Copenhagen — Danish archaeologists have discovered a small sword inscribed with runes dating back nearly 2,000 years, the oldest trace of writing discovered in Denmark, the Odense Museum said Tuesday. The runic alphabet, called runes, is the oldest known alphabet from Scandinavia.
This alphabet was used in Northern Europe in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, and was replaced by the Latin alphabet during Christianization in the 10th century.
“The sword itself is unremarkable, but there are five runes on the blade. This is amazing in itself, but the date of these runes makes them even more special because they are actually the oldest ever brought from Denmark,” says the archaeologist. Jakob Bonde told AFP. “There was no writing before.”
This iron sword, which dates back to around 150 AD, was discovered in a grave in a small cemetery east of Odense in central Denmark. A post on the museum's Facebook page said the blade would be on display at the Montegarden Museum starting February 2.
The five runes stand for the word “hirila”, which in the Proto-Norse language spoken at the time meant “small sword”.
The inscription is “a note from the past,” Bonde said. “It provides an opportunity to look more closely at how the oldest known language in Scandinavia developed… (and) how people interacted with each other.”
“We wanted to show that the person who owned it was some kind of warrior, or wanted to be one,” Bonde said, but in the museum's Facebook post, archaeologists could not confirm whether the label “small sword” specifically referred to a warrior. I said no. The sword or its owner.
The first traces of human settlement in what is now Denmark date back to the Stone Age, around 4,000 BC. However, there are no traces of writing before the Roman Iron Age (0-400 AD).
Bonde said the discovery in 1865 of a small comb made of bone and inscribed with runes dates back to about the same time as the sword.
When writing first appeared in Scandinavia, it was “mainly just small inscriptions on objects.”
“For example, we don’t have books or larger inscriptions,” he said.
Denmark's most famous runestone, erected in the 10th century in the village of Jelling, bears a longer inscription. Strongly associated with the creation of Denmark as a nation-state, this family was raised by Harald Bluetooth in honor of his parents, King Gorm and Queen Thyra.