Scott’s Model of Writing and Coercion in Early States, and Its Applicability in Scandinavia

James Scott’s oeuvre provides a departure point for this article, especially his recent Against the Grain. Scott argues forcefully for the oppressive role of literacy in early states. His novel contribution is that writing and political coercion are dialectically encouraged by the cultivation of cereals as an economic base. “…why have no ‘lentil states,’ chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record?” he asks.Footnote ⁹ The answer, he maintains, is that cereals produce crops that are (1) clearly visible to tax inspectors, and (2) can be harvested, transported long distances, and stored with relatively little worry about spoilage. This is not true of crops which produce their carbohydrates underground, like tubers, or hide their carbohydrates under foliage, like legumes.

Once the state sees cereals—something it can measure, extract, and redistribute in the form of rations—it needs a technology to oversee the process. That technology is writing, and so the bureaucrat is born. Their power is underwritten by the armed overseer or soldier, whose beer and porridge rations come out of the same grain that the bureaucrat administers. Beginning with counting sheaves of grain, the bureaucrat quickly develops a glyphic repertoire to administer other resources, and indeed to administer other human beings, either by moving about slaves or through issuing written orders and communiques to his fellow bureaucrats. This is why, Scott reasons, early writing tended to be pictographic or logo-syllabic: “Neither in China nor in Mesopotamia was writing originally devised as a means of representing speech.”Footnote ¹⁰ It was originally devised to do things with cereals and do things with people who could be fed with processed forms of those cereals, either beer, bread or porridge.Footnote ¹¹

The early states of the fertile crescent were obviously different to the early states of Scandinavia. Mesopotamian polities were essentially city states, and later networks of cities. A walled city governed a rural hinterland. Urban settlements in Scandinavia, from about 500–800, were limited to trading emporia. In places such as Ribe in Denmark and Birka in Sweden, the great and the good lived in townhouses only during the peak commercial seasons.Footnote ¹² It has been suggested, on the basis of later, post-Viking Age parishes, that conurbations such as Århus and Hedeby may have exercised extractive power over their hinterlands, but this is speculative.Footnote ¹³ The basic social unit in Scandinavia prior to about 800 was not the city but the farmstead, called in runic inscriptions a býr. Footnote ¹⁴ It appears that the term could describe independent smallholdings, farmsteads that were part of manors, and perhaps manors themselves,Footnote ¹⁵ although the extent of manorialism in the Viking Age has been debated.Footnote ¹⁶

The first states in Mesopotamia and the first states in Scandinavia differed greatly in form and durability. Indeed, political power in the north was so diffuse and limited in geographic reach that some have questioned whether one can speak of “states” at all before at least 950–1000. Should we not rather speak of “big men” of the type that Marshall Sahlins famously identified in Melanesia.Footnote ¹⁷ The Norwegian debate over state formation has been particularly indicative of how Sahlins’s typology might shape discussion of the Viking Age.Footnote ¹⁸ Sverre Bagge argued that, prior to the High Middle Ages, Norway was a “pre-state society” (førstatlig samfunn) of Sahlinsian big men.Footnote ¹⁹ Some twenty years later, an outcrop of articles responded by taking up the question of how great the powers of Norwegian rulers of the 900s were.Footnote ²⁰ If their authority was too extensive, Knut Helle thought, they represented “the state” rather than “the big man.”Footnote ²¹ It was countered that, even as late as King Óláfr Haraldsson (r. 1015–1028), the regent was still little more than a big man if he “joined supporters to himself by dint of charisma and generosity, but lost power when the resources ran dry … [and] had no institutionalised power based on compelled offerings” (knyttet tilhengere til seg ved hjelp avkarisma og generøsitet, men som mistet makten når ressursene tok slutt [og] ikke hadde noen institusjonalisert makt, basert på tvungne ytelser).Footnote ²² The debate raged on for some time, gradually ceasing to cite Sahlins as it perambulated the familiar stomping ground of Norwegian historians: the search for the origins of Norway.

For Sahlins, both the Melanesian big man and the Polynesian chieftain were often in tension with “the state.” For example, “Polynesian paramounts seemed inclined to might ‘eat the power of the government too much’”; that is to say, extract too much from their subjects and thereby provoke revolt which “proves the chiefdom’s undoing.”Footnote ²³ But I find this tension not to be intrinsic, and in some iterations (such as the debate between Bagge and Helle) to be chimeral. There are varying definitions of “the state,” but most strike similar chords. Weber notably called the state “the only human Gemeinschaft which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force,” though he admitted his definition was not suited for the premodern era.Footnote ²⁴ Tilly is more transhistorical: “Let us define states as coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories.”Footnote ²⁵ Speaking in the context of Viking Age Denmark, Randsborg opts simply for “a large, stable political unit with a high level of production.”Footnote ²⁶ Expanding on Engels’s definition, which admits Weber’s, Tilly’s, and Randsborg’s, I define “the state” as a superstructure which (1) persists over more than one generation; (2) encompasses the territory of more than one family; and (3) is capable of exercising control over the products of labor and the activities of the people within its borders.Footnote ²⁷ Sometimes, as Sahlins found, the big man may threaten such a state. But if a big man establishes control over an area, directs its production, and his instruments of power survive him, then according to the definitions given above, he has made himself the state without necessarily losing his “bigmanliness.” Put coarsely, a hairy Viking with a menacing sword arm may well make himself and his offspring a de facto state for a few generations. That their state might be extremely small (say, a particular peninsula or valley) should not distract us from its denizens’ experience of being subjected to stately power. Periods of statelessness or state collapse certainly occur, but very often there is a state to be found even in conditions which appear chaotic and fragmented. There is nearly always the presence of a strongest, wisest, or most ruthless person who exercises and consolidates authority. Less regularly, that person creates political structures that outlive them.

