Archaeologists found a whetstone covered with runes during excavations prior to a railway-construction project in Oslo, Norway.

According to the researchers of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, the runes ‘æ, r, k, n, a’ appear on the whetstone, but at this point it’s not certain what they mean. The runes could be an attempt to spell a person’s name, or they could spell the word “scared,” “ugly” or “pain”. Karen Langsholt Holmqvist states that the person who wrote these runes was probably not a trained rune carver and was likely learning to spell in runic, also the quality of runic writing on the stone is poor.

(after Karen Langsholt Holmqvist & Live Science)