the author of numerous books, including Runes: A Concise History, recently published by Oxford University Press. Together, we'll be looking at the remarkable history of one of Europe's oldest alphabets, which connected villages to empires,

• 3:32Eleanor Janega?

  merchants to pilgrims, lovers to families, and whose greatest achievement may simply be this: allowing us, across 20 centuries, to hear the voices of ordinary people speaking once again. And before we begin, a word of warning. I say that we are going to hear the voices of ordinary people, and some of those voices are saying ordinary and slightly crude things. So I would suggest that you have a listen before letting any little ears take part, because there is going to be some tavern talk. With that in mind, Tom, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me on.

• 4:15Eleanor Janega?

  I'm really excited to have you here today because I feel that this is a real gap in my own knowledge, and I think a lot of people's, actually, because if you don't have time to sit down and study runes, they can be a bit of a monolith, a little bit opaque for us. So I suppose the best place to start is at the very beginning. Can you describe for us, at the very most basic level, what runes are? What do they look like? What do they represent? Because I think that people have this tendency to think that it's a sort of one-for-one for the alphabet, but that's not exactly it, is it?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, so runes, very simply, they're the individual characters of the runic alphabet. And that's a slight misnomer because alphabet is based on the first two letters of the Latin alphabet or the Greek alphabet. And runologists tend to refer to the runic writing system as the futhark, which is based on the sequence of runes in that writing sequence. But it is alphabetic. It's an alphabetic writing system, just like Roman, or Greek, or Cyrillic. And it belongs to that family of writing. And there isn't a one-to-one correspondence, exactly, between the scripts. And there are some differences with runes that are quite important, and I'm sure we'll get on to talk about those later.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  But essentially, it functions in exactly the same way as the Roman writing system. The primary function of each rune is to represent a sound in the language, and that's exactly the same in the writing system we're more used to today.

• 5:49Eleanor Janega?

  So that makes me feel more comfortable. I love to be presented with something that I need to sound out. That's great, that's great. I'm always a little bit... I will just say that my conge is lacking, right? As a result of having to learn a bit more than that. Helplessly European in my brain. But can you tell us a little bit about the origin of runes? Do we have a particular time period when we see that they are developed and spread? Or is it a bit more complex than that?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is one of the trickiest questions, really, in the field of runology, is where did runes come from? Why did they come about? We can kind of pin a few things down. So the earliest inscriptions in runes are from about the second century CE. So there's some debate about how much earlier the system would have been developed, based on those earliest finds. But I think there's a kind of consensus that it was in the first 100 years of the modern era, probably. And where? Again, we don't know exactly, but probably southern Scandinavia. That seems to be where most of the inscriptions come from. The earliest inscriptions, anyway. There are also people who say it might have been northern Germany. There's some recent evidence that might suggest

• 7:05Speaker 02

  that Norway was one of the earliest places using runes. But I think, for me, it makes the most sense that runes came from the Roman script. That was the kind of primary influence on them, and that they developed in the place where there was closest contact between Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire. And that would be kind of along the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, where there were a lot of mercenaries kind of being recruited into the Roman legions, where there was a lot of trade, a lot of contact. And it would make sense that some people who returned to Scandinavia brought that kind of tradition of writing with them. But why they decided to develop their own script and not just copy the Roman script, which had all this prestige and was used across Europe?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  That's a big question. And again, there's a lot of debate about it, but it probably had something to do with distinguishing themselves from Rome and saying, "We have this prestigious technology. We can use writing, but we're going to do it differently. We're going to have our own thing." So I think the runes were consciously deviating from that kind of imperial script. And they did that in various ways, by rearranging the order of the letters, by using new characters. The script is very angular. That's probably the first thing that people notice about it. And that makes it look exotic, and that kind of plays into this idea that it's a fantasy script. But that probably comes from materiality, the fact that straight lines are easy to carve with a knife onto wood or onto stone,

• 8:34Speaker 02

  and you avoid the kind of tricky curves. And then also, the runes were given individual names, which is, of course, something that the Greek tradition has. Although those names, which came from Phoenician, didn't actually mean anything, in most cases, in Greek. But the runic names for the letters, although they refer to the sound value, they do actually mean things in Proto-Scandinavian. So to give you an example, the first letter of the alphabet is recorded in Old English as being "feoch," meaning "wealth." And the important thing about that is that it starts with the "f" sound, so it shows that that's the sound designation of the letter. But it also means "wealth" or "cattle." Runes could be used to demonstrate the sound value,

• 9:18Speaker 02

  which is how they were used in the vast majority of cases. But then there are a few cases where they seem to be used to represent the whole word as well, or the concept designated by their names. So there were several ways, then, that the runic script consciously departed from the Roman alphabet. And I think that's one of the most intriguing things about it, is that its beginnings were all about... Differentiating themselves from the kind of standard way of doing things in Europe at the time.