According to these criteria, it was probably in Denmark where the first Scandinavian states emerged, and they did so haltingly. Compared to Norway and Sweden, with their steep fjords, fast-flowing rivers, vast forests, mountain ridges, and enormous geographic scale, Denmark was relatively flat and easy to traverse: a more appealing canvas for those who would build states than could be found in Fennoscandia, with easier communication and more arable land.Footnote ²⁸ Still, the cohesion of Danish states was labored. An individual might achieve a monopoly on power over a wide geographical area for a while and be acknowledged by foreign powers as rex Danorum “king of the Danes”—only for more than one person to present themselves in the following year using the same title. For example, according to the Royal Frankish Annals, a Danish king named Hemmingus (ON Hęmmingr) seems to have inherited a fairly stable kingdom from Godofridus (ON Guðrøðr?) in the year 810.Footnote ²⁹ But by 812 the kingdom had become some sort of biumvirate under the kings Herioldus (ON Klakk-Haraldr) and Reginfridus (ON Ragnarr?) following a civil war.Footnote ³⁰ Two factions, loyalists and usurpers, then continued to attack each other until 821. To demonstrate how fluid Early Danish power structures could be, we should note that this Klakk-Haraldr, called a king of Denmark by our Latin annalist, is described by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241) using the title konungr af Jótlandi, “King of Jutland.”Footnote ³¹ One eccentric saga calls the same man only “jarl einn er réð fyrir Hollsetulandi,” “a certain earl who ruled over Holstein.”Footnote ³² EarlyMesopotamian states generally disappeared either because they were conquered by other states, became deurbanized owing to ecological changes, or were pillaged by nomads.Footnote ³³ Early Danish states simply collapsed back into the primordial goo of squabbling big men whence they came. Too many kings meant there was soon no king at all. As the Roskilde Chronicle (ca. 1140s) puts it:

We lack space to intrude on the debate about the valences of “Denmark” or “Danishness” in Viking Age statecraft.Footnote ³⁵ For our purposes, it is important only to stress that when I speak of a “Danish state” in the period around 800 and earlier I mean only “a state within the borders of today’s Denmark.” These states need not have controlled all of Denmark, though some probably did. Some of these states may well have characterized themselves as Danish or of the Danes. Others perhaps thought of themselves using identities which today are regional, such as Jutish,Footnote ³⁶ or were uninterested in ethnic designations at all. For example, the vikings who raided Nantes in 843 are called in Latin Westfaldingi, “People of Vestfold”; that is, a regional rather than a national identity such as “Norwegians.”Footnote ³⁷ As late as 1157, “Denmark” could be dismantled into Lego-like constituent kingdoms. Saxo Grammaticus (d. ca. 1220) wrote that Valdemar the Great:

If Scandinavia and Mesopotamia in their respective periods had quite different political histories, there was also a noteworthy difference in terms of the history of literacy. The people who devised cuneiform worked from a tabula rasa, save for some pictographic proto-writing.Footnote ³⁹ But by the time that states started to emerge in Denmark, about, say, AD 500 if we assume that the earliest portions of the Danevirke fortifications were the work of a state, alphabetic writing had existed for at least two thousand years, following the invention of the Canaanite alphabet ca. 1800–1500 BC.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, at that time alphabetic writing had been known to Germanic-speaking populations for at least six centuries. The Vimose comb, excavated on Fyn, features the Common Germanic word harja, which either meant “comb” or a man’s name, in the Elder Futhark script.Footnote ⁴¹ It dates from about AD 160. Still earlier, the Negau Helmet may show a Germanic name or noun phrase written in Etruscan script, probably from about 200 BC.Footnote ⁴² In Scandinavia, early states did not invent writing; it predated them, or, to speak figuratively, writing was reclining in the field and the state was built around it. Furthermore, that writing was not logo-syllabic, but alphabetic. Alphabets certainly can be used for administration; the bureaucratic landscape of the modern West is not hindered because it is not expressed in hieroglyphs. But alphabetic scripts are not tailor-made for administration in the same way that logo-syllabic scripts are.

Taxable Carbohydrates in Denmark

If Scott’s model is viable, none of the differences outlined above ought to affect its applicability to Scandinavia. Denmark in Late Antiquity and the Viking Age must have been “a cereal society” of the type which, Scott says, encourages exploitation and bureaucracy. Animal husbandry was also widely practiced, and milk was an important foodstuff, having been so since Antiquity.Footnote ⁴³ But this was obviously not a society that kept most of its calories “on the hoof,” as did the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Viking Age breads and other baked goods have been excavated and they contain barley, oats, wheat, and some rye.Footnote ⁴⁴ Occasionally loaves were made using peas, a legume that resists state inspection, according to Scott’s typology.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was apparently a marginal trend, though, and in any case some barley or wheat would have been required to make pea bread cohere. The Vikings were not hiding most of their calorific wealth under the ground or behind leaves. Precisely which cereal was the major source of carbohydrates in Viking Age Denmark has been debated. Bread alone cannot solve the problem because grain was also regularly consumed as porridge. In order to be preserved directly in the archaeological record, grain normally needs to be carbonized through accidental burning.Footnote ⁴⁶ This means that grains that are usually malted, for example barley, get overrepresented. Rye, which was normally not malted, is thus largely absent from surveys that look for carbonized grain.

