Staveless runes

What was taken away

Nearly every runic letter is built the same way: a stave, the vertical stroke that forms the backbone, and one or more branches cut into it. Which letter you are looking at depends on where the branches meet the stave, at what angle, and on which side.

The staveless runes throw away the stave. The branches are left hanging in the air, and the reader supplies the missing vertical from the position of the mark within the text band — how high it sits, whether it crosses an imagined midline, whether it hangs from the top or rests on the bottom.

This works because the stave was carrying almost no information. It is the same in every letter. Only the branches vary, so only the branches need to be cut. Once the eye accepts an invisible grid, the whole system collapses to a set of short strokes at different heights and angles, and nothing is lost.

Superimpose staves back onto a staveless inscription and the a, n, t, l and s runes turn out to be exactly their ordinary selves. Nothing was redesigned. Something was subtracted.

The name is misleading, and so is the other name

They are often called Hälsinge runes, after the Swedish province of Hälsingland where antiquarians first met them in quantity. Runology has largely dropped the label, because the script is not confined there. Inscriptions have turned up in neighbouring Medelpad, further south in Södermanland and Uppland, and across the border in Norway — including among the wooden rune sticks dug out of the medieval wharf at Bryggen in Bergen. This was a recognised way of writing across the Nordic world, not a local quirk.

Staveless is the preferred term and is also not quite true. Five letters keep a stave. The í rune is a bare vertical stroke to begin with, so it has nothing to lose and keeps its full height. The f, þ, k and s runes retain shortened or modified staves, because without one they would collide with something else.

So the honest description is not the runes without staves but the runes reduced to the fewest strokes that still tell them apart. The system stops cutting exactly where cutting more would start destroying meaning.

Why a carver would want this

Runes have no horizontal lines. That is not an aesthetic choice — it is a property of wood. A cut running with the grain wants to keep going, and can split the piece and take the text with it. Verticals cut cleanly across the grain, diagonals cut safely across it at an angle, and horizontals are avoided.

But the safe stroke is also the expensive one. Driving a deep vertical across dense grain takes force and time, and every single letter needs one. Most Viking Age writing was not monumental at all: it was tallies, messages, ownership marks and gossip cut into sticks of wood, of the kind Bryggen produced in the hundreds. For a person writing that way all day, the stave is pure overhead.

Remove it and the labour drops sharply. What is left is short, shallow, quick diagonal nicks. The claim made almost as soon as the script was deciphered — that this is shorthand — is essentially right, at least in origin.

On stone the motive shifts from speed to space. A staveless inscription packs roughly twice the text into the same surface, which matters enormously when a monument has to carry a long argument.

Meaningless scribbles carved against snakes

After Scandinavia went over to the Latin alphabet, the knowledge of how to read these marks disappeared completely. By the seventeenth century, in the middle of Sweden's antiquarian enthusiasm for its own past, the staveless stones sat there as an open and rather embarrassing puzzle.

Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), Sweden's first national antiquarian and the founder of its runology, seems to have had at least a visual acquaintance with the forms — the title page of his 1611 primer Svenska ABC boken medh runor suggests as much. Modern runologists do not credit him with an actual decipherment.

In 1624 a poster showing two of the stones was printed and sent around Europe, with a royal reward attached for anyone who could read them. It went unclaimed for fifty years.

It did attract Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath who believed he had cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs. Kircher looked at the staveless runes, found no system in them, and concluded there was none: the carvings were meaningless scribbles, and the stones had been put up as superstitious charms to keep snakes away.

That verdict is what solved the problem. Magnus Celsius (1621–1679), mathematician, astronomer and a Hälsingland man, took it as an insult to his province. He went north in the early 1670s and made careful measured drawings of the stones in place, then took them home to Stockholm and attacked them as a cipher.

He got nowhere until he tried adding the vertical strokes back in. The scribbles turned instantly into ordinary Younger Futhark. By 1674 he had the entire alphabet, missing only ʀ, which he took for a punctuation mark. He announced it at Uppsala in 1675, began preparing the work for print, and died before it appeared; his son Olof Celsius — botanist, runologist, and later Linnaeus's mentor — saw the method into publication.

Swedish scholars promptly claimed that since the ancients of Sweden had used shorthand, shorthand had been invented in Sweden.

What was actually written in it

A shorthand might be expected to carry trivia. This one carries some of the most substantial texts in the runic corpus, which is the strongest evidence that nobody regarded it as a lesser form of writing.

The Malsta stone from Hälsingland is closer to a deed than a memorial. Hróðmundr raised it, and traced his descent back through seven generations — his father Hé-Gylfir, then Brísi, Lini, Unn, Ófeigr, Þórir — while naming the estates and territories the family holds and recording how Gylfi came by the land. The reasonable reading is that his right to it had been challenged and he answered in stone. The choice of script is practical: in ordinary long-branch runes that text would have needed a monument more than twice the size.

The Skarpåker stone in Södermanland does the opposite. It is short, and it is verse. Gunnarr buried his son Lýðbjǫrn and had cut into the stone a line reaching for the end of the world itself — Jarð sal rifna ok upphiminn, earth shall be riven and heaven above — the imagery of Ragnarök, borrowed to say how large the loss was.

A legal genealogy and a father's grief, in the script that supposedly existed to save effort.

Carvers who could do both

The Aspa Bro stone (Sö 137) shows the two systems in one hand. Most of it is cut in straight long-branch runes; in the final row the carver switches, and everything but the last word is staveless. Whether that was to fit the space or simply a flourish, it means the runemaster moved between the monumental and the shorthand forms without effort — and expected readers who could follow.

Hs 12, at the church in Hög, is staveless throughout and commemorates a bridge. Guðnjótr raised the stone and built the bridge for his brothers, an act of Christian public works of the sort the Church encouraged in the eleventh century, indulgences attaching to the road as much as the prayer. The old shorthand was still in service well into the Christian period.

Why this page has no letter pages

Every other script in this section has a page for each of its letters. This one does not, and the reason is not neglect.

A staveless f and an ordinary Younger Futhark ᚠ are the same letter. Same name, same sound, same position in the row, same history. The only difference is how the mark was cut. Unicode makes exactly this judgement: when the runic block was encoded, the staveless forms were not given codepoints of their own but treated as glyph variants of the Younger Futhark, so that a search for faþur finds the word whether or not the stone that carries it has staves. Typographers who need the shapes use a specialised font — BabelStone Runic Staveless and its relatives — which draws the staveless glyphs from the ordinary codepoints.

So the sixteen letters already have their pages. They are the Younger Futhark sixteen, and what is written there about Fé, Úr, Þurs and the rest applies here unchanged. Repeating them in a staveless costume would be sixteen duplicate pages saying the same thing.

What belongs here instead is what is genuinely particular: the subtraction, the reason for it, and the century it spent unreadable.