Before candy hearts, there were Valentine etchings.
Case in point: a romantic message into a piece of bone more than 900 years ago in Sweden.
“Kiss me,” it says.
The markings had stumped scholars for ages.
But a scientist at the University of Oslo recently what’s known as the jotunvillur code, a secret rune language used by Vikings in the 13th century that can be found in more than 80 Norse inscriptions like the Viking Valentine.
Runes are letters in ancient , which were used to write Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet.
“It’s like solving a puzzle,” scholar K. Jonas Nordby told the Norwegian website . “Gradually, I began to see a pattern in what was apparently meaningless combinations of runes.”
Anyone hoping for some deep, dark Norse secrets will find themselves disappointed.
Most of what’s been so far appears to have been used in learning or written in a playful tone.
In many instances, people who wrote the codes left comments urging readers to try to figure them out. Some even of their coding abilities.
ǰ’ were recently published in the International Journal of Runic Studies.