However, one study considers both rare unburnt plant remains, in barns and latrines, including parts of the plant other than the germ, and impressions left by grains in ceramics. It suggests that by the Viking Age, rye constituted at least half and, in some areas, upwards of 70 percent of cereal consumption in Denmark.Footnote ⁴⁷ The rest was hulled barley (hordeum vulgare var. vulgare). As an aside, the same study indicated that naked barley (hordeum vulgare cf. var. nudum), more labor intensive and more flavorful than hulled, was a staple until around the first century BC, but that it declined in popularity throughout the same period that states started to emerge in Denmark during the Germanic Iron Age and disappeared entirely during the Viking Age. Was this because the farmsteads of the pre-Roman Iron Age were consuming the overwhelming majority of the cereals they produced, and were therefore incentivized to produce a more luxurious grain for their own enjoyment? Or was it perhaps because starting around 500 farmers increasingly saw their surpluses extracted by the elite, encouraging them to produce a “quick and dirty” yield?Footnote ⁴⁸ These are questions for another time. The important detail we have established here is that the agrarian landscape in Denmark was ripe for exploitation by a canny state. We will return to the issue of how able Early Danish states were to exploit their denizens. For now, it suffices to note that, if Scott is right, we should expect some form of bureaucratic organization. What might that have looked like?

A Typology of Administrative Labor

I define administration as any intellectual labor which is intended to make possible another, more important project. Bureaucracy is therefore a particular subset of administration, where administrators are psychologically alienated from the objects of their labor. Therefore, all bureaucracy is administration, but not all administration is bureaucracy. Happily, for present purposes this distinction is unimportant, and my arguments remain intact even if one considers “administrator” and “bureaucrat” to be synonymous. Although “administration” might be considered, in passing, to be one discrete use of runic literacy, compared to memorialization, graffiti, and so forth, we will need to be more detailed.Footnote ⁴⁹ The administrator can have one of three functions:

That runic script was used for administration is sometimes stated as obvious.Footnote ⁵⁰ Let us re-evaluate the sources for assessment and correspondence. Space prevents our considering evidence for certification here, but it has been demonstrated that it often took place without the use of writing, for example by messengers displaying tokens of authenticity such as rings and staves.Footnote ⁵¹ The runic artefacts of the Viking Age that have survived into our own time reveal nothing of assessment or certification, and precious little of correspondence. But the physical technology existed to perform these functions (the mental technology, we shall see, is a different matter). Short messages that could be carried by messengers were conveyed on pieces of wood called rúnakefli. High Medieval sagas such as Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar (ca. 1264) and Íslendinga saga (1270s) depict these rúnakefli being used by both kings and in interpersonal communication during the 1200s. A trove of some 670 inscriptions dating from the 1100s through to the 1300s, many of them rúnakefli, was uncovered at Bryggen in Bergen, Norway. These contained merchants’ tags, letters between traders, as well as personal correspondence, including several love messages.Footnote ⁵² A famous scene in Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii (ca. 870) depicts King Bjǫrn at Haugi dispatching a message: Peracto itaque apud eos altero dimidio anno, praefati servi Dei cum certo suae legationis experimento et cum litteris regia manu more ipsorum deformatis ad serenissimum reversi sunt augustum; “And so, as they neared the end of the second half of the year, the aforementioned servants of God, with trustworthy tokens of the embassy and with the deformed letters of the royal hands, as was their custom, returned to the most blessed emperor [Louis the Pious, r. 813–840].”Footnote ⁵³ This is often interpreted to mean that King Bjǫrn sent a rúnakefli to the Carolingian emperor, although it could plausibly be a reference to broken Latin.Footnote ⁵⁴ The wooden rúnakefli, with letters carved by knife, would have been more time-consuming to produce than a Mesopotamian tablet pressed into wet clay with a stylus, but equally portable, transmissible, and cheap to produce.

Correspondence in Runes Prior to ca. 800

There is no shortage of High Medieval runic correspondence, albeit mostly between non-bureaucrats. But are there any artefacts from Viking Age Denmark which show rúnakefli being used in ways analogous to Mesopotamian tablets? To my knowledge, seven Danish rúnakefli survive that plausibly predate 1050. Of these, three are gibberish (DR EM85;356 [DK NJY 53], DR EM85;371A [Sl 8, also known as the first Haddeby Stick], DR DKSj98). One is an “I wuz here” doodle (DR AUD1997;264, DK Sj32). One is a curse, apparently intended to provoke diarrhea (DR Schl3). One is either a spell or a love letter (DR EM85;350). Only one is, to my mind, unambiguously intended as correspondence: DR EM85;371B [Sl 9], also known as the 2nd Haddeby Stick. It is probably from the ninth century. My reading is as follows, though there are others:Footnote ⁵⁵

The opening appellation Ráði Oddulfr “Let Oddulfr interpret this” marks the second Haddeby Stick as a letter, although the rest of the details are murky.Footnote ⁵⁶ The first line may witness a man named Øríkr being sent as a hostage by Oddulfr, or perhaps sold on as a slave, and Oddr giving an affidavit that he originally sold or sent Øríkr to Oddulfr. If Øríkr was a slave, it would make sense that a record of his sale was important. Medieval Scandinavian law codes which apparently contain older, Viking Age jurisprudence show that someone selling a slave was liable in some circumstances even after the sale. Under the Old Gutnish law, Law of the Gotlanders (ca. 1220), if a recently purchased slave developed health problems, the slave’s previous owner was responsible, for a month in cases of epilepsy or incontinence, and up to a year for leg problems, probably meaning knee injuries.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Old Swedish Law of the East Geats (ca. 1290) demands witnesses for the sale of a slave, and compares the transaction to those of kuika þæn, sum horn ok huf hauer; “living things that have horns and hooves.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The rúnakefli may have been reused, so the first line need not be congruent with the other two. The second and third lines mention swęrð illt, “a bad sword.” Liestøl interprets this as an eyebrow-wiggling reference to a penis, but I am inclined to think, along the lines of Freud, that sometimes a bad sword is just a bad sword.Footnote ⁵⁹ Did úþękkr Bjǫrn, “Wretched Bjǫrn,” sell Oddr a defective weapon? Perhaps this was a letter of complaint, or an agreement of compensation.

