In 1997 the Uppsala professor, Dr Henrik Williams, was visiting Australia as a guest of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Melbourne. He had discovered, to his surprise, that there were two people in Melbourne writing independently on runic matters and decided to bring them together. The first products of our ensuing collaboration were two jointly written papers. We found that our differing backgrounds served to complement each other's weaknesses, if not always strengths, and we soon discovered we were often able to cover a lot more ground than a single writer could be expected to.

Our respective backgrounds as a Scandinavist on the one hand, and as a Germanist (who has also read in classics), on the other, are a good guide to the principal authorship of the different themes and geographies covered in this work. It grew from our second joint paper, which was inspired by an observation by the American linguist Dr Thomas L. Markey.

Research for this work was supported by two generous grants, from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York and the Greta Hort bequest to the University of Melbourne, which enabled research trips to Italy and Denmark respectively. Thanks are also due to the Departments of Medieval Archaeology and English at the University of Århus, Denmark. The University of Melbourne, and especially its Department of History, has also helped fund the study by means not just of the use of its facilities, but also in the form of publication subsidies.