Gone Medieval - Runes

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Runes give us a unique understanding of the Vikings in their very own words. While the Latin alphabet became widely adopted in northwestern Europe during the medieval period, in some places this happened late and it wasn’t the only language used. So if we want to get into the minds and lives of the Vikings we need to turn to runology. Cat is joined by Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, as well as a specialist in runology and the Old Norse language. Judith takes us through the world of runes, from runic love notes, to inscriptions on footwear, to whether or not they were used for magical powers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss 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 Jarniger, 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 forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and today's episode is going to be all about rooms. While the Latin alphabet became widely adopted in North Western Europe during the medieval period, in some places this happened relatively late. It was also not the only writing system used. If, for example, we want to get into the minds and lives of the Vikings, we need to turn to runology instead. Because throughout the Viking Age and beyond, runic inscriptions have given us some pretty unique insights into the sort of messages people wanted to leave behind for posterity and some that maybe they didn't. I'm really pleased to

have the brilliant Professor Judith Yesh here with me on Good Medieval today. Thank you for joining me, Judith. It's great to talk to you, Kat. Now Judith is a professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and she's a specialist in runology as well as the Old Norse language and literature and the Viking Age more broadly. Now I feel very lucky to be able to have Julius to call on whenever I come across an artefact on a dig or in the field somewhere from one of my archaeological sites with lines or inscriptions that I think might just be a runic inscription and I can show them to Judith and she will give me her expert opinion but I think so far my success rate is about zero.

Isn't it? You've got to keep trying, Kat. Keep trying. Exactly. One day we'll find something amazing. Right, so I'm mighty here to just give us a really good insight into runes and what they can tell us about medieval minds. So I wanted to just start with some of the basics, really. Can you just explain what exactly are runes and when and where do they first appear? Right. Runes are simply the individual characters in an alphabet that we call the runic alphabet. So they're like any other alphabet, the Roman alphabet, the Greek, the Cyrillic, the one we use today. They first appear probably in the second century CE. There's possibly some evidence for them having been used earlier, but they're definitely in use by about the 160s.

And they appear in those parts of Europe where people spoke a Germanic language. So we find them on the European continent. We find them in Scandinavia. They're also exported to Britain and the Scandinavians took them with them to the places they went to, so including Britain, but also to Iceland and Greenland, for example. So a lot of people mainly associate runes with the Vikings and the Viking Age, don't they? But were they really the only people using them then? No, not at all.

So runes were in use from, as I say, the second century till about the 15th century. so over a thousand years, but in different ways in different places at different times. And of course, over that long period of time, the alphabet changed. So we have what the earliest runes we call the older Futharque. Futharque is also a name for the runic alphabet. So in the same way as the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. So Futhark are the first six characters of the runic alphabet.

F, U, F, uh, and K. The earliest runes are this older Futharck, and these are also used on the European continent. Then what you get is runes appearing in England, and there's a special Anglo-Saxon form of the Futhark developed in England, which is similar to the runes used in Frisia, so they're often called the Anglo-Friesian runes. Around this time, ruins die out on the European continent pretty much, and they're mainly used in Scandinavia, And what we call the Viking runes develop a little bit before around the beginning of the Viking age, so sometime in the 8th century. And then these are exported to places that the Vikings went.

They took them with them. But then runes continue to be used after other alphabets are introduced into Scandinavia, particularly the Roman alphabet, which comes with Christianity around the year 1000. And then we have the medieval runes, which are then used mainly in Scandinavia, although we also have some used, for example, in Greenland or in Northern Scotland, in the medieval period. You have to remember, in runology, we use Scandinavian terminology. So the medieval period is the period after the Viking Age.

They're two separate periods. And then gradually, in about the 15th century, they stop being used on a regular basis anywhere. Can we completely understand all run? Have we sort of properly deciphered the script? If you see an inscription, will you always be able to understand? understand what it says or is there still some uncertainty? Some individual inscriptions have that uncertainty. I mean, we know what the characters stand for on the whole.