Either way, the second Haddeby Stick testifies to the suitability of the rúnakefli for correspondence in Denmark during the Viking Age.Footnote ⁶⁰ But the only way to read this as a state document is to assume that none of the named parties was the carver, and that, instead, the carver was a state-employed scrivener. This is an unnecessary level of complexity, since the ráði formula of the inscription otherwise resembles later medieval inscriptions between two individuals without the involvement of any state intercessor (Vg Fv1992;172, N 13M, N 111M, N 169M, N 352M, N 393M, N 408M, N 473M, N 485M, N 575M, N B65M, N B325M, N B434M, N B584M). This is correspondence, yes, but between persons acting in a private capacity. A survey of preserved runic finds reveals no examples of state correspondence from the Viking Age. However, runic correspondence seems to have been a technology known widely enough that it would be strange if the state never deployed it. The poor durability of wood and the inherent ephemerality of most correspondence means little has survived. Circumstances such as the supposed message of King Bjǫrn at Haugi, and the High Medieval saga tradition, also suggest that state correspondence once existed but is now lost.

Bad Maths: The Challenges of Assessment Using Runes

Evidence for bureaucrats corresponding, then, is limited to second-hand accounts and comparative cases. What of assessment? Interestingly, the runic script is, uniquely, poorly suited for this purpose, for the simple reason that, unlike every other script that I know of, it has no numerals. Certain modern scripts like Cherokee or Vai borrowed Arabic numerals after native numerals failed to gain traction, but they still have some way of denoting numbers. Runes cannot even do that. True, some Swedish manuscripts of the 1500s feature pentadic numbers, particularly in runic calendars, but those must be an expression of contrived antiquarianism.Footnote ⁶¹ It is implausible that the pentadic numbers were known across Scandinavia for nearly a millennium and then were only accidentally preserved in Early Modern Sweden. The numbers in Ole Worm’s Computus Runicus (Reference Worm1626, allegedly an apograph of an MS from 1328) look suspiciously like Greek and Hebrew numerals, where ᚠ = 1, ᚢ = 2, ᚦ = 3, just as א/α = 1, ב/β = 2, ג/γ = 3, and so forth.Footnote ⁶² This is exactly what one might expect from a Renaissance Humanist of 1626 whose enthusiasm got the better of him. Runic calendars are sometimes discovered incised on wooden staves, but exclusively in Swedish-speaking regions, and again overwhelmingly from the Early Modern period.Footnote ⁶³ Even the oldest example, the Nyköping Stick from the 1200s, appears to be an attempt to nativize computus, not an expression of Viking Age mathematics.Footnote ⁶⁴ In sum, there is no reason to suppose the use of runic numerals was known in the early Danish state. Three Norwegian inscriptions—N 573M, N A39M, and N B46M—all from the High Middle Ages, abbreviate letters to denote numbers, but this a completely unworkable principle for mathematics; in Old Norse it cannot, for example, distinguish between one and eleven, or two, ten, and twenty, or four and five. Here is N 573M:

The normal way to denote numbers in runic script of the Viking Age is to write out the entire number in prose. For example, this Swedish runestone, Vg 4:

For an assessor, this is a most unwieldy system, especially considering what a slow method of inscription a rúnakefli was. In defense of the runic script’s mathematical suitability, we should note that the early Danish state probably did not have to assess as much as, say, Babylon or Sumer. It has been argued that the states in Denmark from roughly 500 to 900 operated under the “tributary mode of production,” in between the slave-based production of antiquity and the feudalism of the Middle Ages proper.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rulers extracted surpluses from middlemen, who extracted them from lower farmers, who in turn extracted the labor of cottagers and slaves. So far, so feudal, but in a tributary system these surpluses were thought of more as “gifts” than “taxes,” and in many situations they may not have been exactly quantified. Arup theorized that the Jutish kings from 500 onward had incomes restricted to externally rendered tributes, for example from the Frisians and Abodrites, taxes from Hedeby, and then income from crown land in Jutland.Footnote ⁶⁶ He viewed this as an impressive achievement, though personal taxation and feudal dues are conspicuous by their absence in his model. Poulsen convincingly expanded on the details of these sorts of tributes prior to the year 1000 on numismatic grounds.Footnote ⁶⁷ Some have argued for a still-more-extractive Danish state. Sawyer described a system not too distant from textbook Blochian feudalism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Randsborg thought of Denmark in the 800s as “a loosely knit society, fragile on the level of integration, but stable on a local level owing to a self-sufficient economy.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He supposed some form of support to towns from their hinterlands, and also described a fairly well-developed officialdom.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is not the venue to solve the problem of how sophisticated administration by the early Danish state was. It may have been as extensive as royal reeves acting as de facto tax collectors out on the countryside in crown lands. That is to say, some people growing food might have dealt with administrators face-to-face. Administration may have been as minimal as a small clique who received goods at treasuries and granaries around Jelling. We will have to permit ourselves to be agnostic.

Nonetheless, we cannot yet exorcise the specter of Scott’s putative administrator, organizing grain and other resources. Even if early Danish states were substantially more tributary than feudal—and it is not certain that they were—some counting must have been necessary. Under the tributary mode of production, the king may not have been too fussy about the exact size of the gifts he received from his closest retainers every year, in a way that would have seemed utterly louche to a Mesopotamian bureaucrat. However, once his tributes were amassed, it is hard to believe that he did not employ someone to count up how much he had. This is saying nothing of the king’s independent income from raiding, crown land, and trade taxes, to accept Arup’s skeleton state. Trade taxes in particular must have been quantifiable.

