Feature 23 July 2026

History in runes

Far from being defined solely by conquest, Viking society prized storytellers, poets and wordsmiths. Through riddles, kennings and fragments of verse, we can recover a culture that viewed creativity as an essential part of everyday life

Six people in fur clothing sit and stand around a campfire in a village with huts and trees, talking together. The sky is dark and swirling, and the mood appears calm and communal.

Eleanor Barraclough, FRSA

Historian, writer and broadcaster

reading time: Six minutes

Arts and culture Arts and society Creativity

Summary

Historian, writer and broadcaster Eleanor Barraclough, FRSA reveals a Viking world shaped not only by warfare, gods and exploration, but by poetry, riddles and storytelling. In this amended excerpt from her book Embers of the Hands, she explores kennings, runic inscriptions and oral traditions that show how deeply language and imagination were woven into Norse life.

^{Illustrations by Romy Blümel}

The Viking Age is known for its warlike culture, its far-travelling explorers and settlers, and its colourful pantheon of gods and outlandish cosmic beings. But away from the dramatic myths and epic sagas, the idea of the arts as an intrinsic part of Norse culture is perhaps less familiar. Yet, for those who lived in the early Nordic world, the arts were intricately woven into the tapestry of their lives, and those who wanted to bolster their reputations were just as likely to boast about their artistic prowess as their physical skills.

Take Rognvald, the 12th-century ruler of Orkney, who we know had a healthy sense of his own accomplishments because he even composed a verse boasting of his many talents: “I am quick at playing chess, I have nine skills, I hardly forget runes, I am often at either a book or craftsmanship. I am able to glide on skis, I shoot and row so it makes a difference, I understand both the playing of the harp and poetry.”

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Precious words

Medieval Norse culture delighted in poetry, storytelling, and wordplay, and the ability to conjure stories, shape poems and solve riddles was greatly valued. Wordsmiths were held in high esteem, and the wily, one-eyed god Odin was the god of poets. According to a myth later recorded by the 13th-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson, Odin stole the mead of poetry from a giant by transforming himself into an eagle and carrying it back to Asgard in his belly. Those who drank the finest mead (the portion he spat out of his mouth) gained the gift of beautiful verse. Those who received the dregs (the portion he squirted out of his bottom) could produce only doggerel.

The title phrase of my book, Embers of the Hands, comes from this rich literary tradition. It is a kenning from the Viking Age itself, a word puzzle that poets – called skalds – tucked into their fiendishly intricate verses. A kenning describes something familiar in a roundabout, often metaphorical way. As with cryptic crosswords, where the rules need to be known before the clues can be deciphered, skaldic verse delights in alliteration that chimes across the lines, tangling up the word order so that it has to be unpicked like a knot.

Within each verse are kennings hidden in the tangle of words like Easter eggs – word riddles full of unexpected imagery and mythological references. A kenning for ‘battle’ might be ‘the furious rain of sword-points’, while a kenning for ‘alcohol’ might be ‘the soothing balm of all torments’.

The original meaning of ‘embers of the hands’ was a precious metal – gold or silver – glowing and shimmering like fire on the palm of the one who held it. It came from the inventive mind of an 11th-century Icelander, Thorarinn Skeggjason, who was court poet to the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada. Killed in 1066 at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harald was a powerful ruler, whose glittering reputation was preserved and embellished in sagas and poems (some of his own composition).

Storytelling was the lifeblood of the community – a connection to the past, an anchor in the world: shared memory, shared identity

A white hand holds a glowing ring beneath a circular scene with horses, people, and mythical creatures, surrounded by gold swirls on a dark background.

Story culture

Skalds such as Thorarinn Skeggjason represented the elite of the profession. Many names of his fellow poets survive together with their verses, immortalised in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas alongside their royal patrons. But storytelling, wordplay and poetry were the preserve not only of the upper echelons of society. The Viking world was full of people who shaped stories to tell around the winter fires on their farmsteads, when carrying out repetitive domestic tasks, or during the less exciting parts of long journeys over sea or land. Those famous sagas themselves had been passed down many generations before they were finally recorded in manuscripts in 13th-century Iceland.

