Sublime

After the beginning of the raids in the eighth century, foreign loot was sometimes repurposed as jewellery—book mounts from ecclesiastical volumes turned into brooches, English sword fittings similarly remade, coins pierced and hung on necklaces. In Norway there is an Irish or Scottish reliquary, almost certainly plundered from a monastery, that

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

One of the Eddic poems, the Lay of Sigrdrifa, includes a detailed list of runes for special purposes—for protection in battle, to ease childbirth (“they shall be cut on the palms and clasped on the joints”), to heal, and to travel safely over the sea (“on the prow they must be cut and on the rudder, and burnt into the oar with fire”). There are