Click on the Norse Runestone to learn more about this alphabetic script.

Viking letters were known as Runes. Vikings scraped their letters onto wood or stone. All of their runes were made out of straight lines because it was easier to draw straight lines on stone rather than circular ones. Runes were also used for fortune tellers who travelled from village to village, giving people their horoscopes and things like that. The rune alphabet was known as "Futhark." The order to their letters does not go A,B,C,D,E etc. because ours is based on Latin, but theirs goes, F,U,TII,A,R,K./

The Viking sagas weren't written down on paper, they were memorised and passed down from story teller to story teller. It was only when the Viking raids were ended, that they were written down in Latin, that was about in the year 200. The runic alphabet was reduced to just ~ 6 letters around the year of 800 A.D. One of their letters can have several sounds like "u", rune could either be read as u, 00, y, w or 0. No one knows why they shortened their alphabet this way.

The runes were written on many different things such as on a comb they would write "kabr", which means comb, and "Odin", would be written on a piece of human skull. There were many other strange things written on strange things like, "kiss me", was found on a bone.

When most of the Vikings had become Christian, there were rune stones set up in memory for those who died, the Runic alphabet was written on thtem.