There are indications that the principle of transmuting value into measurements of other resources was known in the Viking Age, and this would have been a key principle for assessment. We could name any number of examples: The Jutish Law, codified in 1241 but with Viking Age roots, uses skeppæ ruff, “barrel-measures of rye,” to quantify a fine.Footnote ⁷¹ Measures of rye are also used as a prescribed rent payment in the Old Norwegian Law of Frostaþing (ca. 1200, again with much older content).Footnote ⁷² The Icelandic Neighbor Law (ca. 1300?) mentions merkur rugar, “marks of rye,” double-malted, as a cubic measurement. One hundred of these rye marks indicated twelve quarts (fjórðungar) of butter, or six weights (vættir) of stockfish, four weights of fermented shark meat, twelve quarts (!) of seal jerky, twelve sheets of fabric, and other equivalents.Footnote ⁷³ A Swedish runic inscription on a ring later reused as a door handle, known as Hs 7, or the Forsa Ring, dates from the 800s–900s. It records three fines in denomination of oxen and aura, a Scandinavian currency derived from Roman aureus. Footnote ⁷⁴ We might also think of the West Norse practice of using vaðmál (units of homespun wool) to quantify any other resource.Footnote ⁷⁵ None of these units can tell us confidently what measurements a Viking Age assessor would have used, although something anchored to rye is a recurring element. They do, though, suggest that there would have been a way to turn tributes, gifts, dues, and taxes paid in kind into numbers.

Of course, we have established that those numbers could not have been rendered with runic script. Here, the tallystick becomes of crucial importance: A staff which was notched every time a given unit was counted—normally ones but sometimes denominations, particularly four or twenty, hence the synonymity of “score” and “twenty” in a number of European languages.Footnote ⁷⁶ Tallysticks were widely used in both the state and non-state spheres across medieval Europe, although very few survive relative to how omnipresent they are thought to have been.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Bryggen finds revealed several High Medieval tallysticks with accompanying runic inscriptions, including one that appears to have also had a correspondence function. N B116 reads þora : sæh : m(e)r, Þóra, seg mér, “Tell me [how much?], Þóra.”Footnote ⁷⁸ One imagines Þóra being handed a stick, unnotched but with a message, counting whatever item was supposed to be counted by notching the stick, and then sending it back.

Surviving Viking Age (i.e., pre-1050) tallysticks are rarer. There may have been one in the Bryggen deposit, but it may equally be post-Viking.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Narsaq Stick (GR 76), dating ca. 980 to 1020, has also been proposed as a tally stick by Lisbeth Imer.Footnote ⁸⁰ On surface §D it contains forty-seven often repeating glyphs. Another Greenlandic stick currently without a signum in the Samnordisk runtextdatabas (Garðar 24) has also been proposed as some sort of counting device, though Imer’s examples are conjectural.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, if §D of GR 76 is a tally then who knows how many other currently illegible inscriptions consisting of repeated letters would also be. As an aside, we should note that if §D contains a tally then the mostly legible inscriptions on §A and §C cannot be read as in any way commenting upon the stick’s supposed administrative purpose. Nonetheless, while surviving Viking Age tallysticks are few, they are also referred to in the Law of Frostaþing, which, although essentially a High Medieval text, has most likely inherited statutes from the Viking Age:

Here, the local bóndi (a free farmer, not unlike a yeoman) is required to keep a tallystick (skorukefli) of the young men in his household subject to the leiðangr—a military levy which sometimes worked as a tax, whose workings I do not have space to discuss here. In this Norwegian example, it is the subject who creates the record. The role of the king’s man (the ármaðr) is apparently to certify or perhaps collect the tallystick, but not to count it for himself. This perhaps works for military service, but it is hard to imagine that the early Danish state relied exclusively on self-assessment of this type. I will return to this point, but for now conclude that the tallystick was the primary technology deployed in whatever assessment the early Danish state undertook. We must assume that the cumbersome runic method of spelling out numbers, as on Vg 4, was only used in the issuing of reports between the king’s men.

Moltke’s Godofridus Theory

So far, I have given a picture of the runic script as being somewhat unsuitable for statecraft. It should be noted that it has been suggested that there was a deliberate attempt to ameliorate this deficiency. The runic script in Scandinavia was drastically shortened around the year 800. Prior to this time, the runic alphabet used in Scandinavia is known to scholars as the Elder Futhark. It contained twenty-four runes and was used not only north of the Eider but in all Germanic-speaking regions. It described Scandinavian phonology relatively well. In the course of the eighth century and particularly around the turn of the ninth century, a change appears to have radiated out from Denmark.Footnote ⁸³ The Younger Futhark emerged, which contained sixteen runes and described Old Norse phonology poorly.Footnote ⁸⁴ Differing theories have been proposed to explain this shift. Following Schulte, these explanations can be classified either as “intentional” or the work of an “invisible hand” (that is, unintentional and the result of various inscrutable forces).Footnote ⁸⁵ The latter type are generally phonological, for example the hypothesis that the consonantal repertoire of Common Scandinavian as it transitioned out of Common Germanic required little differentiation to form minimal pairs, and so the alphabet naturally economized.Footnote ⁸⁶ I agree with Barnes’s observations concerning these solutions.Footnote ⁸⁷ Proto-Norse gained vowels compared to Common Germanic, and yet the Younger Futhark has no extra vowels. Worse still, the loss of Elder Futhark consonants that are useful for establishing minimal pairs, especially ᚷ /g/ and ᛞ /d/, can in no way be attributed to phonological change. Phonological factors may have caused smaller developments along the way, but in my view, they cannot alone explain the transition from twenty-four to sixteen.

