Medieval Runes - History and Use - Continuity and Legacy

Continuity and Legacy

The Latin letters were introduced officially during the 13th century, but farmers, artisans and traders continued to write with runes to communicate or to mark goods. It appears that in many parts of Sweden, people considered Latin letters to be a foreign practice throughout the Middle Ages. Still in the 16th century, the runes were engraved on official memorials or as secret writing in diaries. In the mid-16th century, the parson of the parish of Runsten on Öland wrote a sign on the chancel-wall of the church that said "The pastor of the parish should know how to read runes and write them". It is likely that the text represented the general opinion of the parishioners. Since the runes were still actively known and used in the 16th century, when the first runologists began to do scholarly work on the runes, the runic tradition never died out.

When Linnaeus visited the province Dalarna in 1734, he noted the common use of runes, and this province has been called "the last stronghold of the Germanic script". In Dalarna as in the rest of Sweden, the medieval tradition of using runic calendars was almost universal until the 19th century. A notable case of a runic calendar is the calendar from Gammalsvenskby in Ukraine. It was made on Dagö in 1766 before the Swedish settlement was deported on a forced march to the steppes of Ukraine. During 134 years, the people of Gammalsvenskby in Ukraine used it to calculate the passage of time, until 1900 when a member of the community brought it to Stockholm.

The prominent Swedish runologist Jansson commented on the use of runes in his country with the following words:

We loyally went on using the script inherited from our forefathers. We clung tenaciously to our runes, longer than any other nation. And thus our incomparable wealth of runic inscriptions also reminds us of how incomparably slow we were - slow and as if reluctant - to join the company of the civilised nations of Europe.