Interview with Professor Tom Birkett on "Runes: A Concise History"

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History add free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. [Music] Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Weimann. Thanks so much for joining me today. If you have an image in your head of Vikings and early medieval Europe more generally, there is a good chance that runes play into your picture. This distinctive writing associated with speakers of Germanic languages across the North Sea, Baltic, and even far beyond is immediately distinctive. Sharp lines often incised in stone or metal, bearing witness to a whole world of literacy, belief, and interaction that we could otherwise barely glimpse. Today's guest is one of the world's leading experts on runes and related topics. Dr. Tom Birkett is professor of Old Norse and Old English at University College Quark. Professor Birkett is running the Norse Map project which is funded by a European Research Council grant and I cannot wait to ask him about that. He's also the author of numerous scholarly articles and several books including the Vikings reimagined and the Norse myths. He also has a brand new book out now from Oxford University Press entitled "Runes, A Consized History", which is actually one of my favorite things I've read this year and I highly recommend it to you all. Professor Birkett, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me on and thanks for the kind words about the book. So I actually just received my copy today so I'm really happy to. Oh, my copy is, I should say. So it's perfect timing for this podcast. Is there anything more exciting than actually holding your book in your hands? I don't think so for an academic know. I mean, because I think for listeners who haven't experienced this, which I assume is most people have not published the book, like the gap between the end of your writing process and the end of your edits and the time when the book is a real thing is the most fertile ground for you to question yourself and rethink every decision you made in the book. And then finally, when you get the book in your hand, you're like, okay, it's real. It's a real thing. I actually. Yeah, it exists in the world. Yeah, I'm a bit scared to read it still because you always find us. I'm the sake of some kind, but yeah, it's often a long process as well between finishing the book or thinking you finished the book and finally getting it out there. It can be over a year, you know, where you've got to worry and bite your nails down to the quick. It is for those of us who might be wired with a little anxiety, which I mean strong over indexing an academia, I would say. It is a fertile country for you to question every aspect of every decision you've ever made as regards your career. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you have written this wonderful book on runes. I just have to tell you before we get started, how am I trying to enjoy it? It's beautifully written. It's a fantastic, truly accessible work of scholarship. So what brought you to writing this book? I mean, what was the impetus for you? So there were kind of two main reasons I just have just right this book. And one of them is the fact that if you go online, right, if you go to an online bookseller or marketplace and you type in runes, the vast majority of things that you're going to come back with from your search are runes and magic, runes and divination, how to change your life with the use of runes symbols and so on and so forth. And actually, like, that I think is still one of the main public perceptions of runes that they're a magic script that they're a kind of fantasy script that you can use them for predicting the future or whatever. And we even have that journalistic moniker, you know, read the runes, which is thrown around and every time someone uses that a little bit of me dies is reinforcing that that impression that this was a magic script. So I wanted to write something that was kind of oriented towards the public, towards a general readership, but that really pushed back against that idea that this was anything more than a script, which could be used to write magical inscriptions as all scripts candy. But there wasn't developed in order to do magical things. So that was kind of the one reason and then the other reason was looking at the academic books that are already out there, they're largely pitched at people who want to learn ruins as scholars, you know, their training manuals essentially or their a corpus of runic inscriptions from a particular part of the world. So they're often very dense, they're often very scholarly, which is no bad thing at all, but also they're not easy to dip into, you know, and if you're a general reader, it can be quite off putting and I think having those two genres of book alongside one another creates that space for something in the middle, which is quite kind of public facing, but is also grounded in the history. And that's really the story I wanted to tell was that ruins are as fascinating if we just look at them as a script for writing as they are if we imagine they were magical. The sheer number of different aspects of the early medieval and high medieval world that you were able to illuminate through ruins using ruins as a lens for looking at this world was mind boggling to me. I mean, this is a period I know really well I was trained in this period, I did my doctorate and I know the sociolinguistics of the early middle ages reasonably well that was something I spent a fair bit of time on I was really interested in I learned so much new stuff reading this book so many things I didn't know before about an area that I thought I knew pretty well and like I think that aspect of it was my favorite thing that like you really have used the kind of the sociolinguistic context of of Runeck writing to show us an entirely lost early medieval world that most people have no idea existed. I'm so glad you say that because that was another thing I noticed was that historians tend to leave out the Runeck evidence because it's a little bit inaccessible because they have that resources in certainly in the later medieval period. But it does fill in some