• 9:48Eleanor Janega?

  I hope that's the case anyway, because I think that's, it's really interesting to me when we see these examples of cultures that are consciously rejecting the homogeneity of the Roman Empire. And it also makes sense, because, you know, what do empires do? They're this sort of totalizing entity that eats areas and makes you subject to them. So why on earth would you make a conscious decision to say, yes, well, we're going to just adopt that alphabet system? Because it's almost like doing their job for them. We romanticize the Roman Empire now, you know, to an extent. And we forget that there are all these people who would really rather not be crushed under that particular machine, I think.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. But it's very curious, though, because a lot of, there are clearly a lot of influences, you know, the, one of the early object types that runes appear on are Bracteats. They're the kind of, they're these golden amulets, disc-shaped amulets. And they seem to have been based very, very closely on Roman medallions and coinage, but with the addition of runes sometimes, and with the addition of kind of Germanic motifs. So they were kind of always borrowing, always taking these influences, but then reshaping them so they made sense within their own cultural context. And so they said, yeah, we are not Rome, at the same time as taking a lot from them.

• 11:06Eleanor Janega?

  Many such cases. But, okay, I guess I have a question then. So what are our oldest runes that we ever discovered? Do we have anything that we can definitively say is probably right there at the beginning?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a comb from a bog deposit in Vimmos in Denmark, on the main peninsula on Jutland. This is a bog deposit, so it's probably a votive offering to whatever deity they were worshipping at that point. And it was found along with weapons and things that were clearly war booty, and had been offered up to the bog to give thanks for having won, and stripped their enemies of the battle trappings. But there's one runic inscription amongst all those objects, and it's on a very personal object, which is a comb. And it says Harja, which might be the name of the individual who owned the comb. And for whatever reason, this comb was included in this war booty and deposited

• 12:07Speaker 02

  in the bog. That's one of the earliest inscriptions that we have. There are a couple. There's one in northern Germany, which kind of has pseudo runes on it. It's a fibula, I think. But there's kind of not consensus about whether those are actually runes or not. There was a very recent find, actually, in Norway, in central Norway. And it's several inscriptions on stone, and they seem to date from a very, very early period. So 10 years ago, we'd have said, you know, definitely runes originated in southern Denmark, and the earliest inscriptions are found in the bog deposits. But now we're finding things on stone in Norway, which may date from a similar period. There aren't a lot of inscriptions from this early period.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  No, I think there's 400 from this first phase of the script, which lasts from about, say, 100 C to 700 C. And that's not a lot of inscriptions, you know, so we have to be very careful about what we, what we say about the tradition from that very limited evidence. But they do seem to be on, mostly on kind of personal objects. The inscriptions tend to be very short. And what's really curious to me is that there's a lot of things missing from the record that you'd expect from a culture that was adopting writing, you know. So there's no record-keeping, there's no real recording of literature or of history. There are no administrative uses of runes, as far as we can tell. They all tend to be

• 13:36Speaker 02

  these really short, like, personal sequences. A lot of what has been called nonsense writing as well, which I think isn't the right term. I think it's, it's writing that we don't necessarily understand the significance of. But there are a lot of inscriptions that are inscrutable to us today as well. And in some of those cases, it may be that it was simply about demonstrating that you could write, or that you had some kind of control over, overwriting, right? So we have to, have to be very careful about what we do with the early evidence. But there are also some, some longer inscriptions, which are really curious, you know, and they can tell us about, about the earliest users of runes. And this is a period of history that we know, we know very little about in this

• 14:20Speaker 02

  area of Europe. So they're particularly important, I think, as kind of firsthand evidence of these, of these cultures.

• 14:26Eleanor Janega?

  I find this incredibly interesting, because it really is a more challenging conception of who is literate or not, right? You know, ordinarily, when we talk about someone being literate or literacy, we are talking about literature. You know, we're talking about things being written down or recorded, as you say. And, you know, this comb, this is a personal item. So I guess my question is, what does this tell us about who is using runes? Because I hesitate to even say, what does this tell us about who is literate or isn't? Because if we've got an offering in a bog, to me, this is sort of indicative

• 15:10Eleanor Janega?

