by Neil Price;
One of the key elements in the fabric of power was land ownership, with absentee landholding one of the possible cornerstones of the late Iron Age elites. A major factor in this was inheritance rights, including the transfer of land within families. In the first instance, land always passed through the male line, although women could inherit in the absence of male relatives. If a marriage was childless, property usually reverted to whichever family it had come from. Thus, a childless widower would not inherit his late wife’s land even if they had worked it together during their marriage, and it would instead go back to her own kin. A central concept, found in the medieval laws of Norway and Sweden and much disputed as to its possible Viking-Age origins, was the óðal, or allodium. If a parcel of land had been owned by members of the same family for a longer period of time (six generations was the convention), their heirs had an inalienable right to it, and sale to others was blocked. One interesting effect of this was to protect the inheritance rights of daughters, who could keep the land over the rights of male relatives outside the immediate family.
One of the primary functions of the later runestones in the eleventh century was to record these rights of inheritance, tracing clear lines of descent and, one imagines, emphasising the legality of claims that had once been (and perhaps were still being) disputed. One stone in particular—from Hillersjö in Uppland—has become justly famous, not only for the unprecedented detail of the familial relationships it describes, but for their outcome:
Read! Germund got Gerlög, a maiden, as wife. Then they had a son before he [Germund] was drowned and then the son died. Thereafter she got Gudrik as her husband. He [ … ] this [text damaged here, but probably referring to the acquisition of Hillersjö]. Then they had children but only one girl survived, her name was Inga. Ragnfast of Snottsta got her as wife. Thereafter he died and then the son. And the mother [Inga] inherited from her son. Then she had Eirík as her husband. Then she died. Then Gerlög inherited from Inga, her daughter. Thorbjörn the skald carved the runes.
Thus we see Gerlög, twice widowed, who saw all her children and grandchildren die before her, and who in the end reverse inherited the land of three families. What a life, and in microcosm an image of the lives of her Viking-Age contemporaries: child mortality, multiple marriages, early deaths, no certainty, and around it all, the law in its engraved permanence.
Three other examples give the merest sense of the richness to be found in the inscriptions (and there are thousands of them), the intimate bond to the land and the critical nature of ownership, as well as all the human detail in between.
Östen had this stone raised in memory of Torgärd, his sister, Hallbjörn in memory of his mother.
Bergaholm, Södermanland
Sibba raised the stone in memory of Rodiaud, his wife, daughter of Rodgair in Anga. She died young, leaving infant children.
Ardre, Gotland
Sibba had this stone made in memory of his and Rodiaud’s daughter.
Ardre, Gotland
On the first stone, from Bergaholm, Hallbjörn is underage, which is why his uncle is the main sponsor of the stone; he holds Torgärd’s lands in trust and records his inheritance claim should anything happen to the boy. The two ‘Sibba stones’ from Gotland, raised by the same man to his wife and their daughter, emphasise the rights of infant children to inheritance and also stress that they will inherit from their maternal grandfather: these are the words of a man protecting the future of his line.
The land was not only claimed, but of course also named. Many place-names either refer to obvious topographical features—a stream or spring, a forest, a ford, or a meadow—or join them with someone’s personal name. Sometimes whole settlements are associated in this way. Dating names of this (or any) kind is not easy and has occupied an entire field of scholarship for well over a century, but we now have a broad idea of the named landscape of the Iron Age.
Customs varied over time, especially regionally. A certain zoning of function has been discerned, representing not only administrative divisions but also the physical location of the distinctive elements of power. Beyond places connected with royalty, there are -by (‘village’) names linked to offices and roles, thus situating those people in a network of consolidation, domination, and rapid response across the land. Taking just Swedish examples, we have the villages of the rinkr (a kind of military officer), the karlar (literally ‘the men’, effectively the retinue itself), even of the smed, the smiths—not an unimportant constituency if you wanted to have ready access to armour and weaponry repair. There are names for administrative power centres and central places themselves, such as tuna and husa and many more.
And then, perhaps above it all or maybe also enmeshed in the same webs of power, were the gods. In what are called theophoric place-names, a divinity is linked to a type of site, most often some kind of cultic place. Examples include -lund, a sacred grove, thus Odenslunda, ‘the Sacred Grove of Odin’; -vé, the name for an enclosed sanctuary, and so Ullevi, ‘the Sanctuary of Ull’; -åker, some kind of hallowed field, perhaps where offerings took place, and therefore Torsåker, ‘Thor’s Field’; and so on. Another example is Frösö, ‘Freyr’s Island’, and other kinds of toponym linked to a word for the sacred, thus Helgö, ‘Holy Island’. Most of the cultic name types are linked to several of the gods.
The theophoric names vary widely in distribution, with a tendency for specific gods to cluster in particular regions. There are no Ull names in Denmark, but they are thick in eastern central Sweden; Týr names are almost only found in Denmark; Thor places are common in Sweden and Norway; Odin names are rarely found west of the mountains; and so on. Some scholars have argued that this suggests different focal regions for the worship of these divinities, and this may be the case, but differences in customs do not necessarily reflect a shift in the beliefs that underpin them. For example, Jésus is a common man’s name in Latin America, whereas one rarely meets a European called Jesus—but this does not mean there are no Catholics in Europe. This may be true of the Norse theophoric names as well.
