In the meantime, the geographical extent of runic usage had been extended when the people we know as Anglo-Saxons populated England in the fifth century.

While many of these short inscriptions are difficult to interpret, again they often seem to represent names, of owners, makers or recipients of the jewellery. A mount for a shield-grip reads ‘Ny made’, which suggests that the silversmith who made it was literate as well as skilled in his craft.įurther south, and a bit later, mainly in the sixth and seventh centuries, runes are found on jewellery or other personal items deposited with the dead, mainly female, in their graves in what is now southern and western Germany and neighbouring regions. So one of the oldest inscriptions, a lance-head, reads simply ‘Black’ and this may have been the owner’s name or nickname. A number of these weapons bear short, often ambiguous inscriptions which seem to refer either to the names of the weapons or their owners or makers, or to some characteristic of the weapons. Large numbers of weapons and other military accoutrements were deposited in the bogs, presumably after a battle, though whether these were the weapons of the winners or the losers, or where they came from, is not always clear. The earliest inscriptionsĪ substantial number of inscriptions have been found in Danish bogs, at places like Vimose and Illerup Ådal, the majority placed there in the second or third centuries AD. Runic inscriptions are in fact some of our most important evidence for the Germanic languages before their speakers were introduced to Christianity and, as a result of that, the habit of writing with pen and ink on parchment. Later on, as people moved about and the languages developed, the runic alphabet followed suit. The runic alphabet was most likely devised in southern Scandinavia, and that is where most of our earliest inscriptions are from. In the first and second century AD, the languages that formed the Germanic family were spoken across a wide area of northern and western Europe, including the countries we now know as Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia, and some neighbouring regions. Rather, runes were devised to be carved, scratched or incised in a variety of materials, but particularly wood, bone, metal and stone. An important difference from classical alphabets at that time, which influenced the shapes of the runic characters, is that those who devised the alphabet did not anticipate its use on thin, flat writing surfaces such as papyrus or parchment. Rather than just borrow the Roman alphabet, and write their own language with it, the inventors of runes fashioned an alphabet more suited to the sounds of the Germanic languages.

The runic alphabet was devised for the Germanic-speaking parts of Europe which had not previously used writing, but which had been exposed to contact with the Roman empire and had thus got the idea that writing could be a useful thing. Just as the word ‘alphabet’ is named after alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, similarly, the ‘futhark’ is named after its first six characters (with the ‘th’ sound represented by just one character). The idea that the characters of the alphabet had a fixed order in what we call the ‘futhark’, is also derived from classical alphabets. The letters of this alphabet show clear influence from the Roman alphabet, in the form of some of the individual letters and in the size of the alphabet which originally consisted of 24 characters. Runes are the letters of an alphabet devised at some point in the first or second century AD. However, this alphabet, and the uses to which it was put, have a much wider chronological and geographical range than that, and are therefore of much broader interest. For many, runes and runic writing are indelibly associated with Vikings and the Viking Age.

Elder futhark rune sounds