  of a particular class of individuals who have the wherewithal to be sacrificing, I suppose?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they were probably quite high-ranking individuals in society, I suppose, based on the kinds of goods that were, that were being deposited. And we also find that a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the object types are associated with, you know, the upper levels of society. And it may be that, that this was, this literacy was a kind of a closely guarded technology of the elite. So perhaps they borrowed that from Rome as well, you know, saying that, that we are, we are the guys who are in charge, you know, and we know how to use writing. And it's inscrutable to you, but you can see the power of it, you know, and it allows us to do things that you can't do, like record names for posterity and communicate without making sounds, you know, which would have been almost

• 16:02Speaker 02

  magical, I suppose, if you were literate. So I think, based on the kind of, yeah, the limited number of inscriptions, the fact they're often on high-status objects, there is this sense that it might have been a kind of elite, elite form of literacy, which is definitely not the case later in the runic tradition. Now, this is only about the earliest, earliest period.

• 16:22Eleanor Janega?

  But you make the point in your book, however, that maybe we don't actually know how much runic inscription is happening, because of course, maybe things were being written down on wooden articles and wood decomposes. So perhaps we're, we're missing a whole set of texts, or, well, I mean, I suppose not texts, but things, objects, that might have had runes on it. And I find that quite interesting, because we talk about and think about Source Survival all the time in terms of books, but we could also be talking about almost anything, I suppose, in this case.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. And there's a huge bias towards, towards stone, towards precious metals, you know, which, which would take a lot of effort. And, you know, the precious metals are obviously high-status items, but things carved in stone as well, you know, you need a, you need an artisan to do that. And there were probably monuments were raised, the stone had to be sourced, they're kind of upper-class objects, I suppose. But yeah, absolutely, there's virtually no wood in the record from, from this date. So things could have been carved in wood all the time. There's some reference in a classical source to the kind of painting of runes on birch wood. And that's a very curious reference.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  And if there is some validity to that, it might hint at, you know, a practice that, that wouldn't have survived in the record. And we have a lot of wooden inscriptions from the kind of high-medieval period, from towns where, you know, the preservation conditions are much better. And that might tell us something about, yeah, what's missing from these earlier periods. So, yeah, there's, there's huge gaps in our knowledge. And I think I cite in the book the Belgian runologist Rene Derle, who said, you know, at a kind of, at a lowest estimate, there must have been 40,000 inscriptions written in order to sustain this written tradition. And we found like, less than 0.1% of them, you

• 18:26Speaker 02

  know. And that's a very, very conservative estimate. So if we find new things, it could completely turn the, the history of the runic script on its head. And that's something I find really fascinating about this subject, is unlike most of medieval studies, there are new things being found, particularly with, with metal detecting. But stuff is popping up all the time, you know. And I mentioned the runestones in Norway that have cast out on the earliest places that runes were written. But, you know, there are, there are things turning up, which I, I'm not at liberty to talk about, but that really, you know, tell us things about cultural contact that have implications for early medieval English studies, for example, and connections with the continent. So there's stuff turning

• 19:09Speaker 02

  up that, like, blows holes in all the, and I'm sure my book is going to be out of date within a few years, you know, because of these, these new finds, really.

• 19:17Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, well, that was incredibly tantalizing. Thanks for that, Tom. But I suppose any good book, it really excites. In an exciting field, things do move on, and things are moving. But I guess that brings me to my next question, which is, what can we know about tribal culture and trade networks using these runes and the finds that we do have, that you're allowed to talk about at any rate?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  I think the Bracteats are a very good example of what we can learn from the runic tradition about cultural contacts. So one of the earliest inscriptions in England is from East Anglia, from very close to the coast. And it's a Bracteat, one of these gold amulets that was probably made in the Netherlands or in southern Denmark, and imported to England, probably with the first settlers. So that's kind of material evidence for that first wave of immigration to, to England. And they, they seem to have been part of an exchange network that crossed Scandinavia, you know, or crossed northern Europe generally.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And the designs are remarkably similar. You know, we have this tribal society that, you know, geographically very separated, but that had these, firstly, a really consistent writing tradition for hundreds of years that was used, you know, even when the language, languages started to separate and deviate and develop. The script was remarkably consistent across this huge area. And also, these traditions, you know, like the, the use of Bracteats, was consistent across these, these different tribes. So I think we have to think a lot more, based on the runic evidence, we have to think a lot more about these, these links between peoples and the kind of extensive trade, the extensive exchange that was going

• 21:04Speaker 02

  on, including between the continent and England, you know, from a very, very early, early period.

• 21:10Eleanor Janega?