of the gaps that we know about beliefs about personal relationships and then when we move into even better documented periods of history like the high middle ages it's also you know what the average person was doing you know what the traders were doing in the market town in virgin rather than what the monks were writing in the in the monastery or you know what was happening in aristocratic society so. I hope there is a history that can be told through these that is a little bit different to the ones that people might be used to. I mean I think that last aspect what you pointed to there the high middle ages and kind of the common use of the script I had no idea about that I kind of assumed that essentially as soon as the Latin alphabet was widely adopted across the Germanic speaking world that Rune's pretty quickly fell out of use that's not the case like how long did people continue to use Rune's in their everyday lives. Well depends which part of Scandinavia you're looking at really so in medieval Norway where we have a lot of towns it should be said like burgundy is the best example but also trundheim where you have really quite particular excavation context so in burgundy the medieval war which no now is this really picturesque beautiful brightly colored medieval war if I think dating back to the 18th century. But underneath that are these layers of archaeology of history which are waterlogged completely waterlogged and they preserve layers of rubbish and each time medieval burgundy burn down which was fairly regularly in a place that was all made of wood you get these really distinct layers preserving a lot of these small wooden slips written and there are thousands of them you know hundreds of them properly thousands and that unique context kind of opens a window. On to what a very ordinary group of people were doing really you know it was the people living there a lot of people trading but also people working in pubs and people servicing the trades people the merchants and they were writing about everything you can possibly imagine you know there's business correspondence there is political intrigue there are curses there's pub banter you know there are people like competing with each other to see you can write the dirtiest. Little riff on their name there's quotes of Latin poetry you know it's such a diverse group of inscriptions and it survives in this very particular context we don't really know if that was the case across the rest of Scandinavia but it's a possibility you know that there were these highly literate groups of ordinary people using writing in their everyday lives and all you needed for it whereas Latin writing culture manuscript culture you need expensive parchment you need a quail you need ink all you needed was a knife and a little bit of wood you know so anybody had access to this kind of literacy so it represents it yeah a different kind of of letter person from the medieval period as well. I mean there's so much that I wanted to get into there I mean I think the first one is like as soon as you said waterlogged context my heart started racing if there is anything that we can get through to the listeners of this show if you hear a scholar talking about waterlogged excavations like you should be really excited about that because I mean there's going to be some cool stuff coming out like the Roman for the Vindalanda which is another place where we have you know kind of ordinary everyday writing the kind of stuff that very rarely survives medieval York another good example of this I am. I am not garad to right what are the so like not a lot of places but it doesn't strike me as a coincidence and this is I don't have to make qualifications about these arguments because I'm not being peer reviewed but it's really strikes me that pretty much any time we have access to that kind of everyday literacy it's so much wider reaching than our assumptions would lead us to believe. Yeah absolutely until until the Bergen excavations really scholars understood that a kind of limited range of literacy continued into the medieval period another another great context though is which isn't in waterlogged ground but is again a very special preservation context that the wooden stave churches which only survive in Norway you know and there in the surviving churches we have a lot of this graffiti that was written by parishioners in church and again that's a very informal context. You know as people talking about gossip it's people sometimes the priests seems to have been writing as well and sometimes there's slander written about the priest and so yeah these two context I think together the stave churches and medieval Bergen suggests that yeah there were ordinary people ordinary communities using ruins extensively and a long time after the introduction of Latin written culture and in fact one thing I found really interesting is that the Runex trip doesn't seem to have been a very interesting thing. The Runex trip doesn't seem to have kind of died a death on contact with the Roman alphabet it seems to have had a renaissance you know the influence of Roman writing and the fact that Roman writing was used when all these new and various context I think that that really served as an impetus for Runex literacy to kind of explode as well and it was only in the centuries afterwards that kind of Roman writing it's dominant basically displaced the Runex writing system. A lot of people think that Roman came along, Runex disappeared but actually the story is Roman came along, Runex peaked and for several centuries we used extensively and then they kind of died out over time. That is so fascinating. I mean so I want to turn really quick to a functional thing that you mentioned you said so that Runex are really well suited for use in stone and wood. What is it about them that makes them suited for those media? Well for wood and a lot of people a lot of scholars will still say that Runex were probably developed for writing on wood and that's been queried recently but basically Runex certainly in the in the older form of the alphabet the older Fufa they tend to use straight lines and they tend to avoid horizontal marks and if you imagine writing on a piece of wood with a very pronounced