Norwegian academic Jonas Nordby cracks the ‘jotunvillur’ code
Mysterious Viking rune sticks revealed as the12th-century equivalent of text messaging
An ancient Norse code which has been puzzling experts for years has been cracked by a Norwegian runologist, discover what is the Viking equivalent of playful text messages.
The mysterious jotunvillur code, which dates to 12th or 13th-century Scandinavia, has been unravelled by Jonas Nordby from the University of Oslo, after he studied a 13th-century stick on which two men, Sigurd and Lavrans, had carved their name in both the code form and in standard runes.
They were used to communicate, like the SMS of the Middle Ages. They were for frequent messages which had validity in the here and now. Maybe a message to a wife, or a transaction
The jotunvillur code is found on only nine separate inscriptions, from different parts of Scandinavia, and had never been interpreted.
"The thing that solved it for me was seeing these two old Norse names, Sigurd and Lavrans, and after each of them was this combination of runes which made no sense," said Nordby, who is writing his doctorate on cryptography in runic inscriptions from the Viking Age and the Scandinavian Middle Ages.
He then realised that in jotunvillur, the rune sign was swapped for the last sound in the rune's name, so for example the "m" rune, maor, would be written as the rune for "r".
"I thought 'wow, this is the system, this is the solution, now we can read this text'," Nordby said.