Runes
Category archives for Runes
Re-Used Picture Stone Paper On-Line
Posted by Martin R on February 18, 2013 My paper on the re-use of Late Iron Age picture stones during that same period (mainly in late male graves) has been published in English and Swedish parallel versions of Gotländskt Arkiv 2012. That’s the annual of the Gotland County Museum. Have a look! Questions and comments are most welcome.
Swedish Runic Corpus On-line
Posted by Martin R on May 12, 2012 Here’s an extremely useful resource. The Swedish National Heritage Board has scanned the great multivolume corpus publication of Swedish runic inscriptions, Sveriges runinskrifter, and put it on-line for free. Currently as PDF files, but in the future there will also be a structured database. Though the PDF:s have been run through optical character recognition, they…
Airport Runestone
Posted by Martin R on November 21, 2011 I’ve written before about the archaeological landscape surrounding Arlanda International Airport north of Stockholm. Following on yesterday’s post about the fake archaeology in Oslo airport, here’s a piece of landscape that has been moved inside Arlanda’s terminal 2. It’s an 11th century runestone commemorating one of the men who died on Ingvar the Far-travelled’s disastrous…
Kensington Runestone Faker’s Signature Found
Posted by Martin R on November 16, 2011 The Kensington runestone of Minnesota is a rather obvious 19th century fake. But in a recent paper in Saga och Sed 2010, Mats G. Larsson shows something less obvious: the hidden signature of the stone’s carver, who also was its finder. Olof Öhman came from Forsa in Hälsingland, central Sweden. He claimed to have found…
Iarlabanki Had This Stone Made While He Still Lived
Posted by Martin R on November 13, 2011 If we look only at contemporaneous written evidence and disregard kings, Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur even once on vellum. His memory lives entirely in the many rune stones he commissioned. Iarlabanki (Jarlabanke in modern Swedish) was a major landowner in…
Kalv’s Runestone
Posted by Martin R on July 12, 2011 Driving through Hagby parish in Uppland on a tiny road Friday, I was lucky enough to cross the bridge at Focksta right at the moment when the afternoon sun hit this lovely runestone straight on. I didn’t even have to get out of the car to take the photograph. Dating from the early 11th century,…
Hogganvik Runestone Re-erected
Posted by Martin R on July 5, 2010 The recently found Norwegian 5th century runestone of Hogganvik carries a memorial inscription and so might be expected to have stood on or near a grave. My buddy Frans-Arne Stylegar has excavated the site and sadly found no preserved burial, but he did find the original stone setting of the monument. This is a rare…
Runological Report on the Hogganvik Rune Stone
Posted by Martin R on November 2, 2009 Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is [?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR eknaudigastiR ekerafaR His translation is Skelba-þewaR’s ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?Within/From within the ?wheel-nave/?cabin-corner. I NaudigastiR [="Need-guest"]. I, the Wolverine. So there isn’t actually an explicit lord-retainer relationship in the text, just a…
5th Century Rune Stone Found
Posted by Martin R on October 7, 2009 Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: “Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man”. But by that time, runic writing was already 900 years old. It’s…
Runic Aerobics Disliked by Nazis
Posted by Martin R on August 20, 2009 In Nazi Germany and its occupied territories there were many ways to get thrown into an extermination camp. But Friedrich Marby broke some kind of record: he was sent to Dachau for publishing too silly ideas about runes. He survived. The Nazis themselves were no strangers to occultism, particularly Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-Pagan religious movement…
