IN 1898, IN the rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, USA, a farmer found a stone slab. The farmer was Olof Ohman, a Swedish-American who had just taken over an 80-acre stretch of land and was clearing it, ready for ploughing. The stone was lying face down and tangled up in the root system of a poplar tree. Ohman’s ten-year-old son, Edward, noticed some markings on the stone which Ohman thought were an ‘Indian almanac’.
Before I go any further with this story, I should say that pretty nearly everything I’ve written so far has been disputed. The stone may have been found in August or November, right after lunch or at the end of work in the evening. Olof and Edward may have found the stone on their own; they may have been with two workmen; they may have been with neighbour Nils Flaten.
The stone was taken to the nearby town of Kensington and transcriptions of the carvings were sent to a regional Scandinavian-language newspaper. Soon after it was found, the stone was displayed at a local bank. Within months it had caused a worldwide stir, the reason being that the carvings on the stones were runes, the alphabet used by the Vikings.
The inscription, when translated reads:
8 Götalanders [people from what is now southern Sweden] and 22 Northmen [Norwegians] on an exploration journey from Vinland westward. We had one camp by 2 rocky islets one day’s journey north of this stone. We were out fishing one day. When we came home we found 10 men red with blood and dead. AVM save us from evil. We have 10 men by the sea to look after our ships, 14 days journey from this island. Year 1362.
Here seemed to be proof positive that the Vikings had not only made it to the fringes of the North American continent (Vinland), they had ventured hundreds of miles inland. And it was written in the alphabet associated with the ancient peoples of Scandinavia. The stone is on display at the Runestone Museum, located in downtown Alexandria, Minnesota. Near by at Fort Alexandria you can see a forty-foot Viking ship, the Snorri, and you can have your picture taken next to the ‘country’s biggest Viking’. Many local businesses use the ‘Kensington Runestone’ or the Vikings as part of their branding, and the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings owe their name to the Runestone. The only problem with this scenario is that most academic ‘runologists’ think it’s a hoax.
The runic alphabets are made up of beautiful, angular letters, each of which has a name, referring to an object, and a sound based on the initial letter of that name. If you were reciting, by name of object, one of the oldest forms of the runic alphabet, you would start off by saying: ‘fehu, uruz, thurisaz, ansuz, raidof, cen’ (meaning, in order: ‘money’ (or ‘cattle’), ‘ox’, ‘giant’ (or ‘monster’), ‘god’, ‘riding’ and ‘torch’). If you were reciting it by letter sound, you would say, ‘f’, ‘u’, ‘th’, ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘k’ – and those letters give the name to the oldest runic alphabet, ‘Elderfuthark’.
Purely in terms of the history of the Roman alphabet used by people living in Britain, one reason why runes get mentioned is that the earliest manuscripts written in the Anglo-Saxon or Old English version of the Roman alphabet contained two letters derived directly from the runic letters ‘thorn’ and ‘wynn’, and two ‘ligatures’ (letters tied together), ‘ash’ and ‘ethel’, which used Roman letters but were the equivalent of runes (see ‘D is for Disappeared Letters’). However, these four letters did not get into the Anglo-Saxon version of the Roman alphabet via the Vikings. To get a picture of what happened, I’ll attempt a quick rundown of who went where and when.
In spite of many modifications and caveats, the sequence of the settlement of the British Isles just about hangs together: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. That’s how we drew it at school: a map of the British Isles with big arrows pointing towards it from different parts of Europe, each arrow filled with the name of the invaders and the dates they arrived – and, in the case of the Romans, the date they left.
The many complications to this nice map include the following (not in order of importance):
a) the Celts not being one people – they arrived in many waves from different places;
b) the Romans not being all Roman – it was Roman policy to station people as far away from their original home as possible as it cut down on rebellions, but some ‘Romans’ who came as part of their Empire’s settlement may have stayed;
c) the Germanic peoples who arrived, usually called the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, were, yes, Angles (from Schleswig-Holstein) and Saxons (from Lower Saxony), but they were also Jutes (from Jutland), Franks (from the Rhine) and Frisians (from coastal north Holland);
d) they may well have started arriving before the Romans packed their bags and left in AD 410;
e) some peoples who arrived in England, like the Belgae, may well be better described as Celto-Germanic;
f) the Scandinavian Vikings did indeed set out from what is now Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway but they may well have started arriving while the Anglo-Saxons and their pals were arriving too;
g) the Normans came from Normandy, speaking a form of Old French, but as a people they originated from a Viking settlement;
h) either under duress or willingly, any or all of these peoples, to a greater or lesser degree, intermarried;
i) any or all of these peoples shared, borrowed and merged their ways of speaking and writing;
j) as a rough guide we can say that literate pre-Christian ‘Anglo-Saxons’ used runes. They encountered Latin through Christianity and thereafter amalgamated a few adapted runes into the Latin/Roman alphabet.
Two further examples of sharing: the runic inscriptions found on the Isle of Man show that people with Celtic names and people with Scandinavian names (Vikings) were intermarrying from the tenth century onwards. The modern English word ‘wicket’ probably came from a Norman-French word, which had originally come from a Norse word. This is not evidence that cricket was invented by the Vikings.
So, though life and history would be much simpler if it were more like the maps we drew in my first year at grammar school in 1957, for archaeologists and linguists, it’s much more complex – and three cheers for that.
The vikings arrived speaking what’s known as Old Norse, though they didn’t say, ‘We speak Old Norse.’
