We may have been still scratching our heads over the meaning of the symbols unless we didn’t have the three medieval Rune Poems from Norway, Iceland, and England. They depicted and implied concepts connected with gods, nature, and mode of tribal life. Along with the ancient hieroglyphs, runes didn’t stand for certain letters but could be easily understood when joined into words. Pictures were the first way of passing words and meaning, and runic alphabet was one of the first systems of writing. The Ancient AlphabetĪs a result of collision with the tribes of northern Italy or the strong cultural influence of the Roman Empire, the ancient runes developed and turned into a separate alphabet from the 1 century A.D.Īppearance of the mysterious Viking symbols have several theories of origin starting with its affinity to Etruscan or Latin alphabet correspondingly mentioned above to supernatural Scandinavian version narrating how Odin Allfather in search for secret knowledge speared himself to the tree of life Yggdrasil and hung there for 9 days and nights to learn the runic language. The so-called victory runes placed on swords, shields and Viking ships brought the brave warriors luck in war and trade campaigns. The runic symbols were found carved on stones and graves, on the houses and utensils, on coins, jewelry, and weapon.

However, they used the runes for formal and informal writing. They didn’t write down their legends and epic sagas passing them orally through generations until they were recorded. According to the popular myth, Vikings were illiterate people, which is true and false at the same time.

Nordic rune dictionary huld manuscript