In October, Professor Judith Jesch of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age led a group of 20 runologists from Scandinavia, Britain and Germany to study Orkney’s ...

Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic. The original is here. Why did Vikings sometimes use codes when they wrote in runes? Were the messages secret, or did they have ...

"Kiss me," reads this message, written in cipher runes on a piece of bone found in Sigtuna. Photo: Jonas Nordby More than 900 years ago, Vikings used coded runes to send frivolous romantic messages to ...

People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought. In runic writing systems, each ...

Archaeologists in Denmark have uncovered two objects with rare Viking runic inscriptions dating to around 800 CE, during excavations in Ribe – the country's oldest town. The new discoveries shed light ...

A stone tool used to sharpen Vikings' blades has been found engraved with rare runes. Experts believe mysterious symbols on a chunk of slate are evidence of an practice attempt to carve a name or ...

We all know which star sign we were born under. With its 12 signs of the zodiac, conventional astrology has long dominated our reading of the heavens above. But what if other cultures had different ...

Archaeologists in Norway have uncovered what might be the oldest known rune stone, pushing back the origins of runic writing ...