Tuesday 8 June 2010

Archaeologists given the rune around

A new study of rune stones from Viking times shows that many of the carvings are meaningless

After studying about a thousand inscriptions on ancient rune stones scattered around Scandinavia, a researcher from Uppsala University in Sweden has come to the conclusion that many of the carvings are gibberish.

The researcher claims that the Vikings who carved them couldn’t write and the people who saw them couldn’t read.

‘What was important was showing that you could write,’ explained researcher Marco Bianchi, who is an expert in Nordic languages. ‘What you wrote wasn’t so important since no-one could read it anyway.’

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