Runestones and inscriptions
Several thousand raised stones survive, most of them from eleventh-century Sweden. They are memorials, property records, conversion announcements and, occasionally, poetry.
Runestones are concentrated sharply in time and place. The great majority are Swedish, and most were raised in a window of about a century around AD 1000, which is to say around the conversion. They are as much a Christian phenomenon as a Viking one.
The ones worth knowing
| Monument | Signature | Date | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kylver stone | G 88 | c. AD 400 | The oldest complete Elder Futhark row. It is why we know the traditional order of the alphabet. |
| Vadstena bracteate | Ög 178 | c. AD 500 | A gold pendant with the futhark divided by dots into three groups of eight: the earliest evidence for the ættir. |
| Gallehus horns | DR 12 | c. AD 400 | ek hlewagastiʀ holtijaʀ horna tawido, "I, Hlewagastiʀ of Holt, made the horn." The best-known complete Elder Futhark sentence. |
| Björketorp & Stentoften | DR 360, DR 357 | c. AD 600–700 | Transitional-period stones carrying curse formulas against anyone who damages them. |
| Rök stone | Ög 136 | early 9th c. | The longest runic inscription, around 760 runes, using several cipher systems. Its meaning is still argued over. |
| Jelling I, the small stone | DR 41 | c. AD 950 | Raised by Gorm the Old for his wife Thyra, "Denmark's adornment": the earliest use of the name Denmark within Denmark itself. The Old English Orosius has it about sixty years earlier. |
| Jelling II, the large stone | DR 42 | c. AD 965 | Harald Bluetooth's monument for his parents, recording his rule and the conversion of the Danes. Often called Denmark's birth certificate. |
| Karlevi stone | Öl 1 | late 10th c. | The only runestone carrying a complete skaldic stanza in dróttkvætt metre. |
| Hillersjö stone | U 29 | 11th c. | An unusually long inheritance record passing through a woman, Geirlaug. |
| Franks Casket | – | early 8th c. | A whalebone box captioned in Old English runes, mixing Germanic legend, Roman history and the Gospels. |
| Ruthwell Cross | – | 8th c. | A stone cross carrying Christian verse in runes, related to the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. |
How inscriptions are catalogued
The signatures in the table above are not decorative. Scandinavian inscriptions are catalogued by region: U for Uppland, Sö for Södermanland, Ög for Östergötland, DR for Denmark, G for Gotland, Öl for Öland, N for Norway. The number identifies the inscription within that region.
This matters practically. Every inscription cited on this site carries its signature, so you can look it up in the Scandinavian Runic-text Database or in Runor rather than taking our word for it. That is the point of citing them.
The carvers signed their work
This is the part of the runestone corpus that popular writing leaves out, and it is the part that most undercuts the image of runes as arcane knowledge. Eleventh-century Uppland had professional rune-carvers who signed their monuments by name, and whose hands are distinct enough that unsigned stones can be attributed to them on style alone.
| Carver | Signed | Also attributed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Öpir | About 50 | Sources differ: 50 to 100 more | The most prolific known, working in late-11th-century Uppland in the Urnes style. Åhlén argues the signatures cover more than one carver, which would make these totals a workshop’s rather than a man’s. |
| Åsmund Kåresson | About 20 | Around 30 more | Active from the 1020s to mid-century. He introduced the classic Uppland style (one or two rune-animals with their heads seen in profile) that most later carvers worked in. |
| Balle | 24 | Around 20 more | Västmanland, south-western Uppland and northern Södermanland, in the second half of the century. |
| Fot | 8 | Around 40 more | Mid-11th-century southern Uppland; a recognisable workshop hand. |
A signature means a commission, and a commission means a market. Someone was paying for these stones, someone was competing for the work, and enough people could read the result to make the expense worth it. That is a considerably stronger argument about runic literacy than anything the inscriptions say about themselves.
How a runestone was made
The stone came first and the text was fitted to it. A carver chose a boulder or slab with a usable face, laid out a band (very often a serpent or beast whose body carries the writing) and then had to make the text fit the space the design left. That constraint explains a good deal about how runestone texts read: the formula is compressible, and words get abbreviated, crowded or dropped where the band runs out.
- Layout first. The band was drawn or scratched out before cutting, and on some unfinished stones you can still see the guide lines.
- Cutting. An iron chisel and a mallet on stone; a knife point on wood and bone. The two produce quite different letter forms, which is part of why short-twig runes dominate on portable objects.
- Painting. The finished carving was coloured. Traces of red, black and white pigment survive on a number of stones, and the weathered grey we see today is the paint gone, not the intended effect.
- Raising. Most runestones were set up beside a road, a bridge or an assembly place, somewhere people passed. Several inscriptions say so outright, commemorating a bridge the family built alongside the stone.
Reading a runestone
- Find the start. Text usually runs along a carved band, often a serpent. The head or tail of the animal marks where to begin.
- Follow the band, not the stone. The line can spiral, double back and change direction. Reading order follows the band.
- Expect the formula. Most texts are "X raised this stone in memory of Y". Knowing that makes damaged sections recoverable.
- Watch for dividers. Words are separated by dots or crosses, not spaces.
- Do not expect vowels to be reliable. Younger Futhark spelling merges several sounds. Context decides.
Forgeries and misattributions
Runic material attracts fakes, and some of them are famous. The Kensington Runestone from Minnesota, claiming a fourteenth-century Norse presence in North America, is rejected by essentially all runologists on linguistic grounds: its language contains forms that did not exist until centuries later.
How to spot a doubtful claim
Questions this guide answers
- How many runestones are there?
- Several thousand. Sweden alone has around 2,500, with Uppland accounting for over a thousand of them. Denmark and Norway have far fewer.
- Why are most runestones in Sweden?
- The tradition of raising inscribed memorial stones peaked in eastern Sweden around the eleventh century, at the time of the conversion. Why it took hold so strongly there and not elsewhere is not fully explained.
- Were runestones painted?
- Yes. Traces of pigment survive on some stones, and the carved bands were originally coloured: red, black and white are attested. The weathered grey stone we see is not how they looked.
Sources
Full references on the sources page. Our methodology explains the evidence labels used throughout.