World’s oldest rune stone has more pieces that contain mysterious messages, researchers say | CNN


World’s oldest rune stone has more pieces that contain mysterious messages, researchers say | CNN

Published 7:00 AM EST, Sat February 22, 2025 CNN — The world’s oldest dated rune stone, a landmark discovery revealed in 2023, is just one piece of a larger, nearly 2,000-year-old slab, new research has found. Now, scientists in Norway are working to reassemble the ancient puzzle, a process that’s starting to shed light on who carved the mysterious runic writing and what the words mean. Runes were the building blocks of the first Germanic writing within the first few centuries AD and remained in use in Scandinavia until the late Middle Ages, according to the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. It’s believed Germanic people drew inspiration from the Roman alphabet to create the characters, according to the museum, but the exact origins of runes and how they were used has remained murky. Numerous stones carved with runes found across Scandinavia bear fascinating messages, such as one about a powerful Viking queen or a warning for frigid climate change based on past events. But many of these stones are from the age of the Vikings, about AD 800 to 1050, and few examples of early runes exist. Archaeologists who originally unearthed the oldest known rune stone in 2021 while investigating an ancient grave site in eastern Norway found the large piece covered with traces of runes. But as the fieldwork continued, the researchers uncovered additional sandstone fragments, some bearing similar runic inscriptions, in other nearby graves. The broken pieces appeared to fit together, with some of the runic script from one stone continuing onto another, and the scientists realized the fragments were all once part of a single stone. The research team published the new findings in the February 3 issue of the journal Antiquity.