“Intentional” explanations smooth over these problems by admitting the universal principle that a technically inconvenient reform—in this case the loss of a lot of perfectly good consonants—can easily be made if somebody in a position of power thinks it is a good idea. One recent intentional explanation comes from Imer, who tentatively suggests that the Younger Futhark was designed to conceal dialectal differences in Scandinavia: “På denne måde kunne skriftsystemet også være med til at binde Norden sammen i et større kulturelt fællesskab, som måske skulle modsvare stormagten mod syd”; “In this way, the writing system could contribute to uniting the Nordic region in a greater cultural community, which perhaps was supposed to counter the great power to the south [i.e., Francia].”Footnote ⁸⁸ There are profound problems with this theory. As we have seen, power in Scandinavia around 800 was a fragile thing. Could a given viking warlord, even one with the title of king, seriously have imagined uniting all of Scandinavia? And even if they could, would a shared language have been a sufficient justification for such a daring dream? It is true that language was a key factor in personal identity in the Middle Ages, and it was sometimes, though not always, held that peoples of one language ought to be grouped together in political units.Footnote ⁸⁹ But regional identity in the Early Viking Age was apparently a competitor for proto-national identity, as we have seen in the case of the Westfaldingi at Nantes in 843. If even “Norwegianness” and “Danishness” were works in progress, it is hard to imagine that anyone was so invested in pan-Scandinavianism that they ordered spelling reforms in order to promote it. Indeed, as Spurkland noted, the runic script was ill-suited for the composition of literature.Footnote ⁹⁰ It could hardly be a vehicle for disseminating the sorts of lengthy texts through which an established literary norm could affect identity formation. (Think, for example, of the Bāburnāma’s role in spreading Čagatai Turkic, or the Aṣṭādhyāyī’s in spreading Classical Sanskrit.)

But if Imer is at fault for projecting modern ethnic preoccupations onto the past, I believe she is on the right track for thinking that the transition to a less legible orthography could have been a political project. A more convincing intentionalist solution was offered by the runologist Erik Moltke. He observed that the change happened around the same time and place where the Danish state was beginning to cohere in a serious way, under the same King Godofridus we encountered in the Royal Frankish Annals:

I want to develop Moltke’s hypothesis further. Reducing the alphabet from twenty-four to sixteen symbols did serious harm to the readability of runic script. As I noted, one could no longer differentiate between voiced and voiceless consonants. Depending on one’s dialect, spoken Old Norse during the Viking Age probably had around thirty-six vowel sounds (here counting long or short, nasal or oral as distinct).Footnote ⁹² The Norwegian Homily Book (AM 619 4to, ca. 1200), has a repertoire of twenty graphemes including digraphs to represent its vowels (<a, á, e, é, i, o, ó, u, ú, y, ý, æ/ę, ǽ/ę́, ø, ǿ, , [an accented ],Footnote ⁹³ æi, , and øy>), though nasality had been lost by this point. The Elder Futhark managed eight: <ᚢ, ᚨ, ᛁ, ᛇ, ᛖ, ᛟ, ᚨᚢ, ᚨᛁ>, and the Younger Futhark came down to six: <ᚢ, ᚬ, ᛁ, ᛅ, ᛅᛁ, ᛅᚢ>. Thus, to take a random example, the name Gyða became kuþa (DR 99), which, without context, cannot be differentiated from góða “good” (fem. acc. sng, masc. acc. pl., various weak declensions) or goða “of the chieftain.” The limitations of the new script seem to have exercised rune carvers too. A magnate of the 900s by the name of Hrafnunga-Tófi is hribno : k tubi : on DR 30, rafnuka:tufi on DR 29, and rhafnukatufi on DR 26.Footnote ⁹⁴

Schulte suggests that this clunkiness, especially the removal of the distinction between voiced and unvoiced, is a sign that the script was not deliberately reformed: “It is otherwise doubtful that reformers would dispense with necessary graphemes which reproduce some of the language’s distinctive phonemes, such as /d, g/ in relation to /t, k/ (Det er for øvrig tvilsomt om reformatorer kvitter seg med nødvendige grafemer som gjengir noen av språkets distinktive fonemer som /d, g/ i forhold til /t, k/).Footnote ⁹⁵ But such drastic reductions are exactly what a ruler would do if they needed to train a large number of administrators quickly. As Barnes puts it, modern historians and philologists have viewed this as “an incomprehensible impoverishment of the writing system.… For those who wrote runes, however, the new system must have been quicker to learn, and have offered economy of carving effort.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The Younger Futhark was designed to be, not easy to understand, but rather easy to learn. If the messages that Godofridus’s men were sending to each other were relatively short and formulaic, as bureaucratic dispatches tend to be, then their context would help to predict their content, even though the Younger Futhark spelling system is hopelessly imprecise.

If Godofridus did order reforms to the runic alphabet, then it appears he aimed to facilitate correspondence, not assessment. Numbers were not introduced. This accords with the sorts of activities Godofridus’s state apparently oversaw. For example, when he expanded the Danevirke fortifications in 808, he tacked the project onto the end of a pre-existing military campaign against the Carolingian Empire.Footnote ⁹⁷ He did not need assessors to work out how to feed a crowd of slave laborers for his stretch of the Danevirke, as the Mesopotamians did for their building projects. He seems to have deployed the military levies of his own leiðangr, who were required to bring their own provisions. But he probably did need corresponders to write back to Denmark to order up the tools and specialist personnel who could build earthworks, which presumably could not all have been brought on the initial military expedition. Doubtless, those who knew how to build walls also knew how to fight since the free man of the Viking Age had to be an all-rounder.Footnote ⁹⁸ But why risk a gifted builder on the battlefield, or risk fatigue among the infantry by encumbering soldiers with too much equipment? Correspondence solves this problem by allowing the operation to be divided into two logistical phases.

