The Ellestad stone, inscribed between AD 500 and 700, appears to include encrypted runes
Unknown/Creative Commons
People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought.
In runic writing systems, each rune can represent both a sound and a word. For example, in an early runic system called the Elder Futhark, the rune that corresponds to the letter S also means “sun”.
It is generally possible to translate runes into modern languages. But we have long known that in the Viking period, starting in roughly AD 800, runes were sometimes encrypted, so the text isn’t decipherable. One of the most famous examples is the Rök runestone in Sweden, which was erected in the late 800s and contains a lengthy, encrypted runic text. No one has been able to convincingly decipher it.
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