When the technology of alphabetic literacy was introduced into Scandinavia by the Christian Church, it changed the nature of communication practices in some discourses, such as law, dramatically; in others which were less implicated in the institutional practices of the Church, its effect was probably minimal, or at least gradual. During the first millennium there is evidence that the inscription of runes on stone, wood or bone had been widely, though perhaps not generally, practised throughout Scandinavia. The effect of Christian ideology on all aspects of Scandinavian culture was profound and in relation to writing practices the conversion effected more than a simple change-over of scripts: each technology had been adapted to particular kinds of communication and each preserved particular kinds of texts. Runic texts, necessarily restricted in length, gave voice to a limited number of discourses. Leaving aside transcriptions that are clearly adaptations of alphabetic text types – such as Latin prayers – communication in runes was primarily concerned with the discourses of memorializing, ownership and magic (Elliott 1989; Knirk 1993).

The Christian textual tradition too had its favoured discourses, and religious texts were the first to be produced in the new manuscript culture of medieval Scandinavia. But at an apparently early stage of the new alphabetic industry – extant manuscripts do not allow us to fix precisely when – vernacular texts that were not translations of Latin works came to be written down.