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.

Runes in Our Troubled Times

Back in the day when this blog was nobbut a baby blog, one of my first posts gave a quick mention to the Odinic obsessions of a certain Julian Cope, ageing musician and antiquarian who grew up in Tamworth. Twelve years later, the Other Half is still keeping not-very-musical me up to date with Cope's antics, especially when they have a Viking flavour, as they often do, such as his 2017 album Drunken Songs with a cute Viking ship on the cover. So I couldn't help noticing that his latest album, Self Civil War, includes a runic inscription which is very familiar to me (pictured above). It is of course one of the graffiti from the chambered tomb of Maeshowe, on the mainland of Orkney, which I have had occasion to mention one or two times before. Not that you would know this from the album, which nowhere explains what these funny marks are...

The runes read utnorþr : er fe · folhit · mikit, which in standard Old West Norse is Útnorðr er fé folgit mikit, meaning 'In the north-west is great wealth concealed.' What it actually means is anyone's guess, though I suspect there is a strong element of joke about it, like many of the other graffiti in Maeshowe, several of which play with the idea that there was once treasure in the mound. Why this inscription is on this album is also anyone's guess, though Cope has a long history of being interested both in ancient monuments and Norse stuff. A quick internet search shows that he was writing a version of this message (with what looks like a felt-tip pen) on a plastic-looking stone at the Lunar Festival in Tamworth in 2015. OK, so he wrote 'buried' instead of 'concealed', and 'north', instead of 'north-west', but he is forgiven for thinking that treasure is always buried and for not knowing the concept of útnorðr, which only features in my more advanced Old Norse classes. Like many Old Norse words it reveals a fascinating way of looking at the world, but would require altogether another blogpost to explain.

But Cope does appear to have been doing his Scandi homework, since the album also contains a song 'Lokis sympati' in Danish. I don't pretend to understand what it's about, even though my reading Danish is excellent. If you have any thoughts, let me know! The credits say 'All words by Julian Cope' so I have to assume he knows Danish. Good lad. I suppose this goes back to his interest in 'lost Danish music' which started in a charity shop in Melksham in 1999...

The title of the album is however not Cope's but taken from a poem from the 1630s, 'Self Civil War' by a certain Reverend Roger Brearley. This one I do understand, all too well, and also Cope's comment that it 'seems to sum up the psychic and political divisions that many modern Brits share with their Cavalier and Roundhead counterparts.' This is even more true now than when the album came out at the beginning of this year. Let us hope we can somehow find that elusive treasure, wherever it is.

Runic Yule

Before we completely let go of the Christmas season and turn our thoughts to the New Year, I thought I'd mention a few runic inscriptions where the festive season makes an appearance. The harvest of examples is not as rich or varied as in skaldic verse (as discussed in my previous post), but still has its interest. In addition to the splendid depiction of the Nativity on the Dynna rune-stone from Norway, pictured in that previous post, there are I think only two references to jól in the inscriptions themselves, neither of them especially Christmassy!

Both are graffiti from the walls of Norwegian stave churches, both are probably from the twelfth century, and both state that they were carved on the Sunday after Christmas (the texts below are taken from the Scandinavian runic database, with some necessary modifications). One is from Borgund, in Sogn og Fjordane (pictured), everyone's favourite stave church, and the most 'runic' of all the runic stave churches, and this one says:

klemetr · ræist ru(^n)ar þesar sunutah þan er nestr e^r æpt(e)r iol guþ gæte (h)ans o^k in hælka m(æ)r
Klemetr reist rúnar þessar sunnudag þann, er næstr er eptir jól. Guð gæti hans ok hinn helga mær.
Klemetr cut these runes on the Sunday which is next after Christmas. May God and the holy maiden protect him.

The other inscription is from the church in Atrå, in Telemark, and it has a very similar message:

þostæin bengæir ræit runar þessar sutah þan er nesr net iolom
Þorsteinn Bengeirr reit rúnar þessar sunnudag þann, er næstr ... jólum.
Þorsteinn bengeirr wrote these runes on the Sunday which is closest ... Christmas.

One can only speculate why Klemetr and Þorsteinn felt the need to write these banal statements on the walls of what was presumably their local church. Were they just bored? Were they suffering the after-effects of Christmas eating and drinking? We don't know where the plank with Þorsteinn's runes was originally placed in the church, but Klemetr's graffito is in the covered walkway that surrounds the church, so perhaps he was just waiting to go in, or hanging about after church while his wife indulged in gossip with the neighbours. As Annette Jones once wrote, 'Before or after services was a likely time for people to have written runes'.

At least Klemetr followed his signature with a prayer, and that is in line with most stave church graffiti, which tend to the pious. One of his s-runes has a little cross on it, making it look a bit like the IHS monogram (rune 22 in the drawing below, taken from volume 4 of Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer 1957):

Þorsteinn, on the other hand, not only didn't have much to say apart from documenting his vandalism, but also struggled a bit with his orthography. More interesting than his banalities is his by-name, which means 'wound-spear' and was perhaps intended to suggest his warlike nature. Or perhaps it was just a joke, as so many by- and nicknames were. Although bengeirr is not recorded elsewhere as a byname, it does occur once as a given name for one of the followers of King Sverrir, a man called Bengeirr langi 'the tall'. Since the name is so rare, Magnus Olsen speculated (in volume 2 of Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer) that our runic Þorsteinn bengeirr was the father of Bengeirr langi, since it was not unknown for the father's byname to become the given name of his son or a later descendant.

The pious, the mundane, the violent and family feeling, it's all there in runic inscriptions....