They never mentioned home – the runic inscriptions of the British Isles, part 2

Þorvaldr reisti kross þe[nna]. – Þorvaldr raised this cross.

The text says no more. The cross stands in the church at Andreas on the Isle of Man, and it was raised some time in the tenth century by a man whose name carries the god Thor. On one side stands a man with a bird on his shoulder, and a wolf is devouring him. Next to it stand a large cross and a figure that has been read as Christ triumphing over Satan. The man is read as Odin, swallowed by the Fenris wolf at Ragnarök. Two worlds on the same stone, and in the text only a name.

In the first part we read every runic inscription in the British Isles and asked who wrote them. Now we ask something else. What did those who had left the North say about what they had left? Can we see longing, the family back home, the old gods? Or did they leave all of that behind?

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The home that was never named

Start with the simplest thing. We went through all 84 Viking-age runic inscriptions in the British Isles looking for Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Gotland, Iceland or any of the peoples from there. We found nothing.

The places that are named lie in the west. The carver Gautr, whom we met in the first part, writes Gautr gerði, sonr Bjarnar frá Kolli. – Gautr made it, son of Bjôrn from Kollr, that is, the island of Coll in the Hebrides. And on another cross he writes that he made þenna ok alla í Môn, this one and all on Man. Gautr's family came from an island in the west, and his pride concerns the new land.

Is that strange? We compared with Norway, where most of the people on the islands came from – it shows in the runes, which are of the Norwegian type. Of the 43 Viking-age memorial stones in Norway, only two mention a place on the other side of the sea. One stands at Alstad and remembers Þóraldr, who died miðli Ustaholms ok Garða – somewhere in Garðar, in Russia. The other, at Galteland, remembers Bjórr, who died in the retinue þá's Knútr sótti England, when Knútr attacked England.

That is how it is across the North. A place far away is named when someone has died there. For the emigrants on Man, the dead died at home. Home was Man.

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To the east it is the same. On the island of Berezan in the Black Sea stands Grani gærði hvalf þessi æftiR Karl, felaga sinn – Grani made this vault in memory of Karl, his partner. It is the same way of remembering as on the stones at home – a partner, félagi – but nothing about where they came from. In Hagia Sophia in Constantinople someone has carved the name Halfdan, another Árni. On the marble lion from Piraeus, which stands in Venice today, there is a long serpent band of runes, so worn that it can hardly be read. In the middle of it Thorgunn Snædal reads sviar – Swedes. It is the only place outside the North where a Viking-age runic text may mention the people back home, and the reading is uncertain.

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The fathers

But the inscriptions in the west do tell of the past in one way. They often say whose son someone was. Áleifr Ljótulfs sonr – Áleifr, Ljótulfr's son – raised a cross in memory of his son Ulfr at Ballaugh. Three generations on one stone. Druian, sonr Dufgals. Melbrigði, sonr Aðakáns Smiðs.

In the west 13 of 29 memorial inscriptions do so, in Norway 12 of 43. At first it looked like longing for kin: in the new land people held on to whom they descended from. But when we counted only the inscriptions where the parent has a Norse name, the difference disappeared. Then it is 6 of 29, fewer than in Norway. The whole surplus comes from Gaelic fathers – Dufgal, Krínán, Aðakán.

So it is not a Norse memory of home. It is the neighbours' custom. In Gaelic you carried your father's name in your own, mac – son of. The Norse in Norway wrote like that too, Þórir Harðarsonr reisti stein þenna at Klepp. But it was the Gaels on Man who did it most.

The gods came along in the names

Not a single memorial inscription in the west names a pagan god in its text. The only place on the islands where the gods stand in writing is the little spindle whorl from Saltfleetby in England, which we wrote about in the first part: Odin and Heimdallr and Þjálfi, who are to help Úlfljót. But it is no memorial.

