Runology is the study of the Runic alphabet

Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

s, Runic inscriptions and their history. Runology forms a specialized branch of Germanic linguistics

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

.

History

Runology was initiated by Johannes Bureus

Johannes Bureus

Johannes Thomae Bureus Agrivillensis was a Swedish antiquarian, polymath and mystic. He was royal librarian, tutor, and adviser of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden....

 (1568-1652) who was very interested in the linguistics of the Geat

Geat

Geats , and sometimes Goths) were a North Germanic tribe inhabiting what is now Götaland in modern Sweden...

ish language (Götiska språket), i.e. Old Norse

Old Norse

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

. But he also viewed runes as holy or magical.

The study of runes was continued by Olof Rudbeck Sr (1630-1702) and presented in his collection Atlantica. The physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius...

 (1701-44) further extended the science of runes and travelled around the whole of Sweden to examine the bautastenar (megaliths, today termed runestones).
Another early treatise is the 1732 Runologia by Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík

Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík

Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík was an Icelandic scholar...

.

The various runic scripts were well understood by the 19th century. Wilhelm Grimm

Wilhelm Grimm

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author, the younger of the Brothers Grimm.-Life and work:...

  discussed the "Marcomannic runes" in 1821 (Ueber deutsche Runen, chapter 18, pp. 149-159). Sveriges runinskrifter

Sveriges runinskrifter

Sveriges runinskrifter is a multi-volume catalog of rune inscriptions found in various Swedish provinces. The earliest volume of this ongoing series dates to 1900, and as of 1981, 15 volumes had been published.Sveriges runinskrifter established the standard cataloging system for Swedish rune...

 was published from 1900. The dedicated journal Nytt om runer has been published by the "Runic Archives" of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo

University of Oslo

The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

 from 1985. The Rundata

Rundata

The Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base is a project involving the creation and maintenance of a database of runic inscriptions. The project's goal is to comprehensively catalog runestones in a machine-readable way for future research...

project, aiming at a machine-readable catalogue of runic inscriptions, was initiated in 1993.