The journeys belonged to the young
Who died in the east and the west? We read the runestones' words for kin and counted: sons and brothers died outside Scandinavia about four times as often as fathers and husbands. And the words for the dead follow the same line – *drengr* for the young, *þegn* for the older.
Tola satti stæin þ[annsi æft]iR GæiR, sun sinn, harða goðan dræng. Sa varð dauðr a vestrvegum i vikingu.
Tóla placed this stone in memory of Geirr, her son, a very good drengr. He died on the western route, on a viking raid.
On the stones for men who died in the east and the west, a mother or a father often stands by the stone, seldom a widow: of 69 such stones only 4 were raised for a husband. Tóla at Härlingstorp in Västergötland (Vg 61) is one of them. Her son went west and did not come back. We wanted to know whether she is an exception or a rule: was it the young who went, and the young who did not come home?
Who died abroad?
A runestone nearly always says who raised it and who the dead man was to them: sun sinn, his son; faður sinn, his father; broður sinn, his brother. We read those relations on all legible Swedish runestones with a rule in Rundata's translation and checked it against our own reading of a hundred stones. Then we divided the dead men into two groups: sons and brothers – most often young when they died – and fathers and husbands, who had had time to found a family.
The difference is large. Of 393 stones for sons and brothers, 41 say that the dead man died outside Scandinavia. Of 552 stones for fathers and husbands, 15 do. With region, time and carver held constant that is 10 against 3 per cent. A son or brother who died was thus about four times as likely to have died in the east or the west as a father or husband (odds ratio 4.1, probably between 2.2 and 7.7). A difference this clear would arise by chance in fewer than one case in ten thousand.
Died outside Scandinavia
Called drengr
Called þegn
The scale runs from 0 to 10 %. Source: Vitki's people module (r/people.R) on the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base. The shares are the model's, with region, time and carver held constant; the counts are raw.
We repeated the test in two halves of the material, split parish by parish so that both had stones from the same districts and the same time. The difference shows in both. It also shows in Uppland on its own, on stones with at least ten legible words, and when we compare only sons with fathers.
The parents and the siblings
Who, then, raised the stones for the young who died abroad? Of the 41, 26 were raised by parents and 15 by siblings. On 13 of them the mother stands among the raisers, alone or with the father.
Fastvi let ræisa stæin æftiR Gærðar ok Otrygg, syni sina. Annarr varð dauðr i Grikkium. Faství had the stone raised in memory of Gerðarr and Ótryggr, her sons. The other died among the Greeks