I know nine cases:
Kind scribe, Dashing in the tavern game, I am a skier and a scribe.
Bow, paddle and glorious
The rune warehouse is under my control.
I am skilled at forging
As in the buzz gusel.
(Rognwald Kali. "Poetry of the Skalds". Translation by S. V. Petrov)
For many thousands of years, mankind has done well without writing. Well, maybe he used pictures to convey information. But then, somewhere at the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the volumes of information became so great that human memory was no longer enough. We needed a means of accounting and control more informative than pebbles and sticks, means of identification, in a word, everything that accurately transmits information over a distance and allows it to be stored.
The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal perished in the fire, but thanks to the fact that it consisted of "clay books", it miraculously survived and has survived to our time. The same applies to the writing of the Scandinavian peoples who possessed the so-called runic writing, that is, writing with the help of runes, signs similar to our alphabet, which were carved or carved on stone, metal, wood, and bones and which therefore had a specific angular shape, convenient for cutting.
Runestones in the courtyard of the Jelling Church.
It is important to note that any written text is the most important source in the study of the culture of the past, as it allows you to look into the spiritual world of the people who left behind their written signs and learn a lot that is very difficult to find out with the help of archaeological finds. Therefore, it is not surprising that the stones with runic inscriptions applied to them that have come down to our time have become for scientists a real gift of fate.
The big stone in Jelling is a kind of “birth certificate” of Denmark. It has a height of 2.43 meters, weighs about 10 tons and was installed by King Harald I Sinezuby no earlier than 965. The inscription on it reads: “Harald the king put this stone in honor of Gorm, his father, and Tyra, his mother. Harald, who conquered all of Denmark and Norway, who baptized the Danes."
What historical time do they relate to? It is believed that the oldest monuments of runic writing date back to the turn of our era. But about the place of origin and its very origin, there are still disputes. "Elder Edda" (or "Edda Samund", or "Song Edda") - a collection of poetic songs about the gods and heroes of Scandinavian mythology, tells that the supreme god Odin paid with his suffering on the Yggdrasil tree just to know the runes. But in the "Song of Riga" it is said that the runes belonged to the god Riga, who taught them to the son of Hövding, who became the ancestor of the first king of the Vikings. That is, even in Scandinavia itself, opinions about the origin of runic writing differed greatly.
In any case, the runes have become a characteristic monument of the era of the Great Nations Migration and the first barbarian kingdoms, and many things have survived, on which there are inscriptions made by runes. However, after the adoption of Christianity and its spread, they were gradually replaced from use by the Latin alphabet, although in Sweden they were used even in the 18th - 19th centuries.
The first mentions of ancient runes in literature date back to 1554. Then Johannes Magnus in his "History of the Goths and Suevi" brought the Gothic alphabet, a year later his brother Olaf Magnus published the runic alphabet in the "History of the Northern Peoples". But since many runic inscriptions were made on stones, even then books with their drawings appeared, including the runic calendar discovered in Gotland. It is interesting that since a number of stones have been lost since that time, their images have become the only source of their study for modern researchers today.
Interest in stones with runic inscriptions flared up only in the second half of the 19th century, and many stones became known to specialists in the 20th century from photographs of the 1920s and 1930s and scientific publications in the early 1940s. It is possible that the reason for this attitude towards the Viking heritage was its widespread use in Nazi Germany as a means of promoting the Aryan spirit and culture. Well, then these monuments of Scandinavian culture were directly "attacked" by various mystics and occultists, who considered the runestones as some kind of "places of power." The fashion for Scandinavian neo-paganism and mysticism, which flourished in a magnificent color, also contributed to the spread of pseudo-knowledge about runes and runestones, read from the occult literature of modern authors. The same can be said about the popularization of runes and paganism in modern Scandinavian rock: its bright, semi-antique forms today simply crowd out the original folklore works of the past.
