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This thesis examines visual text conventions in the Nordic runic material from the early Viking Age and shows that visual meanings, as well as linguistic ones, can increase understanding of this complicated material. The thesis also provides a corpus of early Viking Age runic texts. 

The thesis comprises three investigations. In the first investigation, an inventory is made of the early Viking Age material. The period is defined on the basis of two major changes in the tradition of runic carving. The beginning is placed at the transition from the older rune-row with 24 characters to the younger with 16, which occurred around 700 C.E., and the end at the second half of the tenth century with the increasing production of Christian memorial inscriptions. The second investigation considers visual conventions of reading order in early Viking Age material in its entirety. A social semiotic theoretical framework allows a number of visual resources to be distinguished. These express different types of meaning connected to textual organisation which can then be linked to functions of reading order such as the beginning or direction of reading. The investigation further analyses three separate inscriptions (Bo Boije4 Skee, U ANF1937;163 Björkö, DR NOR1988;5 Malt) where new conclusions about reading order are drawn on the basis of such visual resources. The third investigation further employs the visual resources identified in the second investigation in an analysis of the visual text structure of the Rök stone (Ög 136), where different types of multisequential structures as well as monosequential order can be confirmed.

The thesis encompasses an early Viking Age text corpus and designates one aspect of early Viking Age writing culture, i.e. visual conventions, as central in the arrangement of runic text. This has allowed new reading orders to be suggested for individual inscriptions and different types of text structure alongside the strictly monosequential to be identified among the early Viking Age runic inscriptions.