"Kiss me," reads this message, written in cipher runes on a piece of bone found in Sigtuna. Photo: Jonas Nordby More than 900 years ago, Vikings used coded runes to send frivolous romantic messages to ...

Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic. The original is here. Why did Vikings sometimes use codes when they wrote in runes? Were the messages secret, or did they have ...

The Vikings are often portrayed as illiterate, uncultured barbarians who evinced more interest in plunder than in poetry. In fact, the Vikings left behind a great number of documents in stone, wood ...

In October, Professor Judith Jesch of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age led a group of 20 ...

Vikings. The word evokes ferocious warriors, swords, battleaxes, and bloodthirsty raids. Most of what we know about the Vikings, however, are exaggerations written by people who encountered them.

Archaeologists in Denmark have uncovered two objects with rare Viking runic inscriptions dating to around 800 CE, during excavations in Ribe – the country's oldest town. The new discoveries shed light ...