Whoever breaks this stone – a thousand years of runic magic

I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly plagued by sorcery, doomed to insidious death is he who breaks this.

So reads the Björketorp stone in Blekinge, one of the oldest runestones in the North. The carver writes of no dead person. He protects the stone with a curse on whoever touches it. The same curse is found on the Stentoften stone a few tens of kilometres away.

Enlarge ⤢

Runes and magic have long belonged together in the picture of the Viking Age. But how often are the inscriptions really about magic, and where and when? We have searched all 6,753 inscriptions in the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base for curses, invocations of Thor, charms, spells against illness and evil beings and the Proto-Norse formula words. Every hit has been checked against the text, so that personal names such as Vígi and Þórir and ordinary causes of death such as "died of illness" are not counted.

108 inscriptions remain, 1.6 per cent. But the magic is not spread evenly over the objects, and so we report them separately. Only 16 of the inscriptions stand on runestones, 0.6 per cent of all 2,768 runestones in the database, the destroyed and lost ones included. 90 stand on loose objects such as amulets, gold bracteates, metal sheets and rune sticks, 3.5 per cent of these, and 2 on other stones. Most runic inscriptions are memorial texts, owner's marks, names and everyday messages, not magic.

Before the Viking Age: gold around the neck

The oldest magic was worn on the body. Of the 29 Proto-Norse inscriptions with the formula words alu, laþu, laukaʀ and auja, 21 are on gold bracteates, small pendants worn around the neck. The words are usually read as 'ale' or 'protection' (alu), 'invitation' (laþu), 'leek' (laukaʀ) and 'luck' (auja), and they are so common that they must have been formulas rather than ordinary language.

But even then the curse stood on the stone. Björketorp and Stentoften in Blekinge, from the sixth or seventh century, are the two Proto-Norse stones that curse whoever breaks them.

The Viking Age: protecting the stone

In the Viking Age magic moved out onto the runestones. The curses address the living and threaten whoever damages or moves the monument:

A warlock be he who damages this stone or drags it away from here. (Tryggevælde, DR 230)

May whosoever breaks it become a warlock! (Glemminge, DR 338)

The word translated warlock is rati or ræte, a wretch or sorcerer. On other stones Thor is asked to hallow the monument or the runes, Þórr vígi. On the Glavendrup stone on Funen, Ragnhildr does both: "May Thor hallow these runes. A wretch be he who damages this stone or drags it to stand in memory of another."

Enlarge ⤢

We find six such curses and five Thor formulas on ten Viking-Age runestones. Seven stand in Denmark and two in Västergötland, Saleby and Velanda. In Svitjod, the land of the Svear, there is only one, Korpbron in Södermanland, where Thor is perhaps invoked. None of the ten prays for the dead.

Enlarge ⤢

In the south the stone, in the north the soul

The map shows a pattern. Where the stones are protected, in Denmark, Blekinge and Västergötland, they seldom pray for the dead. Where they pray, in the Mälaren valley, they are almost never protected.

Before 1050, 7 of 176 Danish runestones are protected by a curse or a Thor formula, against 1 of 343 in Svitjod. The odds are about 14 times as high in Denmark, and a difference this large would arise by chance in fewer than three cases in a thousand. At the same time 5 Danish stones pray for the soul, against 92 in Svitjod.

There is one more connection. In Denmark and Götaland some stones call themselves kumbl, monument. Those stones more often carry a curse or a Thor formula.

Our hypothesis is that the dead were protected in two ways. In the south the monument itself, often a stone with a mound and a ship-setting like Ragnhildr's at Tryggevælde, had to be guarded against anyone who would damage it or claim it for another. In the north it was the soul of the dead that needed protection, and there they wrote a prayer. That fits what we have seen before: the Danish and Geatish stones speak of rank and monument, those of the Svear of the soul and the journeys.

How sure we are: not very. The pattern rests on ten stones. We usually require a finding to appear in both halves when the stones are split parish by parish, and this pattern does not pass. In one half there are six Danish protecting formulas against none in Svitjod, in the other one against one. The link with kumbl appears in both halves, but is certain only in one. Ragnhildr's two stones and the two at Skern weigh heavily. The hypothesis is therefore a hint to be tested, not a finding.

