Welcome to the Nordic mythology podcast, I'm Daniel Farund of the Kumb horns Vodin. And today I'm joined by Crystal Zilma. So Crystal, thank you for taking the time on Valentine's Day of all days to come and talk to me. Thank you for inviting me.

It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Do you just want to quickly give a little

introduction to who you are, what you specialize in and what we're going to talk about I guess today.

Yeah, my name is Crystal and I am a runologist. This is a fancy word for somebody who is a scholar doing

a runic studies.

So my field of expertise is ronology.

And I work as a professor at the Museum of Cultural History, which is part of the University of

of Oslo in Norway.

And I think I can say that I assume that the reason you invited me to join you here.

Tonight is a very interesting and also quite sensational,

Roonik find that the world first learned about in January 2022.

A Roonstone.

The world's oldest Roonstone, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, that's correct. As scholars of course we are careful with what kind of words we choose and when we were going public with these news as well on beforehand we were discussing

can we actually say that but in this case we did find that we can say that it is the world

oldest dated room stone and meaning basically a stone where we have been able to determine how old the stone actually is.

Okay, okay I'm going to save those questions because I've got a bunch, even just on how you date something.

Firstly, I have to ask what made you choose studying ruins in the first place?

Because it, you know, I'm, you know, I own a business in this in kind of in this whole sphere and the one thing I see argued about more than any other is Runes and misconceptions it seems to be so complicated so what made you choose that one?

It's not necessarily complicated but but it's maybe that ruins, it's a fascinating topic of course and rooms attract a lot of attention.

So when we went public with this news as well, I was already prepared that of course it will attract a lot of different kind of attention as well, ranging from very positive feedback to the wildest theories you can imagine,

but we can get back to that. But the reason for me becoming a chronologist, well, you know, life is in many ways full of random chances and the paths you choose,

sometimes you might start doing something and then you end up somewhere completely different, something that you may have not had mind at all to start with.

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