The Runic characters were of various kinds.  They were chiefly used for magical purposes.  The noxious, or, as they called them, the bitter runes, were employed to bring various evils on their enemies; the favorable averted misfortune.  Some were medicinal, others employed to win love, etc.  In later times they were frequently used for inscriptions, of which more than a thousand have been found.  The language is a dialect of the Gothic, called Norse, still in use in Iceland.  The inscriptions may therefore be read with certainty, but hitherto very few have been found which throw the least light on history.  They are mostly epitaphs on tombstones.

Gray’s ode on the “Descent of Odin” contains an allusion to the use of Runic letters for incantation: 

    “Facing to the northern clime,
    Thrice he traced the Runic rhyme;
    Thrice pronounced, in accents dread,
    The thrilling verse that wakes the dead,
    Till from out the hollow ground
    Slowly breathed a sullen sound.”

THE SKALDS

The Skalds were the bards and poets of the nation, a very important class of men in all communities in an early stage of civilization.  They are the depositaries of whatever historic lore there is, and it is their office to mingle something of intellectual gratification with the rude feasts of the warriors, by rehearsing, with such accompaniments of poetry and music as their skill can afford, the exploits of their heroes living or dead.  The compositions of the Skalds were called Sagas, many of which have come down to us, and contain valuable materials of history, and a faithful picture of the state of society at the time to which they relate.

ICELAND

The Eddas and Sagas have come to us from Iceland.  The following extract from Carlyle’s lectures on “Heroes and Hero Worship” gives an animated account of the region where the strange stories we have been reading had their origin.  Let the reader contrast it for a moment with Greece, the parent of classical mythology: 

“In that strange island, Iceland,—­burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea, a wild land of barrenness and lava, swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild, gleaming beauty in summer time, towering up there stern and grim in the North Ocean, with its snow yokuls [mountains], roaring geysers [boiling springs], sulphur pools, and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste, chaotic battlefield of Frost and Fire,—­where, of all places, we least looked for literature or written memorials,—­the record of these things was written down.  On the seaboard of this wild land is a rim of grassy country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in them and uttered musically their thoughts.  Much would be lost had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been discovered by the Northmen!”