Many inscriptions are perfectly comprehensible, but occasionally new inscriptions are found and we don't really know what they're meant to say. And sometimes we suspect perhaps they're not meant to say anything. They thought they looked nice. They thought it's a good thing to have a runic inscription on whatever object you want to have a runic inscription on and they just copied something they didn't understand and it wasn't meant to mean anything. So we assume that they're not always meant to mean something,

but on the whole, the vast majority have been deciphered, certainly deciphered in terms of we can read the characters and then understood in terms of what the text is supposed to say. That leads quite nicely into thinking about what they are used for. So you're talking about some being inscribed on an object as just possibly just some letters. Can you say something a little bit more about who's using these runes? And what purposes are they being used for?

Because we don't get big books. It's not in the same way as our current alphabet. No, absolutely. Roons are a form of writing. But as you say, they're not the kind of writing we're used to. They're not really designed for writing on flat, thin surfaces like parchment or paper. They're designed for being inscribed on objects of almost any material. So we have runes on metal, on stone, on bone, on wood, and on a whole host of other

random objects. So the text tend to be short, but they can be almost anything that you might want to use writing for. So very often, especially in the early period, a lot of them just seem to be names, which might be the name of the owner of the object or of the maker of the object. Then later on, we get a whole range of other uses. The vast majority of surviving runic inscriptions are on stone, because that survives best. And most of those are memorials to the dead. So a good way of ensuring that the dead could be remembered really for a thousand years or more is to write their name in runes on stone.

And then we also get throughout the period of runic use, runes used to send messages to people on little sticks of wood, for example. Yes, we're going to get back to those a bit later on, I think. There are some excellent examples. So you talked about the run stones. and commemorating the dead. So with those then, do we get quite a lot of insights into names and families and actual individual people? Absolutely. And that starts even before the Viking Age. I mean, Norway in particular has a good selection of pre-viking memorial stones. A lot of them are just names,

but then in the Viking Age you get, the inscriptions start getting a bit longer, so you'll have quite a lot of names. At the bare minimum, you'll have the person who commissioned the monument, interestingly is almost always mentioned. So it's not just about commemorating the dead. It's also about the people remembering the dead, and they want to be involved as well, then the dead person. So those two are normally the minimum.

But then you can have more than one person commissioning the monument, or you could be commemorating more than one dead person. In a few instances, you actually give people's genealogies and tell us a little bit more about who their parents were or who their children were. And then the really exciting ones, especially in the late Viking age, tell us something about what the dead person did,

which very often involved travelling on Viking expeditions either to the West or to the East. And there's one chap who went both West and East, which I think is amazing. Yeah, it's great, isn't it? Because you actually get that little tiny little biography of their lives. But can you say anything more about those travels? And I know I'm particularly interested in the Eastern Viking world, as I've written about in my book, River Kings, these journeys east. And actually, the run stones, especially those from Sweden, are quite a good source of knowledge, aren't they, for those journeys east. Can you tell us a bit more about some of those travels? Yes. Some of them just say he went to the east or he died in the east, and the east could be all kinds of things. But others are more specific, so that they talk about he went to the Greeks, which means basically Byzantium, as we know it, or to Gardariki, or to Gardarvar, which is basically Russia and. the rivers that you're interested in in that part of the world. So these people were voyaging

down those rivers. Several of them were almost certainly involved in the Byzantine Emperor's Varangian Guard and working as mercenaries there. And then there are the inscriptions, as well as these stones in Sweden, they're the inscriptions that they made on their travels. And there's three really amazing examples. One is a little rune stone from Beredazai. which is a small island in the Black Sea. The person commissioning the monument records the death of his Fjelagi, which is a word meaning like a trading partner or some kind of partner. They made a little stone in the Swedish style,