  I suppose I can't let you get away from this earlier discussion without talking a bit about standing stones and rune stones, because I think untrained individuals, such as myself, that's what I tend to think about from the earlier period. And I suppose that's probably down to the fact that this is the sort of thing that one sees in museums. There are a few of them about. Do we have any examples of these from the pre-Viking Age at all? Or is that going to come later?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do. Particularly in Norway, we have a very early tradition of raising rune stones, probably from the very, very earliest periods. And there's one particularly interesting one, the toon stone, which refers to three daughters, the most distinguished of heirs, preparing the stone for their deceased father. And this is a memorializing use of runes that continues and that is really expanded in the Viking Age. But this is an early example. And it's very interesting that it references these daughters as being the most important people in this document of inheritance. So it sheds light, I suppose, on a group that

• 22:21Speaker 02

  might not be very well represented in other sources or in histories of the period as well. It tells us something about inheritance law at this time. And it shows, I think, one of the earliest functional uses of runes, I suppose, was to document inheritance, to memorialize, but also to say something about who came afterwards. So the formula that becomes standard in the Viking Age is to say, so-and-so raised this stone after so-and-so. And basically, I have a right to inherit what this person had. And often you get the rune carver mentioned as well. And we have that in the early period as well. So-and-so carved

• 23:03Speaker 02

  these runes. So the artificer getting their name in there as well. And yeah, absolutely, that is a pre-Viking tradition. It just so happens that in the Viking Age, this explodes. And particularly in Sweden, towards the end of the Viking Age, we have thousands and thousands of these standing stones, which is what people tend to think about when they think about the Scandinavian runic tradition, is these amazing painted, elaborate carvings within the body of a serpent. But there were much earlier examples before the Vikings. Yeah.

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• 24:33Matt Lewis?

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• 26:35Eleanor Janega?

  I'm guilty of thinking of that. Yes, that's me. I'm the one thinking of those when I think of that runes. When we get into the Viking Age, as you say, we have this huge explosion of materials. I mean, not least because it's just closer in time to us, I suppose. But we do see that we have the number of runes in the alphabet reduced, right? Do we have an idea of why that happened?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  That's probably the second great mystery in runic studies, after the, where did runes come from? Yeah, why did they reduce the alphabet by a third? What was the reason for that? It seems like a crazy thing to do.

• 27:16Eleanor Janega?

  And a third is a lot. A third is a lot.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  It's a lot. Yeah, yeah. And especially as the language was changing drastically around this period. And particularly because in England, they did the opposite. They expanded the alphabet to try to take account of the new sounds that were entering the language. So it's radically different to that approach as well. But there are several suggestions about why that may have happened. And one is that it seems a strange thing to do from the perspective of readers, because what you end up having is like one rune representing several different sounds, which can make it a bit difficult to read. But if you're someone learning runes for the first time, I suppose, having a third fewer runes to learn,

• 28:03Speaker 02

  to carve, might have been advantageous. And the second thing is that a lot of runes dropped out organically from the script as the language developed. They became not particularly useful. Some sounds weren't used very often at all, and the runes just dropped out. Some runes were used for more than one sound in an earlier period. So it wasn't just that they woke up one day, or tribe woke up one day and said, right, we're going to slash the number of runes. And they had, some had dropped out. But there was a point where a conscious decision was made that we're going to move from this earlier system to this new system.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  And again, I think, coming back to that point earlier about these connections, these remarkable connections between drastically dispersed tribal groups. This was adopted simultaneously across this very wide area. And again, it suggests that there was a ruling elite that had control over this writing system, that they were able to comprehensively change it and for rune writers to adopt this new system across Northern Europe, really, with the exception of England.

• 29:16Eleanor Janega?

  Well, this is my next question. Because we have this huge area where we find rune stones and runes in the Viking Age and in this period. But do they tend to group up in any particular places? Is there one area where we tend to find more than others? I mean, England notwithstanding, I suppose.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so England actually has very, very few runic inscriptions comparatively, even though I think some of them are the most interesting inscriptions of all. And I hope we'll have a chance to talk about the English tradition a bit more later on. But yeah, one of the biggest clusterings from the Viking Age certainly is in central Sweden, central and southern Sweden, where you have these traditions of raising stones. And it seems like everybody was doing it at a certain point in the 11th century, that it was just, yeah, it was just how you memorialized your dead. And there are clusters as well at an earlier period in parts of Denmark and an earlier period in parts of Norway. And then in the medieval period, because we have a lot of evidence from Norwegian towns,

• 30:20Speaker 02

  it looks like the tradition shifts to Norway. And that may be just because of, again, the preservation conditions. Or it may be that Norway, the runic tradition just flourished in Norway in the later medieval period, partly because of trade, partly because a lot of, prior to the Hanseatic League, a lot of traders were using runes in their everyday life. But then we also get groups of inscriptions in Greenland, for example, from the Norse settlers there. And that tradition seems to have been all about continuing something that came from the Norse homelands. And it has its own particular flavor as well. There are a lot of crosses, for example. Almost all the Greenlandic inscriptions have a Christian

