Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions

Terje Spurkland is a specialist in runology and Scandinavian historical linguistics, and this book, translated into English by Betsy van der Hoek and published by Boydell Press, is an academic survey of runic writing and inscriptions specifically in Norway across the whole period runes were used there. Its method is philological, reading the inscriptions themselves and dating and interpreting them against known runic alphabets and Old Norse language change. Its strength is specificity, it is not a general book about runes everywhere but a focused study grounded in the Norwegian corpus of actual carved texts. Its limit follows from that same focus, a reader wanting Anglo-Saxon runes or later esoteric reinterpretations of runes will need a different source, since this book stays inside the linguistic and historical evidence of the inscriptions themselves.