Lindholm amulet
A carved piece of bone shaped like a rib, cut from a Skåne peat bog. It names an erilaʀ, then runs eight a-runes together and closes with alu: the clearest surviving case of runes doing something other than spelling words.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- Date
- c. AD 375–570
- Found at
- Lindholmen, Skåne, Sweden
- Signature
- DR 261
The text
Transliteration in the conventional runological form. Translations on this site are our own and deliberately literal.
ek erilaʀ sa wilagaʀ hateka : aaaaaaaaʀʀʀnnn bmuttt : alu :
Discovery
Cut from a peat bog at Lindholmen in Skåne in 1840. The object is bone, about seventeen centimetres long and shaped like a rib, with the first line running along one face and the second along the other. It is usually called an amulet, which is an interpretation of what it is for rather than a description of what it is.
Why it matters
The first line is ordinary language: a man calls himself an erilaʀ and gives himself an epithet. The second is not language at all in any normal sense: eight a-runes, then three ʀ, three n, then bmuttt, then alu. That combination on one object is why this piece is cited in almost every discussion of whether runes were ever used for something beyond writing: the same hand produced a plain sentence and a sequence that resists any linguistic reading.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
The repeated runes are frequently glossed as a spell with a known meaning. They have none that anyone can demonstrate. Counting them is straightforward; saying what they were for is not, and the counts themselves differ slightly between editions.
Erilaʀ is habitually translated "rune-master", which makes the first line sound like a title. The word is not recorded outside inscriptions of this kind, and it has also been connected to a tribal name and to a term of rank. A picture of a priestly caste built on it is built on an uncertain foundation.
Runes attested here (2)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.