Skandinaviskt Arkeologiforum

Sweden’s Rök runestone bears the longest runic inscription in existence—some 760 runes divided into 28 lines—and dates to around A.D. 800. The stone’s inscription has defied attempts to understand it since the mid-nineteenth century, but now a team of researchers has developed a new interpretation that ties it to themes in Norse mythology and to a devastating sixth-century climate crisis. In this video, Henrik Williams, a runologist at Uppsala University, reads the Rök’s inscription aloud.