Godofridus, Brytar , and Þulir

Earlier, I took the suitability of the runic script for correspondence, plus its unsuitability for assessment, to suppose that whatever administration the Danish state required was done with tallystick (skorukefli) in one hand and rúnakefli in the other. That is, rúnakefli and skorukefli appear to have been understood as two separate technologies; remember that if Imer’s Greenlandic runesticks are tallies, their text has nothing to do with their numbers. But can we say anything more about the people who putatively wielded these administrative implements? Moltke spoke of a “committee” that might have devised the script. In light of the conclusion that early Danish states were prone to breaking down, I think that we are probably looking at a group of rune-literate people close to King Godofridus, charged with training a cadre of bureaucrats during a period of relative stability. Their principal aim must have been to streamline correspondence, because they did not remedy the deficiencies in assessment by adding numbers. This indicates the limits of Godofridus’s extractive power.

I use the term “cadre” because this was nothing like a stable civil service. Following Godofridus’s death in 810 the stability of the Danish state quickly deteriorated. I assume that anyone trained in the Younger Futhark retained no bureaucratic position once his kingdom fragmented. In this way, the runic techniques that were created by the state, for its own purposes, were scattered on the wind. People who had been trained in the new “quick to learn, hellish to read” script stopped doing correspondence and assessment and went back to the normal runic practices of memorialization and graffiti, now equipped with a script in which it was easy to train others. Godofridus may not have been the first king of a Scandinavian petty state whose rule brought something like this. Five of the weapons with runic inscriptions recovered from the ritual deposition at Illerup Ådal, around 200 AD, (two lance heads, DR MS 1995; 335A, DR MS 1995; 335B, and three mounts for shield grips, DR MS1995;334C, DR MS1995;336B, DR MS1995;336C) exhibit a peculiar innovation where ᚹ is written rather like and ᚦ resembles ⏀ (owing to printing limitations, I have had to use the best Unicode equivalents I could find rather than Gullskoen font). If the weapons at Illerup belonged to a “political alliance of peoples from several regions along the Norwegian coast and inland valleys,”Footnote ⁹⁹ it might be inferred that the elite in this putative confederacy preferred their runes in this style. Perhaps many rulers tried to harness the power of runes, but only Godofridus’s attempt became the norm across the Old Norse-speaking world.

Godofridus’s runic cadre were probably not noblemen. The Old Norse poem Rígsþula suggests that runacy was seen as befitting an elite son: Hann við Ríg iarl rúnar deildi / brǫgðum beitti oc betr kunni; / þá ǫðlaðiz oc þá eiga gat / Rígr at heita, rúnar kunna; “He [the archetypal noble son] dueled in runes with Lord Rígr / Traded tricks and knew more / Then he won the right of being able / to be called Rígr himself, knowing runes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But the servile business of counting the king’s wealth and dispatching messages to organize logistics could hardly have been a fitting occupation for an aristocrat. Godofridus’s short-lived generation of bureaucrats must therefore have resembled reeves more than they did lords. These were probably people of lower rank, ideally with prior experience of managing resources that were perceived as belonging rightfully to someone else. It appears that there was a tradition of reeve-like figures possessing runic literacy. Two Danish runestones from after Godofridus’s time, probably 950–1000, are raised by men holding the office of bryti (DR 40, DR 83). The older stone, DR 40, seems to stress the identity that came with the office: tufi ÷ bruti ÷ risþi ÷ stin ÷ þansi ÷ aft ÷ lika ÷ brutia ÷ þir ÷ stafar ÷ munu ÷ þurkuni ÷ miuk ÷ liki ÷ lifa; Tófi Bryti resþi sten þęnsi ęft líka brytja. Þer stafar munu Þorgunni mjǫk lęngi lífa; “Tófi the bryti erected this stone in memory of the bryti’s equal. These letters will live a long time for Þorgunnr.” The position of bryti probably originated as a slave tasked with overseeing their master’s lands, perhaps while the master was absent.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Later in the Middle Ages the position became a free rural overseer, sometimes assuming the tax privileges of the landlord whose fields he held.Footnote ¹⁰² It seems to have been a respected office. The inherent managerial responsibilities would presumably have made it desirable for brytar to possess runic literacy for the purpose of correspondence. We cannot know what title Godofridus’s transient runic bureaucrats used. Bryti is a sound option. Another is þulr.

The title of þulr encompassed a broad range of activities.Footnote ¹⁰³ It has an Old English cognate, þyle. In Beowulf, the þyle Unferð has been described by one commentator as “the sage, the wise man with the well-stocked mind.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His unfriendliness to the titular hero has been explained as a sign that the þyle was seen as occupying a male role outside of the warrior code. Rather, being weird, inscrutable, and knowledgeable about all manner of people and things was part of their job description.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Poole convincingly argues that the þulr , however their role may have varied from ruler to liegeman at various times and places, was essentially a “rememberer” and a “linker” (my terms).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ That included committing to memory the details of genealogies, stories, and mythology. The mythological-mystical element is particularly colorful, and several sources describe Óðinn as a sort of þulr -in-chief.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ One runestone, DR 248, is among the earliest Danish inscriptions in the Younger Futhark.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It exhibits the term þulr :

