Wimmer Sorts the Runestones Into a Working Alphabet

Runology classifies and dates the surviving corpus of runic inscriptions, carved or incised on stone, metal and wood across Germanic and especially Scandinavian regions, by letterform and by which futhark, the runic alphabet variant in use, a given inscription employs. The Danish philologist Ludvig Wimmer gave the discipline its first systematic classification in his 1887 study Die Runenschrift, establishing the sequence of futhark variants used across different periods and regions and providing runology with the comparative framework it still relies on to date an undated inscription by its script alone.

Runic inscriptions are contemporary, firsthand religious evidence from the pre-Christian and early Christian Norse and Germanic world, in a way the later Icelandic sagas and eddas, written down centuries afterward, are not, recording invocations to gods, memorial formulas and occasional magical or protective texts in the words of people who were still practicing the religion described. The atlas treats runological findings as an independent and earlier check on claims about Norse and Germanic religious practice that otherwise rest on medieval literary sources composed well after Christianization.