Who could actually read runes?

The popular image is of a small caste of rune-masters guarding esoteric knowledge. The Bryggen finds from Bergen make that hard to sustain for the medieval period at least: hundreds of runic messages on wood, many of them trivial, several of them badly spelled, a few of them practice attempts by people clearly learning.

What the Bergen sticks show

Ordinary people wrote ordinary things. Merchants tagged goods with owners' names. Someone wrote out the opening of a Latin prayer. Somebody carved a line of Virgil. Someone else carved an obscene boast. There are business letters, and there is at least one message that reads like a note left for a spouse.

This is not the output of a secretive priesthood. It is the output of a town where a useful number of people could write, using the script they had, on the material that came to hand.

Earlier periods are harder to judge

The Elder Futhark corpus is small (fewer than four hundred inscriptions across six centuries and a very wide area) and heavily weighted towards valuable objects: gold bracteates, weapons, fine brooches. That distribution could mean literacy was confined to an elite. It could equally mean that gold survives and wood does not.

The Viking Age is easier, and the evidence is the carvers themselves. Eleventh-century Uppland had professional rune-cutters who signed their monuments: Öpir signed around fifty, Åsmund Kåresson about twenty, Balle twenty-four. That means a paying market for inscribed stone and an audience able to make something of it. See signed runestones.

The erilaʀ problem

Several early inscriptions contain the word erilaʀ, usually in a formula like ek erilaʀ, "I, the erilaʀ". The Lindholm amulet and the Kragehul spear shaft both have it. The word is often translated "rune-master" and taken as evidence for a specialist role.

It may well indicate one. But the translation is a reconstruction: the word's exact sense is not recorded anywhere, and it has also been connected to a tribal name and to a term of rank. Building a picture of a priestly caste on it is building on an uncertain foundation.

Women and runes

Runestones name women as commissioners, as the people commemorated, and occasionally as carvers. The Hillersjö stone in Uppland sets out a complicated inheritance passing through a woman named Geirlaug, which is both a legal document and a family history. Assuming runic writing was exclusively male is not supported by the inscriptions.

Runes and the Church

One of the more persistent modern ideas is that runes were a pagan script suppressed by Christianity. The evidence points the other way. The Ruthwell Cross carries Christian verse in runes. The Jelling stone announces the conversion of the Danes in runes. Bergen produced runic prayers in Latin. Christian and runic writing coexisted for centuries, and the medieval period, the most Christian, produced the most runic material of all.