Staveless Runes - Scholarship

Scholarship

It appears from the title page of Johannes Bureus' runic primer that Bureus had some understanding of the staveless runes in 1611, but that this has been denied by virtually all runologists. Since Bureus had not succeeded in deciphering the runes, a large poster with the image of two runestones with staveless runes was published in 1624 together with the announcement of a royal reward for the one who could decipher them. It would, however, take half a century before someone found the solution.

At the end of the 1660s, Athanasius Kircher, who was an interpreter of hieroglyphs, studied the runes, but he arrived at the conclusion that the staveless runes were nothing but meaningless scribbles and that the stones had been erected in order to protect against snakes.

The verdict of the hieroglyph expert was too much for the mathematician, antiquarian and Hälsingland native Magnus Celsius. Celsius departed for Hälsingland in the early 1670s and made meticulous drawings of the runestones. When he was back in Stockholm, he worked hard on deciphering the runes but had to give up. Eventually he tried to add staves to the runes and suddenly deciphered some of the staveless runes. By 1674, he had deciphered all the runes except for the rune, which he interpreted as a distinguishing mark.

The following year, Celsius made a speech at Uppsala University, where he made his discovery public. He started the process of publishing his discovery shortly after making the speech but died suddenly before the printing was finished. However, the news of the discovery spread quickly among scholars and it was used as the basis of the claim that stenography had originated in Sweden. It would be Olof Celsius who finally published his father's discovery.