Thor in pictures

Svitjod lacks the curses, then, but not Thor. Rundata mentions images of Thor on four stones: a Thor's hammer on Sö 86 at Åby and on Sö 111 at Stenkvista in Södermanland, Thor's fishing on the Altuna stone (U 1161) in Uppland and a hammer after the last word-divider on DR 120 at Spentrup in Jutland. On the Stenkvista stone the hammer stands where the cross usually stands.

Enlarge ⤢

In the south they wrote Thor, in the Mälaren valley they drew him. That may be a difference in custom more than in faith.

Magic on the body, in the Viking Age too

The runestones are not the whole picture. We find 8 Viking-Age inscriptions meant to protect a person, nearly all on small objects. A lead amulet from Södra Kvinneby on Öland reads: "May Thor protect him with that hammer." An amulet from Sigtuna drives away the spirit of wound-fever, "lord of the giants". A piece of a skull from Ribe asks Ulfr, Óðinn and High-Týr for help against pain and the dwarf's stroke. Thor also appears in a charm against wound-fever preserved in a manuscript in Canterbury.

The Middle Ages: magic moves back to the body

After the Viking Age the curses disappear from the stones, and magic gathers on small objects: lead amulets, crosses, rune sticks and staves. We count 46 medieval inscriptions with Christian charms and 6 with healing charms. Most common is agla, an abbreviation of a Hebrew prayer ('Thou art mighty for ever, Lord'). There is also the magic square sator arepo tenet opera rotas, the mysterious words Gordan, Gordin, Ingordan and the lines "Behold the cross of the Lord; flee, you hostile powers". A rune stick from Bryggen in Bergen cuts "runes of help, once against the elves, twice against the trolls, thrice against the ogres".

Most are in Norway and Denmark, but that is because those countries have the most medieval inscriptions. Counted against all medieval inscriptions, charms are as common in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, one to three per cent.

Three ages

Magic followed the objects, then. Before the Viking Age it was worn around the neck, in the Viking Age it stood on the stone and in the Middle Ages it lay on the body again. That arc partly mirrors what has survived: from the Viking Age mostly stones have come down to us, from the Middle Ages mostly staves and amulets. But the curses on whoever breaks the stone belong only on the stone, and they have almost vanished when the church takes over.

How it can be tested further

1. The burial setting. If the curses protected the monument itself, stones with a curse should more often stand by mounds and ship-settings than other stones of the same time. That can be tested against the registers of ancient monuments.
2. New readings. The National Museum of Denmark will 3D-scan the Danish runestones in 2027–2031. Damaged last lines may turn out to hide more curses, and the evidence grows.
3. Thor in pictures and writing. If Thor was written in the south and drawn in the north, more images of Thor should be found in Svitjod than in Denmark when the stones' pictures are gone through systematically.

Caveats

• The searches find formulas written in the usual ways. An unusually phrased curse or an unread last line is not counted.
• "Magic" is our modern category. A curse may have been a legal protection as much as a magical one.
• The gold bracteates have no find place in Rundata and are not on the map.
• The numbers are small, and the statistical tests should be read as hints.

The maps, curves and models come from Vitki, an open tool for runestone research that you can download and run on your own computer from GitHub. The method is described in METHODS.md.

Sources and data

• Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
• Danske Runeindskrifter, the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen, runer.ku.dk.
• Hauck, K. et al. 1985–1989. Die Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit. Ikonographischer Katalog. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
• MacLeod, M. & Mees, B. 2006. Runic Amulets and Magic Objects. Woodbridge: Boydell.
• McKinnell, J., Simek, R. & Düwel, K. 2004. Runes, Magic and Religion: A Sourcebook. Vienna: Fassbaender.
• Sawyer, B. 2000. The Viking-Age Rune-Stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Photos: Wikimedia Commons, with photographer and licence in the captions. Map and figures: Vitki's analysis in R.