grain like pine. If you wrote any horizontal mark it would disappear into the grain so it makes sense that you just have verticals and diagonals and that's kind of why the Runex script looks very angular and all the imitations of the Runex script like Tolkien's Rune's also borrow that kind of very angular shape. So that's one reason the kind of development of Runex is associated with writing on wood but also if you think about carving on to stone as well carving straight lines is much easier than carving a curved line. But it's also to do with the kind of things that we find in the earliest record you know that some we were talking about durable objects we're talking about bone we're talking about metal we're talking about stone. We're not talking so much about wood because it simply hasn't been preserved from that period or very rarely but a lot of people think that wood was the kind of original medium for the writing of Rune so that's the reason for its very angular shape. So let's go back to the very beginning here one of the things that I really loved about the book was how much effort you put into putting this Runex writing into the actual social and cultural context in which people used it so when and where did people start doing this do we get any sense for what the origins of Runex writing are. Now that is a very difficult question I knew I knew it was going to be I knew it was going to be that that's kind of the million dollar question in Runeology and if anyone was willing to give a million dollars to Runeology then that would be the question they'd want answered right where did Rune's begin and why did they come about so we know roughly where Rune's originated from and it depends if you ask Runeologist it depends whether based the answer they'll give you so if you ask a German Runeologist they'll say well Rune's. They'll say well Rune's developed around the Rhine the upper Rhine you know if you ask a Danish Runeologist it's definitely Southern Denmark and now even in Norway there's some evidence the rooms we use a lot earlier than we thought you know there are competing theories about where Rune's developed but for me the most compelling is probably along the border with the northern the northern border of the Roman Empire basically the Roman Limes and along that northern border there would have been a lot of trade there would have been a lot of mercenaries for example co-opted into the Roman legions from southern Denmark in particular and they would have encountered Roman writing and they would have returned with possibly even with inscribed objects but certainly with an understanding of the importance that the Roman script played to the Roman Empire and for whatever reason they decided not simply to borrow the Roman alphabet but to make something of their own and again we don't know why that is you know we don't know why that is you know we don't know why they didn't just borrow the Roman alphabet wholesale is it because they had an imperfect understanding of it did they encounter Roman script and understand the concept but not remember the characters and do something do something of their own always a deliberate decision like we want something that is not associated with the Roman Empire we want something that's associated with Germanic speaking cultures and for that reason they deliver the Roman Empire and they gave names to the letters as well which the Roman alphabet doesn't have Greek does have of course but the Roman alphabet doesn't so they did a lot of very interesting things whoever developed the Runeck alphabet but we don't know was it a group of people was it an individual you know when was it we've kind of narrowed it down probably to the first century of the common era but again some people argue for slightly earlier some people argue for slightly later and we also have the earliest evidence or the earliest data in description is from around 150 and how long does a script need to be an operation before you start finding the examples of it being used on an everyday object you know was it two generations before it kind of bedded in or did it spread really quickly and is that very close to the date for the origin of the script so there are all these questions which with every kind of new find early find gets refined a little bit but we still don't have the answers to it probably I'm in Dravama and in the latest season of the spy who we open the file on Larry chin the spy who outplayed Nixon for decades chin was embedded deep inside US intelligence then comes an opportunity Richard Nixon's secret plan to reopen relations with China information chin can place directly into mouse hands but the CIA has a weapon of their own a Chinese mole ready to defect how long until chin's giggas up follow the spy who now wherever you listen to podcasts for the listeners these are common problems that everybody has with any writing system that you're trying to decipher anywhere on the planet like that's not specific to runes because people have the same discussions about oh god this is something I just covered a lot in my book the the origins of the Chinese oracle bone script used by the shong dynasty and like there you get this sudden explosion of texts around 1250 BC like thousands and thousands of texts and so some scholars say well it must have been in operation in everyday media that haven't survived for centuries before this to produce that kind of explosion of use of what appears to be a mature script the alternative is no maybe they just moved real quick and it was very useful for the specific purpose and it kind of exploded in popularity at the specific time and we don't we just don't know the answer yeah like if you work in social linguistics and and the development of scripts you've got to be comfortable with a little bit of uncertainty absolutely yeah the yeah and one thing that's particularly interesting I think about about the runes is that they didn't even try to copy the types of uses of the Roman script like they they didn't follow it for administration they didn't throw it for record keeping or for sending letters or for recording literature and these are kind of the big the big narratives as you know very well you know the big narratives of