Yet the gods are there. Þorvaldr, Þorsteinn, Þorleifr, Þórulfr, Þorfinnr, Þorgerðr, Þúríð and Ástríðr – and Þorbjôrn three times. Of the 39 Norse names that can be read in the memorial inscriptions of the west, 12 carry a god. That is 31 per cent. In Norway it is 20 per cent, in Sweden 17.

Our hypothesis was that the emigrants would have more god-names than people had at home. That does not hold: the difference from Norway is too small to tell safely from chance, with so few names. But what matters points the other way. The emigrants did not have fewer. They raised Christian crosses by the churches, but they named their children after Thor as often as people did in Norway – and probably more often than in Sweden, although that comparison rests only on search patterns.

It ties in with what we found in the article on the Viking names: the names with a god in them are the ones that have lived longest, right up to today. The church took Thor out of the cult but not out of the names – not at home and not in the new land.

Odin next to Christ

In their texts the emigrants are not especially pious either. Only 2 of 29 memorial inscriptions in the west have a prayer or a word for God – one is Melbrigði's cross for his soul, the other a cross at Onchan that ends with Jésu Krist. At home a prayer stands on about one memorial stone in eight in Norway (12 per cent) and one in six in Sweden (18 per cent). The Christian element on Man sits not in the words but in the form: they call their monuments kross, not steinn, and they raise them by the church.

The pagan sits in the images. On Thorwald's Cross Odin and the wolf stand next to Christ. On other crosses the hero Sigurðr kills the dragon Fáfnir and roasts his heart. The images are not in the runic database, so we have not been able to count them. But they show that the stories came along, even when the words did not.

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It is clearest furthest away. In Greenland, around the year 1000, someone carved on a wooden stick at Narsaq: Á sæ, sæ, sæ es Ása sat – on the sea, the sea, the sea the Æsir lay in ambush. The reading is uncertain, and no one knows what the verse means. But on the outermost farm of the Norse world, someone wrote about the Æsir.

Two languages in one family

On Man, Norse and Gaels lived in the same families. We looked at every place where both a parent and a child are named and both names can be identified – 12 pairs. In 10 of them the child has a name in the parent's language. Only twice does the name change language, once in each direction. Þorleifr Hnakki – Þorleifr the Neck – raised a cross in memory of his son Fiak, who has a Gaelic name. And Ófeigr, with a Norse name, was the son of Krínán, a Gael.

The families mixed through marriage – several of the wives on the crosses have Gaelic names, like Aþmiul and Myrgjôl – but each parent mostly passed on their own language. The Norse did not vanish in a generation.

The longing

And the longing? It does not show. The emigrants rarely praise their dead: a single memorial inscription in the west has a judgement, the proverb on the cross at Kirk Michael that it is better to leave a good foster-son than a bad son. But it is the same in Norway. There, two of 43 dead get a judgement: Bjalfi was harða góðan mann, a very good man, and Ástríðr at Dynna mær hônnurst á Haðalandi, the handiest maiden in Hadeland.

The only word for grief we have found in the whole material stands at home in Norway. On a stone at Njærheim the carver has written his name: Ulfríkr sorgþungr gerði – Ulfríkr the Sorrow-stricken made it. Whether that is a byname or the grief of that day, we do not know. On Man people write instead about betrayal and faith: Hrossketill vélti í tryggu eiðsvara sinn, Hrossketill betrayed the faith of his sworn confederate. Those are the new land's words – about the bonds made there.

How sure we are

Sources

• Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
• Barnes, Michael P. & Page, R. I. 2006. The Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions of Britain. Uppsala.
• Kermode, Philip M. C. 1907. Manx Crosses. London. The drawings of Thorwald's Cross and the Sigurd crosses.
• Wikipedia (English), the article Manx runestones, with Andy Orchard on the image on Thorwald's Cross.
• Snædal, Thorgunn: the reading of the Piraeus Lion, after Rundata.
• The locked analysis plan, the coding with a note for every inscription, and Vitki's count are open on GitHub.
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, with creator and licence in the captions.