It was a kind of competition in the art of rune making. “People challenged one another with codes. #Celtic runes codeThis makes it hard to figure out which runic letter the code refers to. The problem is that many runes end in the same sound. For example, the rune for the letter U is called “urr” so it is encoded with the rune for R. Nordby thinks the Vikings memorised rune names with the help of the jötunvillur code.Īll runes have names, and the jötunvillur code works by exchanging the rune sign with the last sound in the rune’s name. This is why he has considered other possible uses for the code. It would be pointless to use it for messages,” says Nordby. “Jötunvillur can only be written, not read. One of the reasons for his claim is that the jötunvillur code is written in a way that makes the interpretation ambiguous. “A typical bunch of male adolescents were fooling around and wrote tall tales about treasures and their own sexual prowess,” says Runologist Jonas Nordby. It was found in a burial chamber from the early Stone Age that Scandinavians broke into in the 1100s on the Orkney Islands. The inscription is in cipher runes and in regular runes. “These runes were carved by the most rune-literate man west of the sea,” bragged the author of this text. But I think the codes were used in play and for learning runes, rather than to communicate,” says Nordby. “Many think the Vikings used cryptography to conceal secret messages. The use of runic codes was imaginative, but not mysterious enough for a Hollywood blockbuster. His PhD research has taken him to several countries to analyse runic inscriptions dating back as far as 800 AD. Nordby is the first person to study all the findings of runic codes in Northern Europe, around 80 inscriptions. There were no rune schools then but knowledge of this alphabet could be transferred from generation to generation by linking it to games, poetry, drills and codes, Nordby says. The use of the code as a tool in learning is not as odd as it might seem. The code is in cipher runes, the most common code known from medieval Scandinavia. A rather forthright message written in code: “Kiss me” is etched into a piece of bone found in Sigtuna in Sweden, dating to the 12th or 13th century.
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