In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.

The Vikings are often portrayed as illiterate, uncultured barbarians who evinced more interest in plunder than in poetry. In fact, the Vikings left behind a great number of documents in stone, wood ...

Side view of the blade of an 1,800-year-old iron knife with Danish runes that seem to spell out the word "hirila.". Archaeologists in Denmark have discovered runic letters inscribed on a knife blade ...

OSLO, NORWAY—According to a statement released by the University of Oslo, researcher Johan Bollaert has studied Norway’s medieval inscriptions, some of which were written with letters of the Roman ...

Runes are the characters of the alphabet used by the Vikings and other Germanic peoples from about the second to the 15th centuries A.D. Some runes vaguely resemble letters in our own alphabet; others ...

Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic. The original is here. Why did Vikings sometimes use codes when they wrote in runes? Were the messages secret, or did they have ...

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A 900 year-old runic code used by ancient Vikings has been cracked for the first time, revealing a simple message:‘Kiss me!’. K Jonas Nordby, a runeologist from the University of Oslo, was able to ...