Kragehul spear shaft
A wooden spear shaft from a Danish weapon deposit, carrying a second erilaʀ formula and the sequence gagaga, a repeated rune-group that has been explained four different ways and settled none of them.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- Date
- c. AD 500
- Found at
- Kragehul bog, southern Funen, Denmark
- Signature
- DR 196
The text
Transliteration in the conventional runological form. Translations on this site are our own and deliberately literal.
ek erilaʀ asugisalas muha haite gagaga ginu ga … lija … hagala wiju big …
Discovery
Excavated in 1877 from the Kragehul bog on southern Funen, one of the great Danish deposits of war-gear. The site holds five separate deposits laid down between roughly AD 200 and 475, and the shaft belongs to the latest of them. The text is fragmentary at both ends, so several readings depend on where the editor thinks a word stops.
Why it matters
It pairs with the Lindholm amulet: the same ek erilaʀ opening, the same shift partway through from ordinary language into repetition. Here the repetition is gagaga, a g-rune group that has been read as a request to a god, as an abbreviation, as a metrical charm and as onomatopoeia. That two objects two hundred kilometres and perhaps a century apart do the same unusual thing is better evidence than either would be alone.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
Translations of gagaga circulate as though the question were closed. It is not: Schneider read it as an address to a god, Düwel as a claim about giving good fortune, Pieper as a gift to Óðinn, MacLeod and Mees as charm onomatopoeia. Any single confident gloss has chosen one of those and not said so.
Runes attested here (1)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
- GebōElder
The sequence gagaga, on a shaft whose text opens as an ordinary sentence and then stops resolving into words. Whatever those g-runes are doing, it is not spelling.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.