There is a strange contradiction sitting at the heart of runic history, and I want to start with it because once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The Viking Age — roughly 793 to 1066 AD — is the era we most associate with runes. It's when runestones were raised by the thousands. It's when runes appear on sword blades and amulets and the lintels of doorways. It's when sagas record runemasters carving symbols to heal the sick, curse enemies, and call on the gods. By any measure, this should be the golden age of the runic alphabet.
And yet it's also the period when the Norse people simplified their runic alphabet. The older tradition — twenty-four characters, each with its own name, mythology, and layered meaning — was quietly being replaced by a stripped-down sixteen-rune system. The alphabet got shorter exactly when it was being used more.
That paradox sits right at the heart of the 10th century, the century of Erik Bloodaxe. Understanding it changes how you see runes entirely.
Two Alphabets
To tell this story properly, you need to know what the two systems actually were.
The Elder Futhark is the older alphabet. It has twenty-four runes and dates back at least to the 2nd century AD, possibly earlier. We find it inscribed on objects across Scandinavia, Germany, and the British Isles — on combs, bracteates, weapon fragments, the occasional runestone. It's the alphabet used in the great Migration Period inscriptions, and it's the system that most modern practitioners, including us at Runestone Norway, work with today.
The Younger Futhark — sometimes called the Viking Age runes — emerged around the 8th century and had fully taken hold by the 9th. It reduced the alphabet to sixteen characters. Here's the part that makes scholars scratch their heads: in doing so, it actually made the alphabet phonetically less precise, not more. Several sounds that had their own dedicated runes in the Elder system were now represented by the same character. The rune that had once stood only for 'k' now had to stand in for 'g' as well. Context did extra work.
The most widely accepted explanation for this isn't fully satisfying, but it goes something like this: the Younger Futhark developed among communities where runes were already deeply embedded in daily life, carved quickly and practically onto everyday objects. Simplification made the system faster and more accessible. You didn't need to memorise twenty-four forms — sixteen would do. As a practical writing system for a culture on the move, it made a certain kind of sense.
But something was also lost. The older twenty-four-rune system had a completeness to it — each rune carrying its own distinct identity, its own name, its own place in a cosmological order. The Younger Futhark traded that depth for efficiency.
Erik Bloodaxe, born around 895 AD, spent his life in the thick of this transition.
What Runes Actually Looked Like in His World
When you picture runes in the 10th century, what do you see? Stone monuments, probably. Dramatic inscriptions on ancient boulders. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete.
Runes were everywhere in ways that simply haven't survived. Wood rots. Bone crumbles. Organic materials disappear over centuries. The runestones endure because stone endures — but in daily life, most runic writing happened on perishable surfaces. Sticks of wood, split to create a flat face and scratched with a knife. Wooden tablets. Animal bones. The majority of that record is gone.
What we do have are the runestones, and they tell a striking story. The 10th century saw an explosion of runestone carving, particularly in Scandinavia. Sweden alone has more runestones than any other country — thousands of them, the vast majority from the late Viking Age. They were raised as memorials, usually commissioned by a family to honour a dead relative. The formula is almost always the same: X raised this stone in memory of Y, who was a good man. Sometimes a ship motif. Sometimes a Christian cross appearing alongside older imagery, a sign of the world shifting.
Memorial culture was serious business. Raising a stone was expensive and required skilled craftsmen. It was also a public act of family loyalty — the stone sat at a crossroads or a boundary, visible to everyone who passed. It said: we remember. We can afford to remember. We are people who honour their dead.
Erik's Norway was part of this world, though Norway has fewer surviving runestones than Sweden or Denmark. The political turbulence of the era — and the fact that Harald Fairhair's unification was still raw and contested — meant that the stone-raising tradition was slightly less entrenched there than it would later become in the more settled east.
The Jelling Stones and the World Changing Around Him
You cannot talk about the runestones of Erik's era without mentioning the Jelling stones in Denmark, because they represent exactly the kind of turning point the 10th century was.
There are two of them, raised at Jelling in Jutland. The smaller one was raised by King Gorm the Old in memory of his wife Thyra — a traditional memorial, entirely pre-Christian in character. The larger one, raised by Gorm's son Harald Bluetooth, is something different. It's sometimes called Denmark's birth certificate. It records, in runic inscription, that Harald had 'won all of Denmark and Norway for himself and made the Danes Christian.'
Harald Bluetooth and Erik Bloodaxe were contemporaries, operating in the same political world. Gunnhild, Erik's formidable wife, was likely connected to Gorm's family by birth or politics — the sources are unclear, but the web of alliances between these ruling families was tight. Harald was the nephew, by some accounts, of Gunnhild herself.
What matters for our purposes is what the Jelling stones show: runes being used to announce the arrival of Christianity. The same symbols that had carried the names of Odin and Thor, that had been carved to invoke the old powers, were now being used to proclaim a new God. This is not hypocrisy or contradiction on the part of the people carving them — it's a sign of how deeply embedded runic script was in Norse culture. Even as the religion changed, the writing system endured. The runes outlived the gods they had first been created to honour.
Erik Bloodaxe was killed in 954 at Stainmore in northern England, fighting to hold onto the Viking kingdom of Jorvik. The world he left behind was one in the middle of this transformation — not yet Christian, not yet settled, but moving.
Egil Skallagrímsson: Runes as Weapon
No account of runes in the Bloodaxe era is complete without Egil Skallagrímsson, because no figure in the sagas uses runes more dramatically — and no figure is more directly opposed to Erik.
