Runestones are dated by their ornament, yet more than a third of all runestones lack a style group in the Scandinavian Runic-text Database – and the loss is not random. The damaged, the uninterpreted and the stones outside the Mälaren valley and Västergötland drop out most often. We show that the invisible stones do not behave like the visible ones either, that the category RAK makes whole corpora early by definition, and how the dark number can be lit.

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A mysterious rock carving uncovered deep in the northern Ontario wilderness has left archaeologists trying to determine who created it — and why. - HeritageDaily - Archaeology News

The oldest known instance of the “Cool S”, a symbol of unknown origin, found on a Viking runestone dated to the tenth century AD. This sigil has persisted through millennia and is still…

Women are among those who raised one runestone in four where it can be read who raised it, but only one stone in thirty that states the relationship was raised in memory of a woman. Were women the vanguard of Christianity, as is often said? Our numbers say no. They point instead to inheritance: a woman raised the stone when she stood in the man's place, as widow or mother.

In the year 872, a fatherless Norse boy named Arne discovers a mysterious runestone bearing a single name: Lutro. What begins as a search for identity becomes an epic journey spanning more than a mill...