This was the Haraldr who won all of Denmark for himself and Norway, and made the Danes Christian.” King Haraldr ordered this monument to be made in memory of his farther Gormr and his mother Thorvi. There are also some inscriptions that people put up in their own honour – “at sik kvikvan” (in his own lifetime) or “eftir sik siálfan” (in honour of the man himself) and often commemorate great deeds that the person had done.Ī famous example of a memorial stone which also glorifies the person who commissioned the stone, is the great stone at Jelling, with its inscription: These were often memorials, commemorating those who died far from their homelands. A lot of the inscriptions come from the great rune-stones of the Viking period. The runic inscriptions can tell us something about the Vikings’ side of things. Most of our contemporary documentary sources were written by the enemies of the Vikings and naturally present a rather biased account.

Moreover, these inscriptions can contribute to our knowledge of Norse history. These changes can be traced from the various objects bearing runic inscriptions. 700 AD – was also a time of considerable change in the Scandinavian languages. The time when the new futhark was being developed – c. This of course means that many runic inscriptions can be very difficult to read and there can be a great deal of dispute about their true meaning.ĭespite the difficulties in reading runic inscriptions, they can provide a good deal of useful information. Therefore the name Thormundr appears as thurmutR. It becomes even more complicated, as the spelling practice allowed n to be omitted when it occurred before a consonant. This meant that the name “Svein” appears as in runes “suin” and the name “Gormr” appears as “kurmR”. There were other peculiarities: although there were two characters for the two different types of a, there were no symbols for e and o. Therefore the rune-master had to use b for p, k for g and t for d. For example, there are characters for b, k and t, but there are none for p, g and d (this is because the futhark does not distinguish between these voiced and voiceless pairs.

One can see that there are shortcomings with these alphabets. However, even within Scandinavia, there was no standard form for the characters and there are variations from inscription to inscription, but basically there were two main forms of futhark: the Common or Danish futhark (although it occurs outside of Denmark), and the Swedo-Norwegian futhark (although this also occurs outside of Sweden and Norway. This alphabet was known as the “younger futhark”. By the beginning of the Viking Age, the Scandinavian rune-masters had developed an alphabet, or “futhark” (from the value of the first six characters), of sixteen characters that was quite distinct from the rest of the Germanic peoples.

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