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.

Erling's Home

Photo of Bryne by Rune Sattler CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

One of the most famous footballers today is the still very young Erling Braut Haaland, born in Leeds, but firmly rooted in his home town of Bryne, south of Stavanger, in the Jæren region of southwest Norway. Today's lecture is about his surname.

Like many Norwegians, Erling's surname derives from what was originally a farm-name. According to Wikipedia, his name was originally spelled Håland, which would be the normal modern spelling. Haaland is an alternative, usually older, way of spelling it, which was perhaps adopted by his father when working in Leeds so as not to scare the poor monoglot English with a foreign letter.

According to Rygh's Norske Gaardnavne, there are 31 farms in Norway called Håland or Haaland. The name itself means 'High Land' and it is interestingly quite common in Orkney, too, where it is usually spelled Holland.

Young Erling Braut Haaland grew up in the small town of Bryne, in the municipality of Time. One of the 31 Norwegian farms called Håland or Haaland is actually right on the edge of Bryne, to the southwest, and it is very likely that is where his surname derives from.

And how should it be pronounced? The closest I can get to how an English speaker can get it more or less right is 'Hawlund' ('haw' as in 'jaw' and 'lund' as in 'fund').

There is also a place called Braut, now subdivided into Nord- and Sør- (North- and South-), not far to the northwest of Bryne, which I'm assuming is where his middle name comes from, presumably from his mother's side as is often the custom in Norway nowadays.

So now you know.

The Norwegians Row the Snake

Illustration by Wilhelm Wetlesen for Harald Hardrådes saga, Heimskringla 1899-edition: «Kvinner frå Nidaros står og ser på at skipet vert drive fram med sytti årer.»

Well, tonight is when it happens - Norway meets England in the World Cup. I have already pointed out in a previous blogpost that Erling Braut Haaland's namesake, the eleventh-century Erlingr Skjalgsson, said, before a battle, that 'eagles should fight face to face'. Since he was from the same part of Norway as today's Erling, I am sure that will happen tonight.

A lot of attention has been paid to the 'Viking Row' as practised by the Norwegian fans to encourage the team and by the team itself to celebrate. Indeed, a recent blogpost on the History Extra website by David Musgrove explains the origins of this phenomenon in the fact that (a) vikings did row and (b) they chanted while doing it. Part of the evidence cited is an old article by my PhD supervisor, Dr Richard Perkins (here is a link to a better version of the article, it's on pp. 155 ff.) on rowing chants. Now Richard was mainly interested in arguing that rowing chants were an important influence in the development of skaldic poetry, and particularly the version known as dróttkvætt, the metre in which most of the poetry in praise of Viking Age kings and chieftains was composed. The argument is long and complex but what is relevant here is that some of the poetry describes the rowing process on the way to battle.

Probably the best poem for understanding viking rowing and sailing is by Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, an Icelandic poet who composed in praise of the Norwegian king Haraldr Sigurðarson. Haraldr famously died in England in 1066, at the battle of Stamford Bridge (a non-football connection, that, since it was the one in Yorkshire, not Chelsea). Þjóðólfr's poem, which inspired the illustration above, describes Haraldr's war-fleet. The poem includes the following stanza, as edited and translated by Diana Whaley:

Sorgar veit, áðr slíti
sæfang ór mar strǫngum
herr, þars heldr til varra,
hár sjau tøgum ára.
Norðmeðr róa naðri
neglðum straum inn heglða
— úts, sem innan líti
arnarvæng — með jarni.

Anguish will be felt, before the troop whips the sea-gear [oar] out of the powerful sea, where the oarport holds [each of] the seventy oars in place for the stroke [lit. strokes]. The Norwegians row the snake [ship] nailed with iron on the hail-beaten current; [looking] out, it is like seeing an eagle’s wing from within.

I've always loved that last bit, that looking out of the ship while the men are rowing is 'like seeing an eagle's wing from within' - what a perfect image! It also fits nicely with Erlingr's rallying cry, as noted above, that 'eagles should fight face to face'. The idea of the ship as a snake or dragon is quite common in this poetry, derived, I think, not so much from the dragon figureheads on some ships, but from the slithering flexibility in the water of viking ships.

If Erling Braut Haaland is as interested in his Viking ancestry as seems to be the case, he would do well to read some of this eleventh-century poetry and draw some inspiration from that. So let's hope that tonight the Norwegians do indeed 'row the snake' to victory.