The Ellestad stone, inscribed between AD 500 and 700, appears to include encrypted runes
Unknown/Creative Commons
People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought.
In runic writing systems, each rune can represent both a sound and a word. For example, in an early runic system called the Elder Futhark, the rune that corresponds to the letter S also means “sun”.
It is generally possible to translate runes into modern languages. But we have long known that …