As we have seen, the main official role at the assemblies was that of the lawspeaker, one of whose tasks it was to recite the laws from memory, thereby acting as guarantor for the legality of the proceedings. The same needs for accurate recall and documentation were answered in the runestone inscriptions. This raises obvious issues of oral record-keeping, and the relationship between the spoken and written word.
The question of literacy is an interesting one in relation to the Vikings. When we use the word today, we most often mean the general ability to read and write, with all that this implies for how we (or others) use these skills in daily life. For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, however, it had a different sense, much more focussed on specific purposes and circumstances. There were certainly scripts available for use, in the form of runes. These developed much earlier in the Iron Age and are by no means a Viking invention, despite their popular associations. They had prototypes not only in Germanic Europe, but also a clear relationship to Latin.
Runes are deliberately angular signs, designed to be easily cut into hard surfaces, such as stone and especially wood. They were also sometimes painted. There are, broadly speaking, two forms of the Scandinavian runic alphabet, known as the older and younger futhark after the combination of its initial letters. The earlier series had twenty-four signs. The later version, which flourished in the Viking Age, was shorter at sixteen signs, but reused letters from its predecessor:
Each rune could be used for multiple sounds, as expressed through the filter of different regional dialects. The meaning of the early inscriptions can be especially hard to determine due to changes in the language itself. The sixteen-rune futhark of the Vikings seems to have been a conscious innovation, adapted for the simplification and reduction of the older system—in short, a response to a need. Linguistic fidelity to the phonetic properties of speech was decidedly reduced, but the script was also more accessible, and probably lighter and faster to u
se. As one of the greatest runologists has emphasised, “It was easy for the writer to spell words in this new alphabet but not always easy for a reader to decide what was meant”.
There are many local variants, and examples of personal touches (or confusions) brought by individual carvers. Beyond these, however, the younger futhark is found in two forms. The first was an ‘ordinary’ version of clear, rather formal and decorous characters. In the Viking Age, these are the signs most often found on monuments such as the runestones, and they are also the ones best known today. The second types were the so-called short-twig runes (there are many alternative names) for rapid use—effectively a kind of runic shorthand—and these were the signs people of the Viking Age used in everyday communications. The runes also had individual names, some of them associated with qualities, although many of the supposed runic ‘meanings’ popularised today are from relatively modern times or sources of dubious provenance. Runic inscriptions often consist only of a listing of the signs in the futhark itself—either the complete sequence or just the initial letters. Dependent on context, these inscriptions could represent anything from writing practice to an act of ritual significance.
The mythology gives a sacred, mystical origin for the runes, which came to Odin in a trance of ecstatic fervour. After hanging on the World Tree for nine nights, his body pierced with his own holy spear—a literal self-sacrifice (“myself to myself”, as he says)—the god has a vision. In the words of the Sayings of the High One:
I took up the runes,
screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
This association of the runes with magic and religious energies has a long pedigree, and is very prominent in the popular imagination today. Runes were etched on the teeth of Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, and on the fingernails of the Norns, the spirit-women of fate. It is certain they could be used for sorcery and spells when carved into sticks or household items, inscribed on curse poles and the like, or even cut into flesh. They occur several times in this context in the sagas, in scenes of vivid power. One of the Eddic poems, the Lay of Sigrdrifa, includes a detailed list of runes for special purposes—for protection in battle, to ease childbirth (“they shall be cut on the palms and clasped on the joints”), to heal, and to travel safely over the sea (“on the prow they must be cut and on the rudder, and burnt into the oar with fire”). There are even ‘speech-runes’ to give eloquence in legal oratory, and ‘mind-runes’ for clear thinking. Similarly, they are also found on runic amulets and inscribed slips of metal excavated from graves and in the occupation layers of settlements, serving as prophylactics against harm and ill health, or as active agents of malice against others. Some runestones also preserve magical formulae or cryptic scripts that have to be deciphered before revealing (often rather basic) mythological content, such as the names of gods. However important, in the end they nonetheless represent a peripheral usage of something that at its core was simply script. Obviously, today’s Roman letters have also been used for all these purposes and more, but they are not magical in themselves any more than the runes.
In all, many thousands of runic inscriptions have come down to us, mostly in the form of messages carefully engraved onto freestanding rocks—the famous ‘runestones’ mentioned here many times—in texts set within beautiful borders and other designs of writhing beasts and symbols. Originally painted in bright colours, sometimes the designs and inscriptions were instead cut directly into the smooth surfaces of natural boulders in the landscape. The earliest examples predate the Viking Age and extend as far back as the Migration Period in the fifth century, before increasing in number into the later Iron Age and exploding in popularity during the eleventh century (especially in central Sweden) with the introduction of Christianity. What they almost all have in common is that they are memorials to the dead—occasionally as actual grave markers but more usually set up in prominent places along roads and bridges where they would be most visible. A very few were erected by people in confident acts of self-promotion during their lifetimes. Runes are also found from late Roman times onward, scratched into the surface of metal objects such as bracteate discs, and as ownership marks on weapons and items of jewellery. This practice would continue into the Viking Age.