The word ‘saga’ itself is a clue to this oral storytelling heritage: it comes from the verb at segja, meaning ‘to say’ or ‘to tell’. Some written sagas even give hints of this process at work, describing how certain stories were brought to Iceland by individuals with excellent memories, how others did the rounds among merchants and priests, and how still others passed directly from one generation of a family to the next. Storytelling was the lifeblood of the community – a connection to the past, an anchor in the world: shared memory, shared identity.

That same Viking world was also full of those who took delight at playing with words, making vowels and consonants chime together across the lines of poetry, conjuring images out of other images and shaping brainteasers and puns. Very little direct evidence of this survives in the archaeological record, not least because so much of it would have been spoken rather than written.

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Riddle me this

Some such evidence, though, comes from Norse Greenland, a colony settled from Iceland at the end of the 10th century, and surviving until the 15th century. The underlying permafrost, the cold climate and the sparsely settled landscape enabled a substantial quantity of organic material to survive from the era of the Norse settlement, including hints of wordplay and poetry.

One example is runes – those spiky letters so closely associated with the Viking Age – written on a stick of pinewood, with a natural knot at one end that resembles a birdlike creature. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the runes begin: ‘o : sa : sa : sa : is : o sa : sat’. Several interpretations have been suggested, along the lines of ‘On a tub saw the person, who sat on a tub’, or perhaps ‘On the sea that seemed to be, which you did not see on the sea’, or ‘On the sea, the sea, the sea, is the ambush of the Æsir’ (the Æsir being one group of the Norse gods, including Odin).

Whatever the correct interpretation – and perhaps there was never meant to be just one – this is an example of wordplay using homonyms: words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. The next part of the inscription slips a little kenning into the mix: ‘Bifrau is the name of the maid who is sitting on the blue one’. ‘The blue one’ may refer to the sea, the sky, or even heaven, in which case perhaps Bifrau is a mythological being perched upon it. Ultimately, her identity remains a mystery – a reminder that more stories were lost than survive.

Greenland wasn’t the only part of the Norse world where this sort of wordplay was enjoyed. A similar runic inscription from Bergen in Norway, again on a wooden stick, also plays with the many meanings of ‘sa’. The result is a word riddle that translates as ‘what did they see who looked into the tub? They saw themself, they who looked into the tub’. Likewise, an inscription on a length of bone from Sigtuna in Sweden continues the theme, with runes that mean ‘See! They who saw themself in the tub, saw themself in the ice.’

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Old truths

These fragments of poetry, kennings, inscriptions and riddles reveal a society deeply invested in the creative use of language and storytelling – one in which the arts were not confined to monumental achievements or elite patronage. They were embedded in daily experience, shaping how people entertained themselves, remembered stories, understood the world and interacted with one another. Literary culture flourished not only in royal courts but also in farmhouses, workshops and ships, wherever people gathered to talk, listen and imagine.

From a historical perspective, these fragments are important. They allow us to move beyond narratives focused solely on kings, warriors and political events, and instead recover something of the texture of ordinary life. But from a broader human perspective, the fragments are invaluable. They remind us that artistic expression and storytelling are not luxuries, but fundamental parts of the human condition.

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Dr Eleanor Barraclough, FRSA is a historian, writer and broadcaster currently based at Bath Spa University. Her most recent book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, from which this article is extracted/adapted, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, chosen as a Times History Book of the Year and chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Romy Blümel is a Berlin-based illustrator and painter who has exhibited globally, including in London and Shanghai. A member of the ‘Spring’ collective, her work spans publishing, advertising and cultural events and has appeared in publications including The New Yorker and The Guardian.

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