Messages
The area where I live is littered with those. We call them “runestones”. They often convey some fairly simple message:
Tola had the stone erected
after her son Harald, Ingvar’s brother
They travelled manly
far for gold
and in the East
gave food to the eagle.
They died southwards
in Särkland [land of the Saracenes].
“Give food to the eagle” means they slew enemies, leaving them for eagles to eat on the battlefield. Ingvar was probably not the literal brother of Harald; this is one of the Ingvar stones, detailing the last Viking expedition led by Ingvar Vittfarne (“the widely travelled”) in the mid-1030s.
Vikings set great store by their reputations, and their next of kin often erected the runestones to this end: to tell those who came after of their exploits. Those are messages to me, and my ancestors thought them so important that they carved them in stone so that they could be read in the far future.
Only a few hundred meters from where I live, a restored ancient causeway is walked upon daily, and the main road next to it is named for the person who had the causeway constructed, one Jarlabanke Ingefastsson, who lived in the 11th century. He’d have been ecstatic to know that his name was spoken daily 1,000 years later.
Jarlabanke’s Causeway. This led across a swamp, and improved trade between the Viking heartlands around Uppsala and the area around lake Mälaren where Stockholm would later be founded. It was still in use for traffic until the 1930s, and is today used by pedestrians and cyclists.
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