How an inscription gets a date
Almost every date on this site is a range, and the ranges are arrived at in two quite different ways. Knowing which one is behind a given date tells you how much weight it will bear.
Dates turn up constantly in writing about runes and are almost never explained. This page sets out where they come from, because the difference between "this object was in a layer dated by dendrochronology" and "this spelling looks late" is the difference between a date you can lean on and a date that is really an argument.
Two kinds of date
The first dates the object. That is ordinary archaeology: stratigraphy, grave goods, coin finds, typology, and where the material allows it, dendrochronology or radiocarbon. It says when the thing existed, not when anybody wrote on it.
The second dates the writing. Rune forms change, and so does the language behind the spelling, so an inscription can be placed by how it is written even when the object gives nothing. This is where runology does its own work, and it is also where the softer dates come from.
The two can disagree
Dating the object
| Method | What it gives | Example on this site |
|---|---|---|
| Stratigraphy | A layer, and so a range, often a tight one on an urban site | The Ribe skull fragment, from a layer dated to around AD 725 |
| Dendrochronology | A felling year, sometimes to the season | The Oseberg burial, c. 834, which anchors the valknut |
| Typology | A relative sequence, converted to dates by other means | Bracteates, classified by what the image shows; the Gotland picture stones |
| Ornament style | A range of a few decades for late Swedish runestones | Rundata records a style code for each stone; the scheme spans c. 980–1130 |
| Findspot context | Whatever the surrounding deposit gives | The Kragehul spear shaft, in the latest of five bog deposits |
Waterlogged sites are the reason several of the tightest dates on this site exist at all. The Bergen wharf and the Frisian terpen preserve wood, and wood can often be dated directly, which is also why the corpus is shaped the way it is and why the surviving evidence is not a fair sample of what was written.
Dating the writing
These are the criteria that recur across this site, gathered in one place. Each is a range rather than a line, and each works better in combination than alone.
| Criterion | Earlier | Later |
|---|---|---|
| Alphabet | Elder Futhark, 24 runes | Younger Futhark from c. 800, medieval runes from c. 1100 |
| The ʀ sound | Kept distinct from r, written with ýr | Merged with r; the distinction abandoned at different times in different regions |
| The nasal vowel | Marked, with óss writing ą | Nasal quality lost, the rune drifting towards /o/ |
| Rune shapes | Elder forms: ᚺ for h, ᛗ for m | Reduced Viking-Age forms: ᚼ and ᛘ |
| Graphic tradition | Long-branch on monuments | Short-twig everyday, staveless more reduced still |
| Dotting | Absent; one rune covers /k/ and /g/, /t/ and /d/, /b/ and /p/ | Dotted forms from about 1100 separate them again |
| Row order | maðr before lǫgr | The two swap during the 13th century under Latin influence |
Why the ʀ-rune is the best of them
The sound written ʀ descends from Proto-Germanic *z, occurred at the ends of words, and merged with ordinary r during the Viking Age. Because it merged gradually and at different times in different places, how a carver uses ýr against reið places an inscription in space as well as time. It is the closest thing Scandinavian runology has to a clock.
The same logic runs backwards into the older corpus. The algiz rune wrote that sound before the merger, and its behaviour tracks a change that separates the earliest inscriptions from later ones.
An alphabet caught mid-change
The clearest single object is the Ribe skull fragment, because both kinds of dating meet on it and agree. Stratigraphy puts it around AD 725. The writing is already a younger futhark, but two of its characters, h and m, are still cut in the Elder Futhark shapes ᚺ and ᛗ rather than the reduced ᚼ and ᛘ. The object dates the layer; the letters date the reduction, and show it went through in stages.
The circularity problem
Here is the difficulty nobody can fully escape. If you date an inscription by its language, and then use that inscription as evidence for when the language changed, you have argued in a circle. Runology knows this and works around it by anchoring the sequence on objects dated independently, which is exactly why finds like Ribe and Oseberg carry weight out of proportion to what they say.
Linguistic dating is genuinely useful and genuinely soft. It depends on a chronology of sound changes that is itself partly built from dated inscriptions, and the anchor points are few. A date given to the century is usually doing well; a date given to the decade on linguistic grounds alone is doing more than the method supports.
What a confident date usually means
Why the dates on this site are ranges
Every inscription entry carries a `dateRange` rather than a date, and the ranges are copied from the literature rather than narrowed. Where a range is wide (the Lindholm amulet at c. AD 375–570, nearly two centuries) that width is the finding, not a failure to look it up.
Where a date is unusually tight, ask what is carrying it. The Jelling stone is c. AD 965 because it names Harald Bluetooth and his conversion of the Danes, and those are events historians can place. That is a historical date attached to a runic object, not a runological one.
Questions this guide answers
- How do you date a runic inscription?
- Two ways, usually combined. The object is dated archaeologically: by its layer, its grave goods, its ornament, or by dendrochronology where there is wood. The writing is dated by which alphabet it uses, the shapes of the runes, and sound changes visible in the spelling.
- Can runes be carbon dated?
- The object sometimes can, if it is organic: bone, antler, wood. The carving cannot: radiocarbon dates the material, not the moment somebody cut into it. On stone it gives nothing at all.
- What is the most reliable dating criterion?
- For Scandinavian material, the merger of the ʀ sound with r. It happened gradually and at different times in different regions, so how an inscription uses the ýr rune places it in both time and space. It is still a range, not a year.
- Why are runic dates so vague?
- Because most of them rest on linguistic and graphic criteria, which give centuries rather than years, and because the independent anchor points are few. A tight date on a runic object usually comes from outside the inscription entirely.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.