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 ...

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 ...

In October, Professor Judith Jesch of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age led a group of 20 ...

Two rare artifacts inscribed with ancient letters, or runes, could be the key to a mysterious era of Viking history when they suddenly abandoned their old alphabet and transitioned to a new one.

People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought. In runic writing systems, each ...

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 ...

Like many important discoveries, it happened by accident. Alena Slamova, a Czech graduate student in archaeology, was routinely washing some animal bones that had been recovered from a dig in an early ...

The people most commonly associated with runes are the Norsemen, and, within that, Vikings. Countless artefacts, from gravestones to vases, have been found with rune carvings on them. People used ...