Runic inscriptions

A single-edged iron knife inlaid with a complete 28-rune futhorc row and the name Beagnoth. It is the fullest runic alphabet surviving on an object rather than in a manuscript, and its middle is visibly out of order.

The oldest complete futhark row known, and the reason we can speak of a traditional runic order at all. It was cut on the underside of a slab sealing a grave, facing the body, where nobody could read it.

A small whalebone chest carved with scenes from Germanic legend, Roman history and the Gospels, captioned in Old English runes and in Latin. The single richest futhorc object there is.

Not an object but a class of witness: rows of the futhorc copied into manuscripts by scholars, with the rune names written out. They are where the English rune names actually come from, and they are writing about runes, not writing in them.

A tall stone cross carrying Christian verse in runes, corresponding to passages of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. Decisive evidence that runes and Christianity coexisted.

Four objects that carry a futhark row, cited all over this site and until now with nowhere to go: the Mariedamm and Grumpan bracteates, the Breza column and the Charnay fibula. Between them they outvote the Kylver stone on the order of the alphabet.

A gold pendant carrying the futhark divided by dots into three groups of eight. It is the earliest direct evidence that the alphabet had ættir, and it was stolen from a museum in 1938 and has not been seen since.

A tall standing stone from the transitional period carrying a curse against anyone who damages the monument, one of the clearest cases of runic writing used to threaten rather than to record.

Around 670 runic inscriptions on wood and bone from the Bergen wharf: business notes, name tags, love letters, obscenities, prayers and school exercises. The largest runic find of the twentieth century, and the best evidence we have for ordinary runic literacy.

Raised by Harald Bluetooth for his parents, recording his rule over Denmark and Norway and his conversion of the Danes. Often called Denmark’s birth certificate.

The longest runic inscription there is: around 760 runes across several faces, using ordinary Younger Futhark, deliberately archaic older runes, and several cipher systems in one monument. What it means is still argued over.

One of around thirty Swedish stones commemorating men lost on Ingvar’s expedition east. It ends in verse: they fed the eagle far in the east, and died in the south in Serkland.

The only runestone carrying a complete skaldic stanza in dróttkvætt, the most technically demanding metre of the age. Evidence that runic writing could handle far more than memorial formulas.

A carved piece of bone shaped like a rib, cut from a Skåne peat bog. It names an erilaʀ, then runs eight a-runes together and closes with alu: the clearest surviving case of runes doing something other than spelling words.

A piece of human skull, cut with a hole for wearing and covered in runes. It is probably the oldest surviving text in a younger futhark, and it was written while the alphabet was still losing runes: two of its characters are the old Elder Futhark shapes.

A transitional-period stone combining an apparent gift of a good harvest with a curse. It may also carry the clearest case in the whole corpus of a rune used ideographically, standing for its own name.

A small gold pendant from Suffolk carrying three words, one of which nobody can explain. It is the earliest inscription that can be argued to use the futhorc rather than the Elder Futhark, which makes it the object the Anglo-Frisian origin question turns on.

A piece of yew from a Frisian terp carrying 41 characters: the longest runic text in the Frisian corpus, and the object behind a claim about the rune stan that does not survive contact with it.

A miniature yew-wood sword reading edæboda. Frisian rather than English, and one of the objects that make the futhorc a two-country alphabet.

A roe-deer ankle bone carrying one word, from a cremation urn in Norfolk. It is the oldest runic object found in England, and it is not written in the English alphabet, which is the whole point of it.

A parchment book of 202 pages written from beginning to end in medieval runes. It is the standing exception to the claim that runic writing never carried long texts, and, as most specialists read it, an antiquarian gesture rather than ordinary practice.

The longest inscription in the older futhark: around 200 runes on the underside of a grave slab, describing a funeral rite and warning off the wrong kind of visitor. Almost none of it is securely translated.

Two gold drinking horns, one of them carrying the best-known complete sentence in the Elder Futhark. Both were stolen and melted down in 1802, and everything known about them comes from drawings.

An unusually long inscription setting out a complicated inheritance passing through a woman, Geirlaug. Evidence that runestones did real legal work rather than only commemorating the dead.

A wooden spear shaft from a Danish weapon deposit, carrying a second erilaʀ formula and the sequence gagaga, a repeated rune-group that has been explained four different ways and settled none of them.

A small square copper plate carrying about 143 runes and an engraving of a fish. Among the clearest evidence anywhere that runes were used to ask for protection.

Around thirty runic inscriptions cut inside a Neolithic tomb by Norsemen who broke into it some four thousand years after it was built. It is the largest body of runic graffiti anywhere, and it reads like graffiti.

A silver brooch from a Bavarian cemetery carrying what appear to be three divine names, among the very few runic inscriptions that plainly name Germanic gods.

Three finger-rings carrying almost the same thirty-character runic formula, which is not Old English and does not mean anything. They are the best carved evidence for the late futhorc runes that manuscripts otherwise monopolise.

A memorial stone recording an inheritance divided among three daughters. It is one of the longest older-futhark texts (the Eggja stone is the only clearly longer one), and its reading has been argued over for more than a century.

A bone comb carrying one word in five runes. It is the oldest runic inscription anyone can put a date on, and it is already competently cut, which is a problem rather than a convenience.

A slab found in Minnesota in 1898, claiming to record a Scandinavian expedition in 1362. Runologists reject it essentially unanimously, and the grounds are linguistic rather than archaeological: the language is too modern by about five hundred years.

A brooch from Schleswig-Holstein carrying four punched characters, about a century older than any inscription accepted as runic. Whether they are runes at all has been argued since 1979, and that argument is the whole of its significance.