Medieval runes and runic calendars: the long life of a script

“Gyða tells you to go home.” The message, carved on a wooden stick, was found in Bergen, Norway, among the remains of the harbour district of Bryggen. It is neither a heroic inscription nor a spell, but a domestic note. Evidence like this shows that in the Christian Middle Ages the runes did not disappear at all: on the contrary, they became an everyday script, used alongside the Latin alphabet by merchants, craftsmen and clerics.

The medieval runic alphabet

From the eleventh century onwards the sixteen-sign Younger Futhark was supplemented by dotted runes, that is, runes with an added dot or small stroke, which served to distinguish sounds previously confused: e from i, g from k, d from t. The result was a system closer to the Latin alphabet, so much so that some arranged it like the abecedary of the manuscripts. Scholars call it the medieval runic alphabet or medieval futhork.

One of its most remarkable witnesses is the Codex Runicus, a parchment manuscript of around 1300 containing the law of Scania, then Danish, written entirely in runes. It is now kept in Copenhagen. It is a rare example of runes used on parchment for a long, official text, almost a learned tribute to a script felt to be national.

The Bryggen sticks

After a fire in 1955 destroyed part of the Bryggen houses, archaeological excavations brought to light hundreds of objects with runic inscriptions, mostly wooden sticks dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Among them are ownership tags to be tied to goods, business letters, Latin prayers, love verses, proverbs and even jokes. A unique heritage for understanding the life of a medieval Scandinavian town.

These texts show that in Bergen runes were known to many people, not only to specialists. Their simple form, suited to knife and wood, made them convenient for quick messages, while parchment and ink remained expensive and tied to the Church and the court. Some sticks carry the whole runic row, perhaps as an exercise.

The calendar on a stick

The field in which runes survived longest was the calendar. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia people used perpetual calendars carved on staves, boards or wooden discs, called runstav in Swedish and primstav in Norwegian. Seven runes, repeated throughout the year, marked the days of the week, like the dominical letters of church calendars. Another nineteen runes marked the golden number, used to calculate the phases of the moon and the date of Easter.

Since the Younger Futhark had only sixteen signs, three special runes were added to reach nineteen, known by names such as árlaugr, tvímaðr and belgþór. Pictorial symbols marked saints' feasts and farming deadlines. The Danish physician and antiquary Ole Worm described these calendars in his work Fasti Danici, published in 1626.

Staves of this kind were used in the countryside until the eighteenth and sometimes the nineteenth century, and in the Swedish region of Dalarna a local form of runic writing, the so-called Dalecarlian runes, survived for a long time. The medieval and modern history of the runes thus disproves the idea that they were merely magical signs of the heathens: for centuries they were a practical tool in the service of work and time.