Egil was a skald, a warrior-poet, and by most accounts a genuinely alarming person. He was also Erik's blood enemy. The feud began when Erik had Egil's brother killed and continued for years with escalating viciousness on both sides. Egil eventually composed Höfuðlausn — Head Ransom — a praise poem for Erik that he delivered in York to save his own life. Even Erik's worst enemy had to admit Egil was brilliant.
But it's the runic episodes in Egils saga that matter most here. Two stand out.
The first: Egil discovers that a healing attempt has gone wrong — someone has tried to carve runes to cure a sick woman, but carved them incorrectly, which is making her worse rather than better. He scrapes the botched runes off the bed-planks, burns them, and carves new ones himself. The woman recovers. The saga treats this as simply how things work. Runes carved wrong are not neutral — they are actively harmful. Runes carved correctly, by someone who knows what they're doing, have real power.
The second: Egil's son Böðvar drowns. Egil's grief is catastrophic — he locks himself in his room and refuses to eat, apparently dying of sorrow. His daughter eventually tricks him out of it by telling him he has to compose a poem first, knowing that the act of shaping language into form will pull him back from the edge. The resulting poem, Sonatorrek, is one of the great poems of Old Norse literature — a direct, furious argument with Odin for allowing his son to die. Egil doesn't beg. He rages. He tells Odin he would take revenge if he could. And at the end, he chooses to go on living.
Egil also, famously, carved a curse against Erik and Gunnhild. He set up a pole on a rocky headland with a horse's head on it — a níð pole, a formal ritual insult — and carved runes on it calling on the land spirits to drive Erik and Gunnhild from Norway. Whether it worked or not is a matter of perspective. Erik did eventually leave Norway.
What these stories show is that in 10th-century Norse culture, runes weren't decorative. They weren't just an alphabet. They were understood as a living technology — capable of harm, capable of healing, capable of reaching the gods and the spirits. A person who could use them properly had genuine social power.
The Futhark Sequence Itself as Ritual
One detail from the archaeological record is easy to overlook but worth pausing on.
Across multiple inscriptions from this period, we find objects with the full sequence of the futhark carved on them — not a message, not a memorial, just the runes in order. ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ... all the way through. Sometimes on amulets. Sometimes on bracteates. Sometimes in circumstances that suggest the act of writing the sequence itself was considered protective or powerful.
This tells us something important: the runes were understood as a system, a totality, not just a collection of individual letters. The sequence had meaning. The order mattered. Writing all twenty-four — or, in the Viking Age, all sixteen — was an act of invocation, of calling the whole runic tradition into presence at once.
This is why the name matters. Futhark is not a word — it's the first six runes: Fehu, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kenaz. The alphabet names itself after its own beginning. Which is either practical or poetic depending on your mood, and possibly both.
If you want to understand what Fehu and Uruz meant in Erik's world, the answer is: they were the first two steps in a system that, when taken in its entirety, was considered to hold the structure of reality within it. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Why We Use the Elder Futhark
This brings us to a question we get asked fairly often: why does Runestone Norway work with the Elder Futhark — the twenty-four-rune system — rather than the Younger Futhark that was actually in use during the Viking Age?
The honest answer is that the Elder Futhark is older, deeper, and more complete. Each of the twenty-four runes carries its own distinct identity. There's no ambiguity, no shared characters doing double duty. The system that Odin is said to have discovered — hanging nine nights on the World Tree, sacrificing himself to himself to receive the runes — is the Elder Futhark.
The Younger Futhark was a practical adaptation, brilliant in its way, but it was the Elder system that encoded the mythology most fully. When people work with runes today for meaning, for divination, for personal reflection, the Elder Futhark gives more to work with. More nuance. More precision. A richer vocabulary.
Erik Bloodaxe's era was the hinge point — the moment when the older system was giving way to the newer one in everyday use, while the older tradition still lived in the memories of people like Egil, in the poems and the practices that would eventually be written down in the sagas. The world of the Elder Futhark didn't vanish in 895 AD or 954 AD. It was remembered. And it's that remembered tradition — preserved through the sagas, through the Eddas, through centuries of scholarly and spiritual interest — that we carry forward.
What This Era Means for Anyone Working With Runes Today
If you work with runes — or you're thinking about starting — understanding this historical moment matters in a way that goes beyond trivia.
The 10th century shows us runes at their most alive. Not museum pieces, not decoration, not vague symbols on a pendant whose meaning nobody quite knows. In Erik Bloodaxe's world, runes were technology. They were wielded by real people with real intentions — to honour the dead, to shape political narratives, to heal, to curse, to grieve. Egil didn't carve those curse-runes as a metaphor. He did it because he believed it would work. And his belief was shared by everyone around him, including his enemies.
That's the tradition we're part of at Runestone Norway. Not a romanticised fantasy of the Viking Age, but the actual, documented, historically grounded practice of people who took these symbols seriously.
The runes survived Christianisation. They survived the end of the Viking Age. They survived centuries of being dismissed as primitive superstition. They're still here. That persistence is not an accident — it reflects something real in the system itself, something that keeps drawing people back to these twenty-four ancient characters and the stories they carry.
Erik Bloodaxe is long dead. The kingdom of Jorvik he fought and died for is a museum now, underground in York. But the runes he would have known — the runes Egil used to curse him, that Gunnhild might have used to protect him, that were scratched into weapons and stones and wood across the Norse world — those are still readable. Still meaningful. Still here.
That's worth something.