Runic inscriptions from the Viking Age still turn up in Sweden 1,000 years after they were written – revealing fascinating stories of love, loss and epic battles.
A few years ago, Magnus Källström, a Swedish rune expert, travelled to a farm a few hours south of Stockholm to look at a stone covered in ancient runic writing. A farmer had found the stone in a field and had planned to use it as a doorstep until he turned it over and saw rows of ancient, twig-like signs: runes, used by Vikings around 1,000 years ago.
When Källström arrived, the residents at the farm and local archaeologists gathered around him as he stumbled at the first word, then read the text out loud. Word by word, he was voicing a message no-one had read or heard in almost a millennium: “Gärder erected this stone in memory of Sigdjärv his father, Ögärd’s husband.“
As surprising as this discovery may sound, it’s not uncommon for ancient rune stones to turn up by chance in modern-day Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. They emerge as people build bike lanes or plough their fields. Some are extremely old and date to the earliest days of this mysterious script, such as an up to 2,000-year-old rune stone discovered in Norway in 2023. Over their lifetime, some simply ended up as raw material for construction, smashed to pieces to provide a house foundation or accidentally covered in granite under a church doorstep.
For ordinary Swedes like me, the stones are also a familiar part of the scenery. They appear in fields and meadows, in the middle of roundabouts and in industrial parks. Specific signs point to heritage sites near roads, often containing runes – signs that I, once a child stuck in the backseat of the family car on holidays, still associate with boredom. And yet, despite this familiarity, the stones and the enigmatic writing on them still hold many surprises and unsolved puzzles.