It is not clear whether Róaldr or Gunwaldr was the þulr , though Jacobsen and Moltke recommend the son, Gunwaldr.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Regardless, loyal þulir would have been useful people for a ruler creating a bureaucracy. They would have had access to orally transmitted knowledge about people and places in given areas. Moreover, we should consider the etymology of þulr. It is related to the noun þula, meaning a list.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The existence of Old English þyle shows that the title predated the eighth century, but we should note that it would have been a fitting title for those who carried both a rúnakefli and a skorukefli in the service of Godofridus. Today we might call an assessor a “bean counter,” but the work of keeping tabs on Godofridus’s income, under the tributary mode of production, probably required less counting and more listing. I am not arguing that the carver of DR 248 was a graduate of the runic training program under Godofridus proposed by Moltke. The runes are not in a typical Younger Futhark, but rather are a transitional variant, formerly known as the Helnæs-Gørlev type, although this typology is now considered redundant.Footnote ¹¹¹ Was the carver someone who had known the Elder Futhark and been introduced to the Younger Futhark by Gunwaldr, but was unable or unwilling to relinquish ᚺ for /h/ and ᚼ /a/? The dating of the stone, on the other hand, means it is not impossible that Gunwaldr (if he was the þulr ) had first been given authority over Salløv during the reign of Godofridus, and later became an independent magnate in the course of the civil wars. But all this is pure speculation, even by the standards of Viking Studies.

Ultimately, if Godofridus aimed to put runic script to the service of the state, his success was fleeting. The Younger Futhark was easy to learn and quickly spread beyond the state. Much is made of the tenth-century Jelling Stones and their supposed declaration of the establishment of stable, governed, Christian Denmark. But in truth the successful use of the runic script by the state was a statistical anomaly. Of some 266 surviving runestones in Denmark, only eleven, including the Jelling Stones, mention kings, queens, or people apparently in royal service (DR 3, DR 4, DR 41, DR 42, DR 66, DR 134, DR 55, DR 81, DR 133, DR 134, DR 107). That is just 4 percent of the total corpus. One might add that one of these, DR 66, was erected to commemorate a man named Full who died þá konungar barðusk; “when kings fought each other.” A similar expression is found on a Swedish stone, Vg 40, for a son who varð dauðr í orrustu, er barðusk kunungar ; “fell in battle, when kings fought each other.” I do not think that either inscription can be read as a cheer for the state. There is no enthusiasm here for a particular side. Rather, one thinks of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “War Machine”: the notion of War taking on a life of its own, perceived by the people who carry it out as separate from themselves.Footnote ¹¹²

If DR 66 expresses a muted weariness about the state, most Danish runestones instead give the impression of blissful ignorance of it. They commemorate and aggrandize local big men, their families, and their achievements in local infrastructure. Put another way, they celebrate the sorts of people whose local hegemonies were first a threat and later an irritant to the Danish state. To be sure, this is not cuddly anarchism of the type that Scott identifies in the Zomia Highlands of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹¹³ Danish runestones are not the work of freedom-loving peasants living an anarchist ideal, although it has recently been argued that a Zomia-like “art of not being governed” may in part explain the establishment of certain Danish thorps.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rather, the elite whose names are recorded in granite on our stones probably opposed kingship mostly because they were not yet themselves a king.

Conclusion: Domesticated and Wild Writing

In closing, let me return to Scott’s provocative Against the Grain. One of the book’s driving theories is that domestication was not just something that happened to cereals and certain livestock. When animals are domesticated, Scott notes, something called the “domus effect” kicks in. Compared to their wild counterparts, they become smaller and more docile. They become more fertile, but their brains get smaller.Footnote ¹¹⁵ They retain juvenile traits longer into their lives. It is a slow process and there is a lot of room for interstitial states of being. Both cats and goats, for example, are about halfway along in the process, half-wild, half-domesticated. Foxes, pigeons, and most other vermin are only just beginning their journeys towards domestication. However, Scott claims that the domus effect is universal. In his view, it even applies to humans. Hunter gatherers are taller, more aggressive, but less fertile than those living in agrarian-based economies.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Scott sees writing as something that emanates from the state. But what if writing, too, can actually come from the wild, while the state seeks to subject it to the domus effect? Just as wild species versus domesticated species have certain overarching morphological traits, could the same be said of scripts? Runeiform scripts are angular, designed to be carved into wood and stone.Footnote ¹¹⁷ They are suited for the commemoration of magnates, for casting spells, for telling rude jokes. But in order to be successfully domesticated by the state, they have to increasingly be written on more portable, more forgiving surfaces such as papyrus or parchment. As writing moves away from being carved with a knife to being written with a pen, it becomes increasingly cursive and flowing. Orthographic conventions emerge—something that Old Norse in runic script mostly lacks compared to, say, Latin in its own alphabet. (There are a handful of conventions, such as voiced alveolar nasals not being written before plosives, but they are rudimentary. If there were consistency then the “first law of runo-dynamics” would not be true: “For every runic inscription there shall be as many interpretations as there are runologists studying it.”)Footnote ¹¹⁸ These changes take centuries to occur, of course, just as domesticating an animal does. But these morphological developments can be observed in the transition from, say, Canaanite script to Aramaic/Hebrew script, from Archaic Latin script to Classical Latin script, and to some extent from Brahmi script to Devanāgarī. Similarly, Germanic runes uncannily resemble writing systems with which, according to scholarly consensus, they have no genetic relationship, for example Hungarian Székely or its likely ancestor, Turkic Orkhon.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But they have in common the quality of existing largely outside of the state. Scott theorizes that cereals breed scripts, because they stimulate the impulse to measure and exploit. I have set out to show that the history of the alphabet in Scandinavia tells an opposite story. If Moltke’s theory is correct, one might say that Godofridus hoped to domesticate runes with the Younger Futhark. Instead, he sowed a crop which soon took to the wild, never to be harvested by the state.