Runic inscriptions on Viking-age plates — what do they tell us? The aim of the project is to provide new readings for a number of runic plates from the Viking Age and linguistically to analyse earlier interpretations of their inscriptions
Supervisors: prof. Henrik Williams, prof. Rune Palm, prof. Veturliði Òskarsson
Sofia Steblin-Kamenskaya email: sofia.steblin-kamenskaya@nordiska.uu.se
Material In my investigation I have chosen to include runic plates made of copper or bronze (not lead) and with inscriptions in Old Scandinavian (not in Latin). Their size varies from 2 cm to 8 cm in length. Some of these objects have a rectangular form while others are rather trapezoidal or quadratic. Some may have a hole in order for them to be worn on the body, others may not. They are found in graves as well as in actual settlements in Scandinavia, Russia and the UK, and for my purposes it is of little importance whether they have a proper archaeological context or if they have been found by chance. I only need to be sure of their Viking Age (or early Middle Age) provenance, and their inscriptions may help me to establish this. The corpus is small: I have around 20 runic plates but only a few of these allow for a linguistical analysis of their inscription (5 to 7). Some of the others are too damaged or have only a few runes or pseudo-runes instead of a meaningful inscription.
Above: The Staraya Ladoga amulet (Russia, 800 CE) was found in a settlement and has a cryptical but meaningful runic inscription. Below: The Ulvsunda amulet (Sweden, 800 CE) was found in a grave and is too damaged today to be interpreted.
Text example: The Sigtuna amulet (Sweden, 1050 CE) Boil/Ogre of the wound-fever, lord of the ogres! Flee you now! You are found. Have for yourself three pangs, Wolf! Have for yourself nine needs, Wolf! <iii ifiR þis isiR auk is uniR>, Wolf, take this incantation! The Sigtuna amulet (above) was found by chance. The last line of the inscription has received six different interpretations, none of which is altogether correct.
Method
I want to give one example of my work with the runic plates: I analysed the runes of the Sigtuna amulet several times with the help of a binocular microscope and using light from different angles. In this way I was able to provide a better and more reliable reading even for the last line, which was slightly damaged. I thus managed to establish that one of runes in this line was not a “short-twig” s but a “staveless” f. This obviously entailed that earlier interpretations of this line were incorrect. I also analysed the methods by which earlier interpreters had reached their results. I was especially interested in whether they had been inspired by other similar texts (incantations from the same period) and, if so, how such similar texts influenced their work, especially as regarded unclear parts of the text. I gave my own interpretation of the last line as well, having carefully analysed the semantics of other words in the text in order to achieve a better understanding of the text as a whole.
Below: The Sigtuna amulet through the microscope. The second rune in this line is a staveless f, not a shorttwig s.