They ended up occupying what we now call ‘the North’ of England plus East Anglia, Pembrokeshire, the Scottish islands and the Orkneys, the north and east coasts of Scotland, and the south-east corner of Ireland. It’s almost certain they did get to the North American continent – Kensington Runestone or not – and it’s completely certain that they got to Turkey and into the Arab-speaking lands of the Middle East.
Anyone who speaks, reads or writes English cannot avoid talking Viking. Words of Old Norse origin are everywhere. If you read this list aloud, it’s almost a free-verse poem about the effect the Norse-speaking peoples had on those around them in Britain:
Anger, bag, bask, birth, blunder,
both, bull, cake,
call, choose, clip,
club, die, dirt, dregs, egg, fellow, flat, fog,
freckle, gap, get, gift, haggle, hit, how,
husband, ill, knife, knot, law, leg, loose,
low, mistake, muck, muggy, odd, outlaw, raise,
ransack, rid, rotten, rugged, run, same, scare,
scarf, score, seat, seem, shape, skid, skill,
skin, skip, skirt, skull, sky, sly, snare,
snub, sprint, stagger, sway, take, their, they,
though, tight, trust, ugly, until, want, weak,
whisk, window, wing,
wrong.
The patterning of the alphabet on a page of English writing would look fundamentally different if the Vikings had decided to give the British Isles a miss. No ‘take’ or ‘get’. No ‘their’, ‘them’ or ‘they’. No ‘window’ which holds within it the beautiful metaphor ‘wind-eye’. No ‘egg’. No ‘sky’. Indeed that ‘sk’ combination would hardly have reached Britain. Of course, it goes without saying, there were non-Norse ways of saying these things and we have ways of saying them with words of French origin or from many other places which have influenced speakers of English.
This is a risky thing to state, but it seems as if the Scandinavians who arrived in the British Isles were not particularly literate. However, we can be fairly certain that they were storytellers and poets.
Those Vikings who wrote, wrote in runes. Depending on their age, their alphabets are called ‘Elder’ or ‘Younger Futhark’. At the point at which the Germanic peoples (Frisians, Jutes, Saxons, Angles, Franks) first started arriving they wrote in runes too. Their alphabet is called ‘Futhorc’. What has survived of this kind of writing is found on clay pots, metal swords, amulets, and brooches, on bone, stone and occasionally on wood where it has been preserved in airless mud. The British Isles represent a site in which a spectrum of different kinds of runic writing meets over a period of some eight hundred years. Beyond saying that, the runic field is clogged with debate and disagreement. The First Law of Thermodynamics concerns heat and energy. According to the runologist D. M. Wilson, the First Law of Runo-Dynamics states that ‘for every inscription there shall be as many interpretations as there are scholars working on it.’
Even so, the subject is worth more than a glimpse. It may seem strange, but at the height of the 1960s, with the air full of protest and revolt, civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, I found myself being excited by something utterly distant and different from Martin Luther King, the Tet Offensive and Wenceslas Square. It was the extraordinary tally between, on the one hand, a mystical Old English poem about the Crucifixion, found on a manuscript in a library in Vercelli in northern Italy, and, on the other, a runic inscription on a stone cross in a church in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. The poem is called ‘The Dream of the Rood’ and a narrator talks of his dream of the Cross; the Cross itself tells the story of the Crucifixion; the narrator reflects on what he has heard. Written in Anglo-Saxon runes on the fragments of the Ruthwell Cross is a text that overlaps with what is written on the manuscript in Italy: ‘I raised up a great king, lord of heaven. I dared not bow down. Men reviled us both together. I was drenched in blood.’ And it continues.
Quite apart from the power of personification which I have always enjoyed in poetry, I was drawn to the idea of a line between Vercelli and Ruthwell, at a time when travel was so precarious and time-consuming; a trade route of ideas and feelings preserved by chance in these objects tucked away in libraries or in inscriptions in rural places. In fact, in this case, it was the stone that was more at risk than the parchment manuscript, as seventeenth-century Puritans identified the cross as idolatrous and smashed it up.
The Viking runes in the British Isles are often quite simple: ‘A good comb Thorfastr made’, ‘Dolfin wrote these runes on this stone’, or ‘Ginna and Tóki had this stone laid’. On a font in Cumbria there’s a poem:
Richard, he me wrought
and me, to this splendour, brought.
On a cross at Kirk Michael, on the Isle of Man, it says: ‘It is better to leave a good foster-son than a bad son.’
A vision of the popular culture of Viking warriors comes from some graffiti they scratched on the walls of a prehistoric stone grave-chamber at Maeshowe in the Orkneys, where they sheltered or held their meetings:
‘Úframr Sigur∂arsonr cut these runes’
‘Ingibjorg the lovely widow’
‘It’s true what I say, the treasure was moved out of here. The treasure was taken away three days before they broke into the mound.’
‘Happy the man who can find the great treasure’
‘Thorni f****d. Helgi carved.’
R. I. Page, who died in 2012, was regarded as the world’s greatest expert on runes. He wrote about these graffiti, pointing out that one of them was ‘an inscription I would like to have cut myself: “The man who wrote these runes knows more about runes than anyone else west of the sea.”’
Page divided runologists into two categories: the imaginative and the unimaginative. Unless an interpretation could be proven, he would declare he was an unimaginative runologist and clearly liked it that way. With barely concealed scorn, he stepped round the New Age enthusiasts who have found comfort in the pagan knowledge expressed through runes. Of the Kensington Runestone, he wrote: ‘It is a stirring story, with the sort of detail about Norsemen in midwest America that is not recorded anywhere else. Only the unimaginative runologist will fail to be impressed, but I have already declared myself an unimaginative runologist.’