The situation changed only in the early 2000s; among scientists, interest in runestones revived again. In a number of Scandinavian universities, research groups were organized, specialized databases began to be created, in particular, such a database was created in Norway at the university in the city of Uppsala. The electronic library "Runeberg" was collected - an impressive in its volume repository of the world scientific runological literature. By 2009, it was finally possible to settle all the legal and technical issues related to the online publication of the information accumulated in it, which then became available to specialists around the world. Now this database contains more than 900 runic inscriptions, and it continues to expand. Moreover, it includes not only the inscriptions found on the runestones in Denmark, but also Germany, Sweden and Norway and other Scandinavian countries. Along with rare photographs of the 1920s and 1940s, there are also those of them that were taken in our time.
Photo of 1936. Stone next to a house in Herrestad. The inscription on it reads: "Gudmund made this monument in memory of Ormar, his son."
It is interesting that there are a number of specific difficulties in the study of runestones. For example, due to the texture of the stone on which the inscriptions made on them are engraved, much when looking at them depends on the angle of view of the observer and the degree of their illumination. The same can be said about the methodology for the study of these stones: it is interdisciplinary in nature and includes both textological and philological methods, data from archaeological research, as well as the texts of ancient sagas and testimonies of chroniclers. One method is one-sided and can negatively affect the results of the study.
Photo of 1937. Men are dragging a stone on Faringso Island. The inscription on it reads: "Stenfast set a stone in memory of Björn, his brother … in memory of Björn and Arnfast."
Well, and the reading of the runic inscription on the stone itself begins with determining the direction in which the carver placed his text. So, if the preservation of the inscription is not very good, it can become a rather serious problem for the researcher.
There are three types of arrangement of lines in runic inscriptions: when they run parallel to each other (the most ancient inscriptions are oriented from right to left), along the contour of a stone, or like the Greek bustrophedon - that is, a method of writing in which its direction alternates depending on the parity of the lines. That is, if the first line is written from left to right, then the second - from right to left. In addition to archaic Greece, this type of writing was widespread in the Western Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. Well, contour inscriptions were typical for stones on which drawings are combined with inscriptions. In them, runes fill the outline of the drawing, usually designed in the form of the body of a giant snake.
Photo of 1944. Stone at Nebbelholm. The content of the inscription: “Gunnkel installed this stone in memory of Gunnar, father, son of Rod. Helga put him, her brother, in a stone coffin in Bath, England."
The fact that the lines of the early (IV-VI centuries) runic inscriptions are located from right to left, became the basis for hypotheses about the Middle Eastern or even Ancient Egyptian origin of the runic writing. The traditional European writing from left to right occurred gradually, as a result of the contacts of the Scandinavians with their southern and western neighbors. It has been noticed that early runic inscriptions (made before 800) usually do not have ornaments and often contain magic spells.
A big problem in reading runestones was the language in which the inscription was made on them. Already by the 7th century, that is, by the time when the tradition of installing runestones was widespread in Scandinavia, dialectal features and differences in the languages of different Scandinavian peoples began to appear in them. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the runic inscriptions on stones were read by many experts in completely different ways. First, they dealt with poor-quality images of them and therefore mistakenly took some signs for others. And secondly, since it is not at all easy to carve signs on a stone, their authors often resorted to abbreviations that were understandable at that time, but … alas, incomprehensible today.
Today there are 6578 known runestones, 3314 of which are commemorative. More than half is located in Sweden (3628), of which 1468 are concentrated in one of its regions - Uppland. In Norway there are 1649 and very few in Denmark - 962. There are runestones in Britain, as well as in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. There are several such stones even in Russia, for example, on Valaam. But Russian runestones have not been sufficiently studied, due to traditionally anti-Normanist phobias that exist both in our national historiography, as well as in public opinion, but they are revered by local mystics and occultists as “places of power”.
Another extreme characteristic of our modern home-grown amateur runologists today is attempts to "read" runic inscriptions on stones using the vocabulary of the modern Russian language: after all, even if we assume that they, like, for example, the famous stone from the River, were put by the Slavs, their the texts could by no means be written in a language close to our modern Russian. Although the wide distribution of runes among the Germanic tribes, including those who lived along the lower and middle reaches of the Dnieper, that is, the Goths who belonged to the Chernyakhov culture, suggests that the hypothetical early Slavic writing, known as "chety and rezy", was just formed on based on those runes that the Goths used.
Interestingly, in addition to real runestones, a number of their fakes are also known. So, according to scientists, fakes are the Havenersky and Kensington stones, which were found in the United States outside of any archaeological context, which at least somehow spoke of the Scandinavian presence in these places. This can be explained by the "Vikingomania" that swept the United States in the 1960s. Also a fake is the discovery of two stones in 1967 and 1969, made by schoolchildren from Oklahoma. All of them turned out to be written on an artificial mixture of the runes of the older (II-VIII centuries) and the younger (X-XII centuries) futarks - that is, runic alphabets, which means that they could not have been created by people of either era. Most likely, these students, not understanding the specifics of various alphabets, simply copied them from some popular book about runes.
The inscription on this stone reads: “Sandar erected the stone in memory of Yuara, his relative. No one will produce a more talented son. Maybe Thor will protect."
One of the most common reasons for installing runestones was the death of a relative. For example, what the inscription on the Grönsten stone says: “Toke put [this] stone after [the death] of Revla, the son of Esge, the son of Björn. May God help his soul. " At the same time, it is not at all necessary that such stones stand on the graves. Most likely, such stones were placed not so much at the burial place of a given person, but in some significant places for him or for the entire community as a material "memory"!
The inscription on the Kollinsky stone testifies that they could have been placed in the homeland of someone who died in foreign lands, and were buried there: "Toste put this stone after [the death of] Tue, who died in the eastern campaign and his brother Asweds, a blacksmith." That is, the runestones should be considered not monuments to the deceased, but above all memorial stones.
Such memorial stones are characterized by the following manner of presenting information:
1. X placed this stone / carved these runes after [death] Y.
2. Description of the circumstances of the death of Y, and a listing of the feats he accomplished.
3. Religious appeal to the gods, for example, "Thor sanctified these runes" or "May God help him."
Here it must be borne in mind that in the Scandinavian cult of the dead, it was assumed that the soul of the deceased, if you mention it in the inscription, can move into this stone, receive sacrifices from the living, talk with them and even fulfill their requests. It is not surprising that the Christian Church considered the runestones to be the creations of the devil and fought with them as best she could, as a result of which many of them show signs of damage. On the other hand, in the popular mind, respect for these stones persisted until the late Middle Ages.
Photo of 1929. “Alrik, son of Sigrid, erected a stone in memory of his father Spute, who was in the West and fought in the towns. He knew the way to all the fortresses."
Now we do not know whether it was possible to put such a memorial stone in memory of any person, or it must be a "difficult person", but the structure of the text of these memorial stones is such that X (the person who placed such a stone) usually tried to indicate the merits of Y (then there is the one to whom it was put). This gives rise to the assumption that such stones were received only by some exceptional individuals with "special power" capable of helping living people who turned to this person or to this memorial stone for help.
It is also unknown what kind of reward awaited the one who put this stone, not to mention the fact that it was quite costly. It is interesting that the inscriptions on the runic commemorative stones very often list the people who put this stone, so it is quite possible that getting on the list of assistants allowed them to hope for some kind of blessing or receiving magical help.
Photo of 1930. The inscription is carved on a rock by the road leading to the town of Södertälje. It is written: “Holmfast cleared the way in memory of Inga… his kind mother…. Holmfast cleared the road and made a bridge in memory of Gammal, his father, who lived in Nasby. May God help his spirit. Osten (cut)."
Researchers of runestones distinguish several types of them. First of all, these are “long stones” up to three or more meters high, made in the tradition of menhirs. These include, for example, the richly ornamented Anundskhog stone, set by Folkweed for his son Heden. Moreover, in the inscription, this Heden is called the brother of Anund. Therefore, historians believe that this Anund is none other than the Swedish king Anund, who ruled at the beginning of the 11th century. And even if according to historical chronicles his father was Olaf Sketkonung, and Folkwyd was just a distant relative, this relationship was quite enough for him to be mentioned on this stone.