• 31:03Speaker 02

  dimension to them. So there's these little pockets. And then Iceland has virtually no inscriptions, or very few inscriptions. And those inscriptions tend to be from a much later date. So there's these areas of the Viking world as well, where the tradition doesn't seem to have been adopted. Orkney is a place where there's, again, a lot of inscriptions clustered in one place, in Mezhow. And they may have been Norwegians who were stopping off in Orkney on the way to, on crusade, for example. But they left this repository of inscriptions in Orkney. So yeah, and then there are these...

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Sporadic inscriptions from places like Ireland, you know, a few inscriptions from Shetland and the Faroes and so on. But yeah, I think in the later medieval period, Norway is really the kind of heartland of runic writing.

• 31:51Eleanor Janega?

  What are we turning to see when we find these groups of runes? What are they communicating in particular? Is it a lot of things or is this just largely memorialisation?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  The Meys Howe group is a really interesting one to look at. So this is a Neolithic chamber tomb that seems to have been used as a shelter during the Viking Age and the later medieval period. So essentially Vikings broke into the tomb, they decided to stay away from storms. And this is recorded in the sagas as well as, you know, the evidence of them having been there from writing runic inscriptions on the walls. But there are lots of inscriptions there and some of them are just about putting your name on a wall, you know, that is often described as graffiti. So not really memorialising, but I suppose kind of self memorialising in the same way that someone might write their name on a on a tree in at a famous landmark or something, you know. But then there are also inscriptions

• 32:44Speaker 02

  which give us more information. So there's references to buried treasure, there's references to Jerusalem fairies, so to crusaders. There are people saying, I wrote this inscription up high, like a kind of boast about how tall they are. There's references to deviant goings on in the in the Howe. There's someone who says, I carved this inscription with the axe that Gaokar Trondilsun had in Iceland, you know. There's kind of inscriptions that just say, read these runes, you know, and then give you no other information. There's reference to an inscription carved by the housekeeper of the Earl. So an inscription by a woman showing that, you know, women were actively using runes at this period and were part of this kind of dialogue. And I almost think of Meys Howe as a kind of,

• 33:29Speaker 02

  like a discussion board from the medieval period, because people were kind of writing and responding to other people's messages and kind of trying to outdo each other, I think, in the kind of coded writing they did. So there's so much happening just in this very small context. And again, it makes you think what's been lost, which I know is something we always think about in medieval studies. But this wasn't suddenly, people didn't become literate and start responding to each other in this one context. It's just that this is a place where it's been preserved in a Neolithic tomb, you know. So there were these very, very lively discourses going on in runes elsewhere in the Viking world that have just been lost to us, you know. So it's kind of like the tip of the iceberg

• 34:13Speaker 02

  that you see with these surviving contexts.

• 34:16Eleanor Janega?

  Well, how did they then differentiate between the English inscriptions that we have? Because now my interest has peaked, I'm afraid.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  So the English inscriptions, first of all, there were a couple of kind of changes in individual characters of runes, which might have happened in kind of either side of the North Sea or of the English Channel. So one of those was the breakdown of the A rune to represent three separate sounds with three separate characters. And that was a very distinctive kind of English development. And further things developed, new characters were added, there was some rearrangement of the order of the letters. So from quite an early period, we can distinguish English runes from those on the continent. But something also happened in England quite early, which was that the church seems to have taken the

• 35:10Speaker 02

  runic tradition and made it its own. So from about kind of 600 onwards, we get runic inscriptions which have a kind of Christian dimension to them and that are really integral to the kind of identity, I think, of the church in the north of England particularly. So English inscriptions tend to be from the north and east of England. There's very few inscriptions in what would become Wessex. And they tend to be, well, there's definitely a tradition of raising rune stones and, you know, the Ruthwell Crosses and the Bucassac Cross are great examples of that, incorporating them into religious objects. So St Cuthbert's

• 35:51Speaker 02

  coffin, you know, which was like the the most sacred object in the in the north of England, is carved, you know, the apostles' names are put in runes on the coffin. So that shows you just how kind of integrated they were in the literacy of the early English church. And we get this kind of parallel tradition to the development of English literature as well, which I find fascinating because it's kind of overlooked. Like, we've got all this story of Cardman's hymn, you know, and the kind of origins of the first literature and the vernacular. But then people were writing things in runes, including poetry, you know, in runes around the same time. And it's just not really talked about, you

