Futhark? What's a futhark? If you look at the first six runes of the Norse alphabet you will discover where the word derives. Several runes figure prominently in the saga Dance of the Hummingbirds. Lars Svensson will eloquently explain them.
Norsemen might have been even more impressive sailors than previously thought.
"It is widely accepted that Norse people were excellent mariners. Now it seems they used much more sophisticated navigational instruments than we thought before," said study co-author Balázs Bernáth, a researcher at Eötvös University in Hungary.
Runestone dated to 1060. Thorynn was still alive at that time. (I think)
As I am writing the sequel to Dance of the Hummingbirds, I will explore climate change in Scandinavia around the year 1000 A.D. In the mean time this is an interesting article about human adaptation to climate change in prehistory.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=prehistoric-climate-change-may-have-encouraged-human-innovation&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130524