but it was there found on this island. It's now in the museum in Odessa. There's a copy in Stockholm. That's one wonderful example. The next wonderful example, or the next two are both instances of graffiti, in fact, I believe you've seen the ones in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Yes, that's an amazing example. Which was the Hagia Sophia Church,

and in the marble balustrade there, a guy called Halfdan and one or two others have just literally said basically Halfdan was here. Maybe they were forced to attend a church service or something, I'm getting a bit bored, I don't know. But my absolutely favorite one is, today is in Venice. It's a marble lion outside the arsenal. in Venice. This marble lion was originally in Piraeus, which is the harbor of Athens,

and at some point a bunch of Swedes arrived. And the lion itself is from about the second century, I believe, but these Swedes came along and they didn't just write their names on, you know, saying Thorstein was here or whatever. They actually carved what is basically a Swedish runestone on the flanks of this lion. So the round flank of the lion has this serpentine design, like you have on Swedish runestones and with a very long inscription, which has only recently been fully interpreted by Torgon Snydahl, a Swedish-Islandic runologist.

And you can actually compare the design of this inscription with runestones back in Sweden. They're almost identical. So you can say where in Sweden, these particular Swedes, who were in that part of the world at the time came from. That's just such fantastic bit of evidence, isn't it? Because we get a lot of this from the start,

which are a later fictional or semi-fictional accounts, and we never quite know how true they are, but actually to have that very physical evidence is fantastic. Okay, so there's one question I do need to ask though, because a lot of people tend to associate runes with magic, and there's a pretty common conception that runes had magical powers, or they were used for magic purposes, and certainly if you Google Roons today,

then that's probably what you're going to find on the internet. Is there any truth to that at all? Well, you said two different things. No, runes don't have magical powers, but yes, runes could be used for magical purposes. And as I said earlier, runes are a form of writing, and if your magical purposes require writing,

then you use runes, especially in the period when you don't know any other form of writing. So up until the 11th century or so, runes were the only form of writing available to the Scandinavian. So if they were going to do magic that required writing, they used rungs. So it's not that the runes themselves are in any way magical. And the surviving evidence suggests that although magic may have been a small part of what runes were used for, it's a very small part. The vast majority of runic inscriptions have much more mundane purposes.

But yes, you know, if you write abracadabra on a piece of paper, it doesn't make the English alphabet magic, it just means you're writing abracadabre using the alphabet you've got to hand. That's a very good comparison. Do we get quite a few contemporary insights then into beliefs, to religious beliefs, and things like the use of magic from the ruins? Yes, obviously. There's a surprisingly small number of inscriptions that actually mention the pagan gods, but we do have a few references to Thor in particular in some runic inscriptions. but if you look at religion more generally, the interesting thing is that the Swedish runestones of the 11th century, which is late Viking age as far as I'm concerned, the vast majority of them are quite clearly Christian. Either they have a Christian prayer on them or there's a cross or there's some other reference to Christianity.

And that's interesting as well because this is a period of time before the church is really fully established in Scandinavia. So again, the Rooney conscriptions are, in some ways, some of our earliest evidence for Christian organization, Christian beliefs in Scandinavia at the time. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belethkeith to Shakespeare, Mogul India to the Mayflower. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so some of these larger run stones and these inscriptions are clearly quite expensive and quite sort of big monuments, really. They, I suppose, give us one part of society, but I want to sort of try and bring it back into some of the sort of small and more sort of everyday things. We briefly mentioned earlier some of these runsticks and some of these smaller descriptions.

So this is one particular discovery from Bergen in Norway made in the 1950s of a lot of these. Can you tell us more about that? I can do, although just before I do that, I want to get on to the idea that run stones are expensive. Yes, most of them are extremely expensive because you have to hire someone who can carve the stone and someone who knows ruins and they might have been painted as well and so on and so forth. But a runologist like to make a distinction between expensive runestones and cheap runstones. Okay. So there's a one option, was that? There was an option.

