The point should not be overstated, but it is striking that the key tenets of the new societies that rose from the Migration Period crisis seem to have included a marked rise in militaristic ideology, infused with uncompromising codes of honour, oath-bound loyalty, and the obligations of violent redress. These values were expressed in the growth of

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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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