Maeshowe inscriptions
Around thirty runic inscriptions cut inside a Neolithic tomb by Norsemen who broke into it some four thousand years after it was built. It is the largest body of runic graffiti anywhere, and it reads like graffiti.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Medieval runes
- Date
- 12th century
- Where
- Maeshowe chambered cairn, Mainland, Orkney
The text
Why none is reproduced here.
This entry covers a class of source rather than a single object, so there is no one text to give. Look it up under its name in the standard catalogues, where the readings are given with their apparatus.
Where it survives
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered cairn on Orkney. Norse visitors broke in during the twelfth century (forcing the roof rather than clearing the original entrance passage) and carved the walls of the main chamber and a side chamber. Two explanations are offered for how a group with time on their hands came to be standing inside it, and they are separate things that get run together. Orkneyinga saga describes men under Earl Harald sheltering in Orkahaugr out of a snowstorm around 1153, two of whom lost their minds there. The mound itself carries the other: an inscription recording that Jerusalem-farers broke Orkahaugr, which points instead at crusaders connected with Earl Rognvald's expedition, wintering in Orkney in 1150–51 and returning in 1153. Michael Barnes's 1994 edition is the standard reading of the corpus, and it dates the carvings on style to roughly 1125–1175. That is a fifty-year window rather than an occasion, so tying them to either party is inference.
Why it matters
The Bryggen sticks show what people wrote when they had something to say; Maeshowe shows what they wrote when they had nothing to say and a wall in front of them. The texts are boasts, names, a claim to be the most skilled runecarver west of the ocean, and the observation that Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women. Taken with Bryggen it makes the case that runic literacy in the medieval north was ordinary rather than specialist about as firmly as it can be made.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
The inscriptions are routinely presented as Viking-Age and as somehow connected with the tomb they are cut in. They are neither. They are twelfth-century, several hundred years after the Viking Age proper, and the cairn was already about four thousand years old and had nothing to do with the people who wrote on it.
A few of the carvings are treated as coded or cryptic messages about treasure. Barnes's edition reads them as ordinary boasts and name-tags, some of them using the same twig ciphers found elsewhere as a display of skill rather than to conceal anything.
Runes attested here (1)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
- MaðrYounger
Name after name cut on the walls of a Neolithic tomb by Norse visitors: this rune over and over. Medieval rather than Viking-Age, like the Bergen material.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.