There are small ones as well, which are obviously much cheaper. and some where people probably tried to make them themselves instead of hiring a professional and did a sort of botched job. So actually, even runestones have a kind of broader level of society represented in them, including lots of women, which I feel I should mention. But you're quite right that what we get in the medieval period and very obvious, particularly at the site of the excavations in the wharf, the Brighen Wharf in Bergen in Norway, is an insight into kind of everyday uses of ruins by all kinds of different people. So we have around 700 objects, the vast majority being small wooden sticks,

which were found in the archaeological excavations that took place at Bruggen, which is the harbour area of Bergen in Norway, after a big fire, which was in the 1950s, and the excavations went on for some time, and because it's very waterlogged there, the wood was well preserved. So we have these very large number of objects mainly from the late 11th to the 14th century. So those were sort of items that were lost, just sort of everyday things, weren't they? Yes, most of them, because these are what we might call ephemeral inscriptions that you wanted to write something for whatever reason.

Most people carried a knife. There's plenty of trees in Norway, plenty of bits of wood around. You picked up a little piece of wood, you carved your message. if you wanted to send someone a message or if you just wanted to write an ed memoir to yourself, or if you wanted to mark the goods that you were trading with your name, and then these being small pieces of wood, if you no longer needed them, you just threw them on the fire, but we're lucky that not all of them were thrown on the fire and some of them were lost. And then there are various other objects as well found, but the majority are these sticks of wood.

So some of them will just be really quite boring and mundane. but there were some quite interesting messages on some of those, weren't they? Could you give us some examples of them? Okay, as you say, the boring and mundane ones, a large proportion of them just consist of personal names, but often accompanied by the verb owns, so so-and-so owns, when this suggests trade,

and these are thought to be ownership markers for whatever objects or commodities people were trading. So if, you know, at the market, there might be different people selling the same thing. and then the stick would identify who the seller was. Some of them do seem to reflect messages that people were sending to each other from the sublime to the ridiculous. So sublime ones include long messages about political shenanigans,

you know, don't tell so and so I said this and so on and so forth. There are relatively few of those, but they're very interesting. And then there's the ridiculous, a nice example, which is most, commonly mentioned and it really is good. It's found on the site that the archaeologists identified as a tavern and this little stick of wood that says Giza, which is a woman's name, Giza says you should go home. So you can just imagine the wife sitting at home while the husband is in the pub. And did she write it? Does this suggest that women could write, for example? That's an interesting question. So that's a nice example. And then there's quite a few,

which I daren't even tell you about is this is presumably a family show. So if you want to know what the F word is in Old Norse, then there's plenty of evidence from these inscriptions. Yeah, I'm sure people can Google this and find out if they want to know for themselves, yeah. But there's also more romantic ones. There's one that's actually got a little bit of poetry on it, where the guy admits that he's in love with another man's wife, and then he says his love is hotter than fire in a very poetic way.

So these are lovely because they give us actual real insights into people's lives and their minds, don't they? And I mean, they would sound almost a bit like text messages that you would write or emails. Yes, that's the comparison that's made. Yes, I think so. Just the spontaneous expression. And unlike many other written texts from the Middle Ages, these are, you know, the person writing is the person who's had the thought. So it hasn't been through this process of a scribe copying a text, for example. So you have literally in your hands, well, you're not really allowed to touch them much, but you can have in your hands an object that somebody,

