In all, many thousands of runic inscriptions have come down to us, mostly in the form of messages carefully engraved onto free-standing rocks—the famous ‘runestones’ mentioned here many times—in texts set within beautiful borders and other designs of writhing beasts and symbols. Originally painted in bright colours, sometimes the designs and

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Offerings on the platforms most commonly include cattle, but also pigs, dogs, and especially horses. Most of them were killed with blows to the head, in some cases even with stone axes that date from the Neolithic, made thousands of years before the Vikings. Tools like these were evidently picked up in the fields by Viking-Age people just as they

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