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dailymeh:

Norwegian rune staff. Rune staffs and prim staffs were calendars, usually carved on bone or wood, in popular use in Norway and Sweden from the Middle Ages until the early 19th century. This particular staff contains three rows of symbols: one, a repeated cycle of the first seven runes from the runic alphabet (F-U-TH-A-R-K-H), representing weekdays; another, a set of symbols marking days of agricultural or religious importance; the third, a set of numbers indicating which year of the 19-year lunar cycle you’re in, based on which dates the new moon falls. The wheel helps determine which rune represents Sunday, based on the 28-year solar cycle: basically, in the Julian calendar, the pattern of which dates fall on which weekdays repeats every 28 years. From these devices, people could determine not only static holidays, harvests and so on that fall on the same date every year; they could also determine weekdays and moving holidays like Easter, that depend on the motions of the moon and the sun. And all that, from one calendar that stays the same, every year.

I can’t decipher this thing. Illiterate and uneducated farmers in the 15th century, without Google, could. It’s amazing.