Archaeologists given the rune around

[Liffrea]

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.’

Most of the rune stones examined by Bianchi are found in the remote north of Sweden, but he has also discovered rune stones with meaningless signs that look like writing in Denmark.

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet. Most of the rune stones in Scandinavia were carved in the late Viking period around the year 1,000 AD.

http://www.cphpost.dk/culture/culture/122-culture/49171-archaeologists-given-the-rune-around.html

[The Ripper]

I remember reading that there was some Finnish guy who suggested that some of those rune stones in northern Sweden might have been in some Finnic dialect. But like with all linguistic problems that cannot be solved or situated, enter theories about Finnic/Baque/Sámi etc...

Ah here it is (in Finnish): http://sverigesradio.se/cgi-bin/sisuradio/nyheter/artikel.asp?artikel=375080

And he's Swedish, not Finnish.

I don't know, in a sense it is somewhat surprising that "Finns" have not left any runic writing behind them, because in later years (after entering the historical period) runes (or riimut, as they're called in Finnish) were quite common place among the peasantry as house marks (http://www.genealogia.fi/faq/faq030e.htm), as well as calenders, etc. And the Finnish word riimu is apparently an old Finnic word.

I should actually have a picture of runic house marks the islanders of Kaunissaari used, I'll see if I can find it when I get home.