why scripts are adopted by the Egyptians by the Phoenicians by the Greeks by the Romans but it seems to have been used in a really different way amongst Germanic people they used it for private communication for really short often inscrutable inscriptions weren't really interested in using it for the the kind of imperial uses that Rome was using it for it may have been a kind of status symbol it may have been a way of signaling their authority or you know that they had they have this knowledge that other people didn't possess but I'm and the question of how quickly gets adopted as well like if it was a question that spread amongst the elites which I think is the kind of general consensus it could have spread really really quickly you know once one group adopted it there was a lot of interplay between these different tribal groups you know once a visiting delegation from one tribe saw the use that would have taken it back and it could have spread you know within within a generation easily I think across northern Europe I mean great great parallel there with the goals and the spread of Greek scripts to the goals that appears to have been a very rapid elite mediated process and this brings me around to something I want to talk about which kind of the broader context of iron age Europe in which these developments are taking place like I have a lot I have a lot of thoughts I spent a lot of time working on the Roman frontiers over the years so I was really stoked to talk about this but along the frontiers the best way to understand is that they're not a barrier there is zone of interaction where people are going back and forth in both directions and quite frankly people living on both sides of the frontier for some distance have more in common with each other than people who are living a long distance away from it and for their Germanic speakers who are interacting with the Roman world they're not interacting with like the city of Rome or mainstream Roman elite culture they're interacting with the military context they are by and large interacting with the Roman army as an institution which has its own sense for how literacy ought to be used and just spitball but it doesn't strike me as a coincidence that the uses that they were putting the script you were so different from what the Romans were and that you're talking about the group most likely to have developed a script as the group that is most likely to have been in intense contact with the Romans who would have been well aware of what the Romans did with it like they would have seen guys writing things down on scrolls like they would they would have known that these people weren't fools it really seems deliberate to me that they were trying to mark off an aspect of identity mark off some sort of difference from the Romans from their social infarriers that would be my guess like absolutely yeah and it must have had a social currency in order to spread as rapidly and as widely as it did because you know we're talking about within generation ever seen southern Norway we have huge geographical spread for the earliest inscriptions we have descriptions from what is now Ukraine we have inscriptions from Bosnia you know from the Netherlands so this huge geographical area very different tribes very different cultures and using a very remarkably similar version of the script and remarkably similar orthography and there was some kind of standard that they were all sticking to and for that to be you know that there wasn't obviously they didn't have the kind of cultural integration of the Roman Empire there must have been some really compelling social narrative associated with the elites I think for this script to have been taken up so widely and I think that kind of plays into some people who think that there was maybe a sacred aspect of this but maybe it was to do with you know a kind of religious elites that maybe cross tribal boundaries but I'm not sure you know I think if you think about the Brachtia which we might talk about yeah yeah so tell me tell me about the Brachtia because this is one of the major contexts in which we see early Runeck writing exactly in the in the migration period so this was a kind of trend that that seems to have developed from Roman coins so Brachtia is a small gold disc basically like little medallions and they're often based on Roman coins they often have a little figure which has sometimes been associated with Odin on the front of them and quite a few of them have Runeck inscriptions which are generally short which usually refer to for example they mention the word 'Alu' which might be a kind of a sacred or a cultic word associated perhaps with ale and with with beer they have 'Laucar' which is probably 'Leak' so that may have been another kind of thing involved in ritual or initiation and sometimes they have more extensive inscriptions so there's one that was discovered quite recently that says he is Odin's man and it's the first reference we have to Odin and it's probably referring to you know the person who gave the medallion or the person who wore the Brachtia that they were dedicated to Odin but the interesting thing about these Brachtia is again they spread really widely and they were in use for kind of 150 years across this huge area and they seem to have been adopted by everyone at the same time or not quite but certainly adopted very very quickly and I think that just shows how fashions spread you know amongst Germanic cultures that you know one person decided to copy a Roman coin and make a medallion and rewarded to their followers and suddenly this was happening across the North so yeah. It's something that I think can be hard for lay people who haven't spent a lot of time on this period to understand is we tend to think of this binary opposition between Romans and barbarians between what's on one side of the frontier and what's on the other side of the frontier and when we think about the interactions between those groups we tend to focus on barbarian and Roman interaction and what's going back and forth between the Germanic speaking world and the Roman world but like the Germanic speaking world is not a monolith there are different tribal groups there groups that may speak the same