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.

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 ...

One theory posits that the runic alphabet—also known as “futhark,” after its first six sounds—was derived from the alphabet of the Etruscans in northern Italy. Another is that runes were ...

People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought. In runic writing systems ...