Professional identities and cosmopolitan personas: Latin as cultural capital in Scandinavian rune inscribers’ signatures

Abstract Written culture in medieval Scandinavia featured the concurrent use of different languages–Latin and the local vernaculars–and two scripts–the Roman script and the runic script. Although Latin carried substantial cultural capital as the cosmopolitan language of religious and juridical authorities, diplomacy, and high literate culture, the vernacular runic written tradition had already been established for many centuries and continued to be used alongside Latin and the Roman script. This coexistence was particularly evident in the epigraphic landscape and resulted in several inscriptions that mixed both languages and scripts. This article explores the choices of language and script made by two medieval inscribers who, despite being primarily trained within a vernacular runic tradition, used Latin and/or the Roman script, particularly in their signatures. The study argues that these inscribers leveraged the symbolic value of Latin and the Roman script to project a distinctive professional identity in response to a changing linguistic market in which these linguistic resources were gaining value. The analysis also illustrates how these inscribers’ highly individual practices resulted from a negotiation of different linguistic norms and highlights a tension between their level of literacy and their efforts to display cultural capital. Finally, the article argues that the use of Latin and the Roman script was motivated more by their symbolic value than by purely communicative necessity, offering parallels to modern instances of language commodification.