This paper will draw together some of my own work and that of others on the history of the study of runes. I will concentrate on scholarly works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which discuss Old Norse-Icelandic runology and/or myth. I wish to place these works within the context of some broad intellectual movements of the period, particularly those which affected theories of language, writing and literature; as such, I will be restricting this survey largely to published material, but I will make some reference to unpublished works and correspondence. The main Old Norse (-Icelandic) texts dealing with runology or the uses of runes and known in the seventeenth century were:

1. The Third Grammatical Treatise (3GT) by Óláfr fiór› arson hvítaskáld. This work is found in four medieval manuscripts, three of which contain versions of Snorra Edda. Two chapters of the first section contain detailed information on runes: their names, phonetic values and so on.