language but are have a blood feud with each other that goes back generations there are ties of trade there are slave raids there are full blown wars there are marriage like there is this whole gamut of complex interactions between pretty sophisticated iron age agro-pastoral groups living beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire these people are not simple they are they are they have a fully developed metal working society they have a complex subsistence regime their populations are rising in this period this is a sophisticated world is just one that has not given us a wealth of textual material that we can use to understand it absolutely and you only have to look at I know of course I know this very well because I teach bear will regularly but bear will for a great example of the complexity of that tribal world even though it's a kind of projection from from a later period but yeah absolutely a very very complex society or set of societies and I loved your your characterization of the Roman francier as a zone of interest and I think that's exactly it you know that there there was so much passing back and forth and we see that in the bulk deposits where again a very important context for the discovery of the earliest runes that we have a lot of Roman weaponry some of it was clearly brought from the Roman Empire some of it was copied you know that there was huge into play and particularly I think in the military cultures of the time you know that there was the mercenaries were serving in the Roman Empire and then going back and engaging in their own kind of tribal struggles when they got back home and of course they were going to bring other influences with them including knowledge of writing it's one of the things I find so fascinating about cultural interaction is a thing is you can never be sure what aspects when you have cultural contact are going to be adopted wholesale are going to be adopted for and seemingly carried over directly but with entirely different reasons behind it or the cases where you see I mean what's been called like schismogenesis right where you see an aspect of the other culture and you say well I don't like that I'm not that right and and so you get this really strong reaction to what you're seeing and an attempt to distinguish yourself from that and the fundamentally different uses of rune script it's it seems to me that it kind of falls into that category that you have these people who are taking on so much from the Roman world and their weaponry I mean like you assume tons of them are probably bilingual you assume that there's intermarriages happening back and forth that some of these chiefed ins who were coming back and warring against their neighbors also hold a Roman military rank there's all sorts of stuff happening there and you can see somebody thinking well in this aspect we're not going to do what they're doing we may be taking this other stuff but not this one. Yeah yeah yeah and yeah again we tend to tend to think that anti imperialism began in the reaction to the the kind of British empire but no of course there was anti imperial sentiment in the in the early middle ages or in the in the Roman I and age I should say so yeah yeah that kind of deliberate distinguishing of we are not the Romans we are not part of this empire I think is really important for the beginnings of running writing. So let's talk a little bit about the language so what language or languages is Runeck writing and coding I mean obviously this is going to change over time as language is developed when we start off and we look at these inscriptions what language are we actually looking at. We're looking at proto Germanic for the earliest which as the names suggests you know is the earliest form of Germanic languages and then you know from about 400 onwards in the Scandinavian context we can talk about proto Scandinavian or proto Norse which again is the kind of earliest recorded version of what will become old Norse but then we see ruins used in later periods for proto-old English and later old English we see it used for Gothic we see inscription. In Latin as well you know so again that was one of the kind of misconceptions that I wanted to push back on a little bit in the book was that. Runes are often described as a language you know and there is no Runeck language like ruins are a system and you can write in you know Portuguese if you wanted to in in ruins that there's nothing nothing preventing that so. So ruins were developed for the writing of Germanic languages originally and that they're particularly it's particularly suited to that so in the earliest version of the alphabet there seems to be more or less of one or on one correspondence between Runeck letters and sounds in the language so this kind of is sometimes called the perfect fit and you know as the language changed and as you know. The proto-gematic broke up into the various branches of Germanic languages it became less of a one or one correspondence and that kind of linguistic change particularly just prior to the Viking age when old Norse was developing seems to have triggered like really fundamental changes in the Runeck alphabet as well and across the water in England as well the development of old English seems again to have necessitated a rethink of the writing system. And again that goes back to the fact that this was a functional script you know it was there for writing it wasn't there as a symbolic thing it wasn't there as a kind of magic thing for casting lots is primary function was to represent spoken language in written form and when the language develops the script had to change you know to accommodate that so. And again this is a bit of a mystery when we're not sure exactly why this happened we know that it was a response to language change but just prior to the Viking age the script was reduced from 28 characters to 16 so it was you know completely lost its its one to one correspondence and all of a sudden one letter could represent you know two or three sounds in the language so it made it much more difficult to interpret the Runeck inscriptions written in this language. And the script was written in this condensed alphabet perhaps made it much easier to write the