The word runic has appeared in five articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 1 in the book review “The Secret Lives of Vikings” by Timothy Farrington:
Runes, which seem at first to have carried a charge of magic or secrecy, were by this era used for everything. Sticks were Norse Post-its, Barraclough writes, and the message on this one reads, “Gyda says that you should go home.”
Other runic inscriptions record curses, jokes and salacious gossip. Meager as they are, these writings are precious because they are more or less the only written sources we have from the Viking Age. No other text gives us as direct a line to the Norse themselves. The sagas, for example, were composed much later, in Iceland, by Christians.
Daily Word Challenge
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