The Rök Runestone: A Father's Riddles

For centuries the stone lay built into the wall of a storehouse beside the church at Rök, in the plains of Östergötland in southern Sweden, its carved faces partly hidden. In 1843 workers found carving on more sides than the one they could see; in 1862 it was taken out of the wall and set up in the churchyard. It is a granite slab about 2.4 metres high, covered on five faces with some 760 runes. It is the longest runic inscription in the world. Carved in the early ninth century, it begins plainly:

> In memory of Vámóðr stand these runes. And Varinn coloured them, the father, in memory of his dead son.

What follows is anything but plain.

A text made of riddles

After the dedication the inscription turns to a series of questions and answers, framed with the formula sagum mogminni, roughly "I tell the folk-memory" or "I say to the young men". It asks which "two war-booties" were taken twelve times, and who died among whom. It names heroes of legend, including a stanza on Theodoric:

Theodoric the bold, chief of sea-warriors, ruled over the shores of the Hreiðsea. Now he sits armed on his Gothic horse, his shield strapped, the prince of the Mærings.

Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths in Italy (d. 526), had lived three centuries before the stone. A famous equestrian statue of him, taken from Ravenna to Aachen by Charlemagne in 801, may be the image behind "sits armed on his Gothic horse". This is a proposal, not a certainty.

The stanza is in fornyrðislag, the metre of Old Norse eddic poetry, so it is also among the earliest recorded Scandinavian verse.

Ciphers

Parts of the inscription are written in cryptographic runes. Among them:

• Substitution: each rune is replaced by the next rune in the futhark.
• Coordinate (cipher) runes: a rune's position is given as "family" and number within the three groups (ættir) of the futhark, marked as strokes on the branches of a stem.
• Older runes: some passages are written in the elder futhark, already archaic by the ninth century.

The ciphers are deciphered, and there is broad agreement on which rune is which. The difficulty is what the text means and in what order to read it.

How to read it

For much of the twentieth century the dominant reading, following Elias Wessén, saw the stone as a heroic memorial full of legendary lore, meant to inspire vengeance for the dead son.

In 2020, Per Holmberg, Bo Gräslund, Olof Sundqvist and Henrik Williams published a new interpretation in Futhark, "The Rök Runestone and the End of the World". They read the riddles as being about the sun and a great cold, and linked them to fear of a climate catastrophe like the dark years after the volcanic eruptions of 536 CE, remembered as a "Fimbulwinter". In their reading the grieving father finds hope that his son will fight beside Odin at Ragnarök, after which the light returns. The interpretation drew wide attention and criticism, and runologists continue to debate it.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Colouring the runes. Varinn says he "coloured" (fāði) the runes. Runestones were painted, often in red and black, and traces of paint survive on some stones.

Runes and secrecy. The word rún also means "secret" or "mystery" in Germanic languages. On the Rök stone the carver uses ciphers as a display of learning, not to hide information from enemies: the reader is invited to work to understand.

The futhark's structure. The younger futhark of the Viking Age has 16 runes in three families. The Rök cipher runes depend on that structure, so the alphabet's order is part of the message.

Connections

Norse Paganism (ch23), Celtic & Germanic (ch14), and The End of Days (ch50) for Ragnarök. Compare the Book of Soyga (V19) for letter-tables and the Voynich manuscript (V01) for text that resists reading.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/rok-runestone.html