inscriptions to learn how to write the inscriptions and then the opposite happened in England that they decided OK in response to language change we're going to expand the repertoire of letters and we're going to have them on and there was some 31 32 letters in the in the old English food. Again those changes to the structure of the alphabet again speak to linguistic change they speak to cultural change they speak to the migration of peoples into England and I think it's fascinating to look at that history from the view of the script as a different way of seeing it. And this is one of the truly wonderful things if you are interested in this period and you're interested in the movements of people in the movements of languages and cultural change over time and space that compared to 30 years ago you have so many more tools for tracking that and one of the things this was this is about almost 20 years ago now I was I was doing a seminar with Michael McCormick who is a Harvard he wrote the origins of the European economy he was one of the first. Proponents of like concilian studies between scientific methods and history and I remember asking him in this seminar why he thought all those bodies of evidence needed to agree with each other because what he was looking for were correspondences between different source spaces between looking at like Greenland ice cores and mentions of volcanic eruptions and I remember asking him like the different source spaces can speak to different aspects of social cultural migratory processes like you shouldn't expect your source spaces to tell the same thing. And you should look at your source spaces because they're telling you about different aspects of reality and expect them to tell you different things and where they disagree with one another is going to be every bit is interesting is where they do lineup and he kind of looked at me for a second then he kind of went on with what he was doing I don't think he was especially interested in talking about it but like I've always thought about that that like you shouldn't expect language genetics. And material culture to tell you the same story about what people are doing in any given time and place because different things are happening at different levels it's layers it's textures you know but language is one that when you have access to it it tells you so much about what people are up to so it can complicate those other stories it can tell you that what you know from another story is right but then it also gives you this direct insight onto social processes and what people are actually up to and concerned about yeah and one thing relates to the world. I think related that that I think is fascinating is some new finds that have been popping up in England in late anglosax in England where we've been told you know people had been Christian for hundreds and hundreds of years and where there's absolutely no English mythology preserved you know as was a great bug bear of Tolkien's but then we're finding these these lead tablets which seem to have been personal charms. Now to and possibly a third one have cropped up which you're against a dwarf so there these kind of personal charms written in ruins and dwarves is still understood as the source of illness and that they need to be ruins need to be used to to combat them you know in late anglosax in England so these folk traditions were continuing kind of under the radar of you know well obviously the church wasn't interested in recording these traditions but we do have them preserved in ruins and those things are not going to be a lot of things. And those things are turning up because of a generally because of metal detecting in England which is a contentious subject but it is lead into a lot of Runeck inscriptions popping out of the ground and it's changing our impression you know and this is one thing about this book is I may have to revise it in five years to account for all the new things that will have popped out of the ground in that time. But as somebody who just wrote a book that is almost certainly going to be obsolete within a few years like I just I just wrote a big thing on prehistory from the ice age to the Bronze Age and I'm sure most of it will be wrong in in before too long and I knew that going into writing the book but that's how you know is subject is worth covering that's how you know it's exciting and interesting and there are cool things happening and I mean like you know I took a took a stab at Runeck writing when in 2007 2008. A lot of this stuff that you talk about in this book was not well known then or not widely discussed or the script a lot of the inscriptions themselves then we're not accessible. Digitization has made a huge difference this year quantity of finds that you mentioned different contexts preservation context like Runeck writing is a fascinating field in that you are actually getting more of it. The your corpus is expanding that's rare that doesn't happen that often exactly you're never going to get a new old English poem in a manuscript I mean it's virtually impossible but we did find a few years ago tweezers or a pinches or whatever which had a quote from a version of the old English Daniel or an episode in the old English Daniel a poetic quote. You know to 100 years earlier than the record in the manuscript so literature is turning up or at least literary quotes are turning up in ruins to this day so you know yeah if anything is going to kind of push forward the literary discourse and the linguistic discourse is the discovery of ruins yeah. This is why I could never stick solely to history is I got so tired of just knowing what the boundaries of the corpus were it really wore on me after why I was like this is what we got this is what we're working with like archaeology just is so interesting because you never know what's going to come out of the ground the next day and how much it could fundamentally change your conception of a whole period time place writing system. I mean I feel like we could do this for hours but you write really movingly in this book about your first time seeing a rune stone in its original setting near Uppsala in Sweden what was that like for you and now with all the experience that