Everyday literacy

What a fire uncovered

In 1955 a fire tore through Bryggen, the old Hanseatic wharf in Bergen. The rebuilding required excavation, and the excavation went down into waterlogged medieval deposits where organic material survives instead of rotting.

What came out was around 670 inscribed objects, overwhelmingly wooden sticks, dating from roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth century. It is the largest body of runic writing found anywhere, and it more than doubled the known corpus of everyday runic text at a stroke.

The technical term for the sticks is rúnakefli, rune-staves: squared lengths of wood a few inches long, inscribed along their edges. They are cheap, disposable and reusable, which is exactly why so many were thrown away and exactly why almost none survive outside waterlogged ground.

That is the crucial sampling problem. For most of the runic period we have what was carved into stone and metal, because that is what lasts. Bryggen shows what was carved into wood, which is to say what people wrote when they were not commemorating anybody.

What they say

Mostly, business.

A large share are ownership tags: a stick attached to a sack or a bale reading essentially Þorkell owns this. Merchants' goods sitting in a shared warehouse needed labelling, and a rune-stick is a label.

Then accounts and tallies: quantities, debts, receipts, instructions to a business partner. One well-known stick is a request to a wife to send money. Another asks for beer.

Then correspondence. Short messages, some of them clearly written to be carried by hand between two people in the same town.

Then the material that gets quoted least in rune books and matters most: school exercises, including a Latin sentence written out in runes; prayers and liturgical fragments, some in Latin; scraps of poetry, including a line of skaldic verse; declarations of love, in Latin and Norse; and a substantial quantity of crude jokes and boasts, some obscene enough that older editions summarised rather than translated them.

One stick carries the opening of the futhark itself, apparently as practice.

What this rules out

The idea that runes were an esoteric technology restricted to a priestly class does not survive this material.

The writers include merchants, women, apprentices and at least one person practising their letters. The subject matter includes cargo manifests and jokes about sex. The script is used alongside and interchangeably with Latin, and sometimes to write Latin.

That is what ordinary literacy looks like anywhere. It is not what a restricted sacred art looks like.

Two further details make the point sharper. First, staveless runes — an extreme shorthand from Hälsingland that strips the vertical stave from nearly every letter — only work if the reader is fluent enough not to need the redundancy. Shorthand implies a population of practised readers, not a handful of specialists.

Second, the short-twig hand exists precisely because wood is a bad surface for elaborate branching. A script developing a distinct everyday register optimised for cheap disposable material is a script in daily use.

None of this means runes were never used for anything numinous. The Björketorp curse stone exists. It means the numinous use was a subset, not the purpose.

Maeshowe, and writing on other people's monuments

The other great body of casual runic writing is graffiti, and the best of it is in Orkney.

Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered tomb, already some three thousand years old when Norse visitors broke into it in the twelfth century. They left around thirty inscriptions on the walls — the largest collection of runic graffiti outside Scandinavia.

The content is what graffiti always is. Claims that treasure was carried off. A boast that these runes were carved by the best rune-carver in the western ocean, cut with the axe that killed a named man. Statements that a particular woman is attractive. Names, plainly and simply, so that they would be there.

The Hagia Sophia graffiti in Constantinople is the same instinct at the far end of the Norse world: a partly legible name, usually read as Halfdan, scratched into a marble parapet by a member of the Varangian Guard.

People carved runes for the same reasons people carve anything: to claim ownership, to record a transaction, to be rude, and to have been there.

Why this is under-used

There is a reason the Bryggen material is rarely quoted in popular rune books, and it is not obscurity — the finds are published and well known.

It is that the material is boring in exactly the way that makes it valuable. A stick reading Gyða says you are to go home does nothing for a system that wants runes to be a repository of ancestral wisdom. A stanza about hail is at least atmospheric; a receipt is not.

The result is a body of evidence that is enormous, ordinary and quietly incompatible with most of what is written about runes, and which is therefore skipped.

Anyone deciding how seriously to take a claim about runic mysteries can usefully ask what the claim does with Bryggen.