Perhaps no one has ever been as excited to see a comb as Danish archaeologist Søren Sindbæk. He and a team of archaeologists from Aarhus University recently unearthed one at a historic Viking town ...

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 ...

The ancient runic alphabet, used by Germanic peoples centuries ago prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet, remains one of the most enigmatic early writing systems. Chief among its mysteries is ...

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 ...

"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 ...