"Long Branches" places the Younger Futhark - the runes of the Viking Age - in their historical and cultural context. Neither magical guide nor academic treatise, "Long Branches" investigates the meanings of this set of sixteen runes used throughout Scandinavia. Author Ann Gróa Sheffield draws on the stories preserved in the Norse Eddas and sagas together with other evidence from Germanic literature, archaeology and linguistics to explore in depth what each stave may have meant to the people who carved these runes into wood, stone, metal, and bone a thousand years ago.