800 years ago, had a thought, wanted to write it down, and you can connect directly with that person. That's just so wonderful. And what do we know about where people in general literate? Do we know roughly how many people could sort of, in a population, could likely understand Bruins? It's very hard to say. What some of the Brighen inscriptions do show,

though is people learning to write runes. So you have some inscriptions quite a lot with the runic alphabet on them. Now why would you write an alphabet on a piece of wood? Well, there was a time when people said, oh yes, it must be magic. A much more likely explanation seems well, especially since we have examples,

many of these wooden sticks are quadrilateral, so you can write on four sides of the stick. And you have one where there's quite a nice runic alphabet written on one side, and then you turn it, and there's a less competent runic alphabet written on the next side, which looks very much like someone practicing. The teacher's written it out and then the student is writing the runes trying to copy the teacher's

hand. That's really lovely. So they do continue into what we call sort of later middle ages or middle ages if you're working in Scandinavia. So presumably at one point you then have both this and other alphabets and other scripts. Is there anything to do with who is using which or for different purposes or why do they persist even among their other alphabots also in their customs? I think partly there's a kind of answer to your previous question in the fact that they do persist, which suggests that knowledge of ruins was quite common and it just didn't die out and it was useful because you could write on sticks of wood. Whereas to write using the new Roman alphabet, you had to kill a cow to make the parchment for the manuscript. You had to find

a feather, you had to find the right plants to make ink out of, and then you had to be trained in that form of writing. And we do know that people who were learned at the time did use both runes and the Roman alphabet. So we have in the stave churches of Norway graffiti in them, some of them in the part of the church where the congregation stood, but some of them up in the part where only the priest was up near the altar. So we do find probably priests were also writing graffiti on their own churches. At the same time, some of the Bergen runsticks are actually in Latin. Well, Latin in Latin. Almost everyone could write Ave Maria. You know, you don't need a lot of Latin to be able to write that, and there's quite a lot of that kind of thing. But there's also a whole

texts in Latin, particularly from the Carmena Barana, so people who knew these Latin songs were writing them down. And writing Latin, the Lord's Prayer, for example, also occurs in a way that gives us an idea of how they must have pronounced Latin because they're using the runic alphabet the way they would have used it to write Old Norse to write Latin. Oh great. So you're actually getting that insight into the spoken language from this as well. Yes, yes. That's fantastic. So in relation to this also, in the material found in Bergen with those runsticks, there was also some other materials weren't there that had runic inscriptions. In fact,

some shoes. Yes. At least two pairs of shoes have been found with runes embroidered. on them. So obviously mainly for decorative purposes, and what's interesting, not only that the runes are embroidered, because that's quite unusual, but also that the runes represent a Latin text, which is armor vinket, omnia, love conquers all. It's a common phrase well known in the period. So maybe even a gift. You know, you can imagine someone giving a gift to their beloved with a nice little message, but assuming that the beloved or the person buying these shoes new enough Latin to understand Amor of Inket Omnia. That's amazing.

But it's quite unique as well. I mean, we don't really get, I mean, obviously now sitting here actually today wearing a t-shirt with a slogan on it, but to think that you've got medieval examples of that very same thing, that's incredible. And that must be pretty unique. Yeah, no, I think it's human. Years ago, former colleague, now dead Ray Page, who wrote a nice little book about Rooms. he pointed out that you can buy bath mats that say bath mat on them.

And there are combs found, for example, that say comb. So if you're sitting around, you know, those long winter nights and they didn't have Netflix to amuse themselves with, you'd probably sit around. And if you just learned how to write rooms, why not scroll something on the nearest object to hand? Yes. And I think that's things like that inscription in a sense. Istanbul in Hagueosophia is, it's so human to scratch your name or to scratch something. And I guess that's what Rooms brings us that part of humanity that we might not get otherwise.

