Runeday

I had thought that runes was something that Tolkien groupies got up to, but it seems that they are a good deal more serious than that, with rune stones being a significant feature of the Swedish landscape, both natural and academic.

The one illustrated left is one of the most famous, is around 1,200 years old and is called the Rök stone. It seems that despite the clarity of the stone carving - I think covering front, back and right hand edge - and with most of the runes being arranged in neat vertical columns - there is much debate in academe about what exactly is being said.and with the latest salvo being published in number 6 of Futhark, the International Journal of Runic Studies, and entitled 'Rök runestone riddles. A study of meaning-making and spatiality'.

As someone who has some difficulty with understanding papers about brain science, it was some obscure comfort to find that a paper about runes was equally incomprehensible - and I don't think that the translation from the original Swedish was to blame for this. By way of example we have: '... In the study of language and spatiality these three dimensions have opened up three ways of conceptualizing how writing contributes to place-making. First, how writing can be spatially organized on the textual surface has been examined ...'. Or: '... The second complex of riddles consists of the text element about the accomplishments of Vilinn on the reverse of the stone and ends with an unsolved numerical cipher. The interpretation here follows Kyhlberg’s ... suggestion that the action to “crush a giant” could be a riddle for the carving of the runes ...'. Perhaps a parallel text of the stone itself would have been a better place for me to start. The sort of thing that the British Museum offer about the Rosetta Stone.

So I ask Amazon about the stone and the best they can come up with is 'Runes and Their Secrets: Studies in Runology' by Gillian Fellows-Jensen and Marie Stokluind, a snip at £999.11. Amazon seems to have these bizarre prices from time to time - so perhaps they should spend a bit more time & money on the bit of their software which does prices. And I guess I shall have to wait until we go and see the thing for ourselves, a thing which I dare say will come with a full-on visitor centre complete with guide books about the stone in every language of the European Union.

PS: through one Michael Barnes we have a link to our own University College London, a place which I have come across before in the context of Scandinavia. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Nils+Holgersson.