Another indication that the Norse were a civilized people was the fact that both before and during the Viking Age they possessed writing. It was at first based on a rudimentary set of characters called the runic alphabet, which seems to have emerged somewhere in Germany in the second century a. d. Initially it featured twenty-four characters, or runes. But in Scandinavia, by the 800s the number of runes had been reduced to sixteen. Most of the characters consisted of vertical or diagonal lines to make it easier to carve them with the grain on wooden surfaces.
It is unknown whether average Vikings were literate in runes or whether the ability to read and write was reserved to a small literate class. No formal schools existed in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, so reading and writing must have been passed from parents or other adult relatives to children in the home. What is more certain is that runic characters have been found on public monuments, weapons, tools, jewelry, and stone markers beside roads and bridges, as well as in graffiti on tavern walls. (An example of the latter is a message from a worried wife to her drunk husband: "Gyda says that you are to go home!"51 These facts at least suggest, as Kirsten Wolf says, "that they were intended to be seen and read, and by extension, that a good number, if not the majority, of Viking Age Scandinavians were able to interpret runes."52
In the last years of the Viking Age, especially between 1000 and 1100, when many Norse converted to Christianity, they adopted the Roman alphabet. For a while, runic characters coexisted with the new alphabet. Royal edicts and legal and religious texts came to be written in Latin, while everyday writings continued to be expressed in runes. Once Christianity had become the norm, shortly after the end of the Viking Age, formal schools began to appear. Some schools were in monasteries and others were in private homes.
World History