All this long suggested to scholars that runic literacy was a matter for the elites and a sign of status in itself. Only the relatively well-off could afford to commission a runic memorial to departed family members, and their public display was also a demonstration of social standing. However, this naturally raised the question of who could read them, unless the point was active exclusiveness through an emphasis that some could understand the angular signs whereas most could not. The argument for runes as an elite privilege received a decisive blow in the mid-twentieth century with discoveries in the Norwegian harbour towns of Bergen and Trondheim. Hundreds of small wooden slips, inscribed with runes, were found preserved intact in the waterlogged deposits of the dockside streets. They had served a fascinating variety of functions. Some were merchants’ tallies, noting the contents of bags and boxes; there were shopping lists, love notes, name tags denoting ownership, vulgar attempts at humour, and much more. They speak to familiar concerns—“Sigmund owns this sack”; “Ingibjörg had sex with me when I was in Stavanger”; “Gyda tells you to go home” (this one has an attempt at an answer in a different hand, but it is an illegible, drunken scrawl); “Things are bad with me, partner. I did not get the beer or the fish. I want you to know this, and ask you not to press me”—in short, the raw stuff of everyday life, expressed in writing. Not everyone was literate, but a lot of people obviously were, perhaps even children. In more recent decades, similar finds have been made all over the Viking world.
Runestones were produced to order in workshops run by specialists. The actual runic letters were carved by masters, who proudly signed their names. Many inscriptions end with such signatures, and we can trace ‘schools’ of work across the regions of Scandinavia, even sometimes follow a carver moving around to undertake commissions. For example, Ärnfast and Åsmund were active in Uppland, as was Öpir, who today even has his own scholarly biography; many other carvers’ names were recorded. Some of the inscriptions even detail the process, and occasionally we find not only the rune-carver named but also the whole team: one who shaped the stone itself, another who laid out the interlace patterns within which the runes would sit (we know from one such text that they were called something like ‘snake-ribbons’ or ‘snake-eels’, although the word is hard to parse), and a third who painted the colours. A beautiful and very elaborate stone from Gotland lists all the workmen in this way, but marvellously also includes some extra, shaky little runes that do not keep to the main design scheme but meander untidily off into what should be a blank space: “and Gairlaiv [did] some as well he can”. One wonders if the team was on lunch break and came back to find their hapless assistant enthusiastically bashing away. Never mind—one could always fill it in and paint over, and it is not certain the patron ever knew.
Most of the later inscriptions, almost all Christian in tone, run along similar lines: a list of sponsors and their familial relationships, the name(s) of the one(s) commemorated, perhaps an associated place or profession. Some include short notices of where and/or how a person died—in battle, on an expedition, in the East, with Ingvar in command. In very rare cases, a poem is provided. Often there is a cross and a prayer for the soul. Sometimes the inscriptions mention a commemorative act, like the building of a causeway or the setting up of other monuments such as lines of standing stones or posts. Now and then it is possible to catch glimpses of a locality’s history, and through groups of linked stones one can follow the generational fortunes of its leading families. The Nordic Rune-Name Lexicon (in Swedish) lists more than fifteen hundred personal names found on the stones—a trove of Viking-Age knowledge that brings us close to the people and their concerns.
The runestones seemed to fit the Vikings’ needs for permanen
t records, while books clearly did not. This is an important point because there is no doubt they understood what these bound stacks of illustrated vellum were, how to make them, and how they worked. Writing Latin with a quill is really not so very far from carving runes with a knife. Nobody knows exactly why the Scandinavians rejected books and the distinctive literary culture that came with them, but it was probably because it gave them nothing they wanted. In the Viking mind, knowledge was a precarious thing. By the same token, the monopoly the Church possessed over both the teaching and employment of writing—holy books, with holy men to interpret them for you—was subtly different, and suffocating, to the Viking sense of what a script was.
12. The runestone from Rök. Bearing the longest runic inscription from Scandinavia, this ninth-century stone in Swedish Östergötland preserves cryptic lists of fragmentary stories, bound up with mythological secrets and the commemoration of the dead. Photo: Bengt Olof Åradsson, Creative Commons.
The ultimate illustration is the early ninth-century runestone from Rök in Östergötland in Sweden, which carries the longest inscription in all of Scandinavia. A large piece of granite, completely covered in signs on every angle of its surface including the top (which is hard even to see), its long text contains allusions to several stories—deliberately teasing fragments that both presume prior knowledge in some readers and emphasise its exclusivity to others. There are riddles, word games, and references to the deep past of the Migration Period and the mythology of the carver’s present. All this in turn relates to the families and concerns of the local area; above all, in its first line, the stone is a memorial set up by a man to his son. Not everyone could read the runes of the Rök stone, and not all those who could might get their deeper meanings, but—like all such memorials and other uses of the runic script—it was deeply socially embedded (and visible) in a way that the book cultures of the Continent never wished to be.
