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I'm joined by Dr. Judith Yesh, Professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham.

Her research has focused on a wide range of topics, including Old Norse sagas, poetry,

Roonic Inscriptions, and Literature and Culture of Norway in Scandinavian, Scotland.

She has written two books called Women in the Viking Age and the Viking Diaspora. Dr. Judith

Gash, thank you so much for joining me today. Hello. So our topic of discussion today,

as the title might suggest, is Scandinavian runic inscriptions in Britain and Ireland.

Now, runes are something that I know a lot of people get very excited about,

and I know they're quite hard to define as well, but I guess sort of a basic question,

sort of clearing up some confusion that many folks have, or what are the runes?

Well, I should start by saying, I get excited by runes, too, so that's perfectly,

that's perfectly understandable and okay.

I think what you're referring to is people imagine runes to have all kinds of secret and magical purposes.

In fact, runes are nothing more or nothing less than an alphabetic system of writing.

The earliest surviving run runeanic conscriptions come from about 160 AD.

We don't know if they're much older than that, I suspect not.

And then runes were used right the way through until about 1,500.

So there are a form of writing that were used in those parts of Europe where

people spoke a Germanic language. So they are designed to suit the Germanic languages.

And we have runic inscriptions from across the Germanic world. So Germany, Denmark, Norway,

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