• 36:33Speaker 02

  know. So there's a, the Frank's casket is an object that Sydney, most scholars of early medieval England will be very familiar with. But the inscription on the front of that, which talks about a whale and refers to the whalebone casket, it's an object that was probably a reliquary, it refers to the fish having been beached, you know, in the flood, and it names the whalebone. That's written in good alliterative verse, you know, in good old English verse. And, you know, has some case for being one of the oldest pieces of old English literature, but it's never kind of compared to Cardman's hymn. And then there's another, there's an inscription from Whitby, a bone comb, which was found

• 37:14Speaker 02

  in a rubbish heap, which is also, you know, it seems to be a prayer, but it's also alliterative. It's probably from a period around the whole Cardman's hymn business was going on in runes in a kind of parallel tradition, and again, ignored for a long, long time. So there's this kind of fascinating parallel tradition of runes. They were really, really important to the early English church. And we keep finding new inscriptions, which can shed light on the literary tradition even, you know. So there's an inscription that was found a few years ago from Baconsthorpe in Lincolnshire, and it refers to reading runes, you know, to Beow having written the runes. And this is like a parallel to the Riddle tradition, you know, read whoso may, Beow wrote the runes. We have another clip from

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Honnington, which is a paraphrase of the Canticle of the Three Youths from the poem Daniel, you know, and from, it's also referenced in Azariah. So these are direct connections to the literary tradition and they're popping up all the time, really. I mean, this one is particularly special. But again, like, I think we kind of ignore the runic tradition at our peril as medievalists, as early medieval scholars, because, you know, it has so much to tell us really about that kind of mainstream source of history.

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• 40:15Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think that this is an incredibly important point because what we see as a result of it is that we have these runic inscriptions and this runic tradition existing side by side with the Latin alphabet, which is in common usages this time. Because if you have Christians, which we can see from these runic inscriptions, these are people who consider themselves to be Christian, then they have Latin, probably at the time as well. So to what extent do we see this kind of

• 40:48Eleanor Janega?

  Attempt to accommodate, I suppose, both runic and Latin alphabets happening at the same time.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that there's in the kind of coin evidence, there's some suggestion that there was a kind of distinction made between the Roman script for the authority of the of the king or whoever the coin was being issued on behalf of. And then the runic script used for the mania, so for the kind of artificer. So that that isn't as clear cut in other areas. But like, yeah, on the on the Frank's casket, there is there is some Roman script as well, you know, which is written in the kind of mimicry of an insular hand. And it's referring to episodes from Roman history as well, you know. So I think there there's a kind of distinction again being made between the sources of these literary or writing traditions.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  But then in other cases, there's not that distinction made, you know, there's. So I mentioned the St. Cuthbert's coffin earlier, and one of the evangelist's names is written in in the alphabet and the rest are written in runes, you know, and there doesn't seem to be any distinction made there particularly. In the literary tradition, it definitely seems that runes become associated with an earlier period of the English people. So they're associated with antiquity, with the deep past, with something, again, that wasn't that wasn't coming from the classical tradition. I think there was a real awareness of that. But then runes were incorporated as well in in the alphabet, the alphabet that was developed for the writing of Old English,

• 42:22Speaker 02

  you know, incorporated the the wind rune, the W rune, and the thorn rune. And in Iceland, the thorn rune is still being used, you know, in in the alphabet today. So they kind of were incorporated directly in that way. And they were also used as abbreviations by some scribes, you know, and they kind of, even when they stopped actively being used, I suppose, as a script for writing on objects, they still found these kind of niche uses in the in the scriptorium. And and even in kind of charms, and there's some evidence coming out recently of the tradition of writing runes on lead tablets, which may have persisted into the conquest period, you know.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  And again, a very niche use of runes, but they seem to have survived in that particular context. And in fact, we found two inscriptions now which refer to the dwarf being dead. Dead is the dwarf, they say. So these were probably amulets saying that we've defeated this particular illness associated with the dwarf. And I think in some of the other sources that that illness might be like a carbuncle or a kind of a growth. And and these lead amulets were supposed to stop that coming back or something of that sort. But the fact we found two of these lead inscriptions referring to the same thing suggests there was a kind of tradition in the late Anglo-Saxon period of using lead tablets specifically to ward off illnesses,

• 43:48Speaker 02

  which again is is not a tradition we'd have had any awareness of really even 10 years ago.

• 43:54Eleanor Janega?

  I think that it's so interesting because I guess I don't really think about runes in any context with England, which shows what I know, I suppose. You know, I think that there is this tendency to sort of differentiate, at least as we get into the period of Christianization between Vikings, who we would think would use runes, and then the English. And it just shows that the world is much more complex than that. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the Bergen excavations because I thought this was so incredibly interesting because I'm quite interested in cities.