you have when you see one of these things I mean what kind what goes through your head is there an emotional response that you have or are you thinking about it professionally or you thinking about the original context what goes through your mind with that. I spend a lot of my time with my head in books and sitting in the office and it's kind of a very detached encounter with history and it can feel very remote and it can feel very well trodden as you said and then when you encounter something you know particularly if it's a new find and I've been lucky enough to be involved with kind of interpreting a few new finds from the English corpus but suddenly you're you're kind of face to face with this this voice from the past you know with this physical object that you're trying to encode and. It gives you that immediate connection with the past and I had a similar experience in that first time I went to Sweden and I did most of my training in Oxford where there are very few ruins apart from a couple of rune stones in the Ashmolian museum but going to Sweden and tracking to Annanthurg it was which is this wonderful double ship setting there's a the largest burial mound in Sweden and part of this kind of memorial to the city of Sweden. Memorial context is a really conscription and it's quite a moving inscription because it's some it's a father commemorate in the death of his son and when I was there kind of in front of the room so I I remembered that scene from from the two towers film you know with the you know no no parents should have to bury a child you know and it's kind of that universal sentiment really and even though it's a very formulaic a lot of the Viking age inscriptions say the same thing they said. So and so raised this room stone for so and so and so and so wrote it but then there was that personal context and you could see the kind of attempt to really establish this loss for eternity you know you see the kind of durability of the room stones you see that you can still read the message after a thousand years you know and you realize what that person was trying to do by raising this room stone which was to establish their legacy and to keep their name in people's memory. And then on the other side you've got this wonderful ship setting which is probably to do with sending the soul to the afterlife you know and and it's such a such a moving experience really and I think everyone who has an interest in rooms to try and encounter a Swedish room stone in the wild because they really are quite special there they're often in the same place they were first raised you know so that's very special. Well for all of the listeners you have it here it is now incumbent upon you to take a trip to Sweden and encounter a room stone in its original setting that's your homework for for each and every one of you listen into this I expect to hear some reports back up no seriously I mean what you just pointed to there is that's what history is about it's like these are real people they were living breathing people they were no different from you were me and their capacities in what made them human. And every once in a while not that often not as often as we would like you can kind of reach through the centuries the millennium you can you can feel something real and I think that was what appealed to me so much about this book is that it is a whole study of a thing that ties you directly back to things that people were actually physically doing hundreds or thousands of years ago and that rules that's so cool. I'm so happy that you wrote this and you know kind of by way of conclusion is there anything that you want people to know about rooms the after writing this book and dedicating your life to this topic what do you want people to go away from this with. Well I think it's kind of circling back to that that first discussion we had which was really about I suppose that the history and what the rooms can tell us about about people about individuals about the changes that happen in Europe about the these great ages of migration about the development of societies the development of English literature you know this is as exciting as any kind of fantasy interpretation of the rooms and that I love it. People could take away as well the fact that the first literature in English was written in ruins and don't anyone tell you it was Shakespeare it was sure so it was very worth it. The first recorded English literature is in the Rhinick script and I think that should be remembered and the Christian context should be remembered as well you know the fact that this wasn't inimical to Christianity by any means you know there's a really famous Anglo-Saxon artifact that St. Cuthbert's coffin St. Cuthbert was the most important native saint in early medieval England you know at least until sent Edmund and his coffin carried ruins you know that the apostles were named in ruins so Christianity adopted the Rhinick script wholesale it wasn't a pagan script and yeah I just like people to focus on the amazing things that we can learn through ruins rather than trying to create meanings that are very hard to find any evidence for the historical record. It's meaningful enough without those interpretations tacked on it. Again the book is ruins a concise history professor Birkett I highly recommend the book thank you so much for coming on and having this fascinating discussion I really enjoyed this. Me too is an absolute pleasure thank you so much. Follow Tides of History on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts you can listen to all episodes of Tides of History add free by joining Audible. Thanks so much for joining me today be sure and hit me up if you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on Tides or something you'd like to see. You can find me on Twitter at Patrick_Wyman or on Facebook at PatrickWyman MMA or on Instagram at Wyman_Patrick. I write on other topics at PatrickWyman.substac.com Tides of History is written and narrated by me Patrick Wymbe. The sound engineer is Sergio Enrique's Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffney from Wondery the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening until next time from Wondery this has been Tides of History.