“God of War’s” special edition steelcase has a hidden message on its reverse cover, decipherable only by those able to read the oldest of the runic alphabets. “This is the story of a bear and a wolf, ...

Perhaps no one has ever been as excited to see a comb as Danish archaeologist Søren Sindbæk. He and a team of archaeologists from Aarhus University recently unearthed one at a historic Viking town ...

The Vikings are often portrayed as illiterate, uncultured barbarians who evinced more interest in plunder than in poetry. In fact, the Vikings left behind a great number of documents in stone, wood ...

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., Nov. 6 -- Norse runes found on a rock near Kensington, Minn., apparently were the work of University of Minnesota graduate students, not Norse explorers in 1363. Two of the ...

Two rare artifacts inscribed with ancient letters, or runes, could be the key to a mysterious era of Viking history when they suddenly abandoned their old alphabet and transitioned to a new one.

Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic. The original is here. Why did Vikings sometimes use codes when they wrote in runes? Were the messages secret, or did they have ...

Runes are the characters of the alphabet used by the Vikings and other Germanic peoples from about the second to the 15th centuries A.D. Some runes vaguely resemble letters in our own alphabet; others ...

Before candy hearts, there were Valentine etchings. Case in point: a romantic message carved into a piece of bone more than 900 years ago in Sweden. “Kiss me,” it says. The markings had stumped ...