• 44:30Eleanor Janega?

  And I think that this particular hall tells us a lot about what is going on in cities where people are using runes. Can you talk a bit about what was found there?

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the the main kind of characteristic of the Bergen inscriptions or the Briggan inscriptions from the Wharf in Bergen is their variety. So you've got business correspondence, you've got love letters, you've got labels for products, you've got curses, you've got religious statements. So I think it kind of shows the richness of people's lives at this point. And the fact that runes, you know, weren't at this point in their history, they weren't, didn't have this kind of niche association, as I've said, might have happened in in England, that they were just used as you'd use the Latin alphabet. In fact, they were probably more useful in a lot of contexts because you could scribble them quickly on a on a bit of wood, you know, like to write the Latin alphabet, you'd need parchment, you'd need a quill, you'd need ink.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  And to write a runic inscription on a bit of wood, you just needed your knife, which everyone carried with them, you know. So the Briggan inscriptions show us just how frequently runes were being used for all these kind of everyday communications. So there are some, I have some favorites amongst the Briggan inscriptions. There's one bit of business correspondence to this poor guy who seems to be really failing in his mission to acquire goods for selling in Briggan. And he says, there's no beer, there's no fish. He suggests he's cold and he asks them to send gloves. So you can imagine him being out in this kind of miserable back end of the of the world place. And he can't get what he needs, he's cold. He says, don't let Thorstein know.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  So he's obviously this kind of rival or this person. And he says, don't beat me, you know, when I get home for my my failure. And so you really get a sense of the the kind of person or the personalities behind these inscriptions. This is a particularly long inscription, it has to be said, but this is latter writing, you know, this is business correspondence. Like, it's a very, very different type of inscription to the ones we talked about at the beginning, the earliest inscriptions. Another favorite is, I don't know if I can if I can swear on this podcast.

• 46:44Eleanor Janega?

  You can now.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  But there's an inscription which seems to have been like three, three guys in a pub setting. And they, the first one writes, John silky cunt owns me. And the second one writes, Guthorma cunt liquor carved me. And the third one writes, John bull cunt interprets me. So they were trying to, like, each one was trying to elevate the crudity of their their message. There's all that kind of, there's those kind of bawdy inscriptions, you know, those those rude inscriptions. There's there's, on the other end of things, there's people, you know, expressing their their love in very romantic terms, you know, saying, my love burns hotter than than fire. There's some very nasty curses, curses against, there's one curse against a woman, which is particularly nasty

• 47:32Speaker 02

  from someone who seems to have been jilted and wants to to use magic to to bring this person around. But then there's also, like, there's one inscription that says, Giver asks you to go home, you know. And it it might be, again, you can kind of imagine that this was sent to someone who who was in the pub, telling them that they had to get home now, like Giver was angry. And that may have been written, that may have been written by Giver herself, you know. So again, it gives us some indication that women were were very much involved in this in this runic communicative tradition. There's another political message which suggests speaking to a woman who's in a nunnery about this kind of political machination that's going on.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  And that suggests that she could also write runes. And for some reason, so this was a an inscription that was carved on a beneath wax, you know, to hide it. It was on a wooden tablet, but a wax layer put on top. So it was obviously like very sensitive political communication. But someone threw it in a rubbish tip, you know, it was found in a midden in in Bergen. Instead of kind of burning it on the fire or or breaking it even, you know, they just discarded it. So there's these tantalizing hints that not just the everyday life, but also these kind of more politically charged moments in Norwegian history as well. It's brilliant. There are even shoes with runes on in saying kind of Ave Maria.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  And you can imagine these kind of, these merchants like prancing around around medieval Bergen with these rune inscribed leather shoes. You know, it's just a brilliant image.

• 49:07Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, I love that. I thought this is really interesting because one of the things that runes sort of allow, you know, as you say, because they are so angular, is this ease of inscription. Because one of the big things that we tend to see even among the literate across the medieval period is you might be able to read, but you probably don't know how to put a quill to parchment necessarily, which is this really particular skill. But anyone can do it with runes. It's not difficult to inscribe a rune. But having said all of that, we definitely see a point in time when runes sort of make it off of gold and stone and they end up on parchment.

• 49:47Eleanor Janega?

  What does this kind of tell us about who's using them and what they're using to communicate, I suppose?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so both in medieval Iceland and in in early medieval England, scribal culture kind of picked up on runes and preserved them in a way. So they preserve a lot of our knowledge about the names of the runes. For example, there's lots of runic alphabets circulating. And they were used as well, scribes fairly often signed their names off in runes. And that's a tradition that that Cunnawolf, the the English poet, used as well in his kind of the Colophons to the four surviving poems. So, yeah, scribes preserved the tradition, but also made it their own, I think. So there's some question about how much this is a like an authentic continuation of the runic tradition

• 50:37Speaker 02

  and how much this is just like antiquarians playing with a script that they've inherited. And I'm I'm in two minds about that, to be honest. I think scribal culture probably was drawing on traditions that were already there. But also scribes love a bit of esotericism, you know, and they love a bit of kind of playing with with exotic characters. And I think that plays into the the way that runes survived in these contexts as well.

• 51:06Eleanor Janega?

  I have a very silly question. This is probably incredibly simple, but what do people using runes do for numbers? You know, because from a medieval standpoint, in an ordinary way, I'm expecting to see Roman numerals. What do you do when you're using runes?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  That is a very good question. I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I have a feeling that probably the the number was sanded out, or there were, so you know, five would have been written as as five. But I wonder if lines are used sometimes in some contexts to indicate numbers. That is a very good question, and I can't answer you very well, I'm afraid.

• 51:52Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, well, that that makes me feel better than actually, because I was like, this is probably incredibly silly. But no, okay, I feel better.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Not a silly question at all, a very good one.

• 52:03Eleanor Janega?

  Do we have any evidence that runes then are still kind of a a fully functional writing system later in the medieval period? Or do we tend to see this sort of scribal play take over in the sources that we have?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely in England, the the runic tradition peters out, you know, and it ridges its heyday and probably in around the time of Bede, you know, in the north of England. And then it gradually declines until it's more or less a scribal tradition and not being used outside the scriptorium, although these kind of lead tablets, these new new finds are pushing the date a little bit later in the period. But in Scandinavia, we get, again, this kind of flourishing in the High Medieval period. Lots of inscriptions in stave churches by parishioners. Some of them are salacious gossip. Some of them refer to pre-Christian traditions as well, like there's a reference to the Norns in in one of them. But yeah, then, as we move kind of into the Reformation period,

• 53:01Speaker 02

  runes seem to be used only in very particular areas. Certain parts of Sweden, they seem to have clinged on to the runic tradition much later than everyone else. Like runes were used in in kind of calendars into the the 17th, 18th century. And they kind of survived in, yeah, again, in these very, very niche contexts. But the runic tradition itself, I think, in the face of the increasing literacy and in the face of the the cultural prestige of the Roman alphabet, they just couldn't, they couldn't keep going, basically. And at a certain point, although when they first come into contact with the Roman alphabet, it seems to spur this this kind of renaissance in runic writing.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Eventually, like that, that is washed away as well by the Latin tradition. And yeah, at a certain point, they stop being used.

• 53:52Eleanor Janega?

  That's just the problem with cultural hegemony, isn't it? You know, it's it's great to have an alphabet that is sort of universalized that everyone can use. But on the other hand, you do lose the fun little minority pockets of things. And but I think this is an important point because I do think that we tend to think about runes, you know, as I said earlier, as sort of a monolith. It's like, well, that's what they are. But really, what we see, when we look at it, is a lot of different people using them for a lot of different reasons at very disparate times, you know. I didn't think, before I had a look at your work, that I would ever think about runes and the Reformation in the same context at all, you know. We do have this tendency to associate them with

• 54:37Eleanor Janega?

  the late antique or the early medieval period, and that just is not the case.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's 1,500 years of of history, really, you know. And that's something I wanted to get across in this book because a lot of a lot of studies focus on individual traditions for very good reason. You know, they look at the earliest inscriptions, or they look at a particular national context like like England. But I wanted to kind of try and tell the whole story of this this kind of rise and fall of this of this script, which I think is fascinating because it does span all these different, all these huge cultural changes. You know, it's amazing that the runic script survived really and and evolved and, you know, continued to be useful to the the people that that used it, in spite of that

• 55:24Speaker 02

  cultural weight of the Roman alphabet that was constantly kind of pushing from the rest of Europe. So, yeah, I hope it's a it's a kind of fascinating tradition. Thanks so much. It was it was a real pleasure.

• 55:35Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, it absolutely is. And I mean, that really, really comes across in the book. So I cannot recommend having a read of this enough if you are, like me, a bit of a nerd about languages. And if you're interested in Nordic culture at all whatsoever, but or English, for that matter. Let us not forget that the English are in there. But Tom, thank you ever so much for coming on to talk to us today.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 56:00Eleanor Janega?

  My thanks again to Professor Tom Birkett. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Now, remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my series, Meet the Normans, as well as ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. I tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

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