I Wrote This on Ólafr's Day, or the Saint in Runes

Door from Rauland church with runic inscription on the upper iron fitting.
Photo J. Jesch 2023.

Today is the feast day of the holy King Ólafr Haraldsson, who died on this day in 1030 at the battle of Stiklestad and subsequently became both Saint Ólafr and rex perpetuus Norvegiae 'eternal king of Norway'. As a widely-known figure, he not unnaturally appears in quite a few runic inscriptions, in various guises.

There is the heartfelt cry of someone carving 'Saint Ólafr pray for me' into the plaster of the church dedicated to the saint in Simrishamn in Skåne, now in Sweden but then in Denmark, some time in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

Then there is the curious message on a runestone from Stedje in Sogndal, Norway, which informs us that 'King Ólafr shot between these stones'. Why? Who or what? Where is the other stone? Which of several kings of the same name is referred to? It is most likely our saint, since there is quite a lot of folklore about him doing things in the landscape, which is what this also sounds like. The dating of the stone to ca. 1100 also fits quite well, not too long after he was canonised and his cult spread (which it did quickly).

Almost equally mysterious is the runestick from Bergen which declares that 'Ólafr the holy owns'. Presumably this refers not to the stick but to something more valuable or important, but we do not know what it was!

Probably the most common form of reference to our saint in runic inscriptions relates to the calendar. Today, commemorated as his death date, was a day in the year familiar to everyone, useful to orient yourself when you didn't have a smartphone or even a calendar to tell you what day it was. My heading above alludes to an inscription on a wooden plank found in the church at Angershestra, in Småland, in Sweden. The plank has been extensively damaged by woodworm since it was found in 1910, but we can still read that someone, whose name has not yet been interpreted, 'wrote me on Ólaf's day'.

But one of my all time favourite runic inscriptions is the church door from Rauland in Telemark, Norway. The door is now kept in the store of the Historical Museum in Oslo, where I was lucky enough to have a look at it in 2023. Here it is in transliterated, normalised and translated form, taken from runor.raa.se:

hake ⁓ beanar⁓sun ⁓ a mik ⁓ suæn ⁓ os-(u)-dar⁓sun ⁓ slo ⁓ mik ⁓ osofar ⁓ ræs⁓t ⁓ mik ⁓ auk ⁓ læiste ⁓ oþesndhen ⁓ nesta ⁓ eptir ⁓ olafs ⁓ foku ⁓ a seta ⁓ are ⁓ rikes ⁓ f(o)s ⁓ firþulhs ⁓ hæra ⁓ mahnusar ⁓ norihs ⁓ konohs

 Haki Bjarnarsonr á mik. Sveinn Ás[m]u[n]darsonr sló mik. Ásulfr reist mik ok læsti óðinsdaginn næsta eptir Ólafsvǫku á sétta ári ríkis várs virðulegs herra Magnúsar, Noregs konungs. 

Haki Bjǫrn's son owns me, Sveinn Ásmundr's son hammered me, Ásulfr carved and read me on the first Wednesday after Ólafr's-vigil in the sixth year of the reign of our worthy Sire Magnús, King of Norway.

I love this inscription for the beauty of the object and the insight it gives into all the people connected with making the door (and, presumably, the whole church), as well as the fact that it is one of the few runic inscriptions that dates itself. Working it out, and assuming the king in question was Magnús VII Eiríksson (ruled 1319-43), gives the date of the 31st of July 1325 (and I should have written this blog post last year on its 700th anniversary!). Even more wonderful to my mind is the use of three different types of time reckoning: firstly the day of the week established using óðinsdagr 'Wednesday', incorporating the name of the pagan god (a usage that had been banned in Iceland in the twelfth century); secondly the day and month established in relation to the ubiquitously-known feast day of our saint, Ólafsvaka (modern Norwegian olsok); and finally the year established by the regnal years of the king.

And here, to celebrate the day today, is the part of the inscription that mentions Ólafsvaka (comparing with the texts given above, what you can see is nesta ⁓ eptir ⁓ olafs ⁓ foku ⁓):

Detail of inscription N 179 Rauland, as described above.
Photo J. Jesch 2023.