Absolutely. Okay, so we've talked quite a bit about these in Scandinavia and on the journey's east and all the way down to the Mediterranean. But we're based in Britain here now. Just to bring it back home a bit, can you tell us a little bit about how they were used in Britain? What's the material we have from Britain? Well, it's not a huge corpus, but it's really...

interestingly varied. And here in England, there are only at last count 19 or 20, depending on how you count from Scandinavian runic inscriptions. Of course, the English had their own runic alphabet, so that's a different matter entirely. But we do have Scandinavian runic inscriptions. Interestingly, not really from the earliest period of Viking settlement. That's why you're constantly looking, but not finding in your winter camps, any runic inscriptions. But a bit later on, And then into the 11th, 12th centuries, particularly in the northwest of England, we have some of these medieval inscriptions, which I think is interesting because it shows continuing contact with either people still speaking old-nors using runes into the 12th century or people in contact with Scandinavia. It's hard to say exactly which. the most amazing body of Scandinavian runic inscriptions in Britain is actually the runestones of the Isle of Man,

which are from the core Viking age, so the 10th, possibly early 11th century, and there's 30 odd of them commemorating the dead. And they're very interesting hybrid monuments, which have runic texts with Scandinavian runes, Scandinavian language, mostly Scandinavian personal names, but also some Celtic personal names, Scandinavian iconography, but they're clearly a local product, they're made of local stone. The dating is a bit difficult, but they actually seem to be earlier than similar monuments in Norway in particular, and therefore there's an interesting question of, you know, we've kind of always assumed that the people in the Isle of Man came originally from Norway, probably via the Northern Isles. That's a long, complicated question, but you can go to the Isle of Man and happily

spent several days looking at these wonderful Viking Age monuments. And then, of course, we have some inscriptions in Ireland, mainly small objects found in the Dublin excavations. And then we have inscriptions in Scotland, particularly in Northern Scotland and particularly in Orkney. And the most famous examples there are the graffiti in the prehistoric chamber tomb of Mays Howe, which are from the 12th century and actually are probably made by visiting Norwegians and Icelanders rather than the Orcadians, although there's a bit of both involved there. And again, they're mainly names, but the F word appears again, and they're almost certainly made by a group of people who'd been to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage

in the middle of the 12th century. And when they came back, several of them mentioned the fact that they were Jerusalem men, people who'd been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. So they were, as well as just being graffiti, there was essentially as a way of showing off what they've done and where they'd been

and leaving some evidence of that. Yes, absolutely. And joking as well. Vikings always had a sense of humour. So there is a tradition in Scandinavia breaking into burial mounds and finding treasure. And this one, there almost certainly was not any treasurer. when they broke into it. So there's lots of jokes about who stole the treasure or where is the

treasure hidden. There's no treasure here. That's incredible. I love that. It's just that really, really human, you know, these boys, presumably they were men or boys who'd been away on missions coming back, breaking in somewhere and leaving graffiti and making jokes about it. I think that's fantastic. But this final one, though, having sort of brought up with these men or women, and you mentioned briefly earlier on that some of these stones mention women, what can runes tell us about women? Are there sources that tell us about women in the Viking Age? Well, different run stones tell different stories. In Scandinavia, the majority of the memorial stones are commissioned by men in memory of men. Most often sons commemorating their fathers,

but sometimes mothers get involved. There's a small number where women are the commissioners. You're, I'm sure, very familiar with it, the most wonderful stone in Norway, the Duna stone, in which a mother commemorates her daughter for being the handiest maiden in Haudeland, which we think might refer to embroidery or something like that. Anyway, she's, you know, it's a good girl. She could use her hands very well. The Isle of Man, I mean, although the name of the Isle of Man

doesn't actually mean men, paradoxically, a very high proportion of the monuments there commemorate women. There's a wonderful one there in which a foster son commemorates his foster mother and actually it ends with a sort of proverb, it's better to leave a good foster son than a bad son. Excellent. These are just fantastic examples.

And again, it's that humanity, isn't it? The fact, you know, people have these family relationships that might be a bit complicated and want to commemorate them. Brilliant. Judith, thank you so much for coming and sharing all that information with us. It was great to talk to you, Kat. And I've only really scratched the surface. There's so much more that could be said about runes. and there's some good books out there, so people should go out and read some of them.

Yes, absolutely. Have a look at some of Judy's Works Online, and you can start from there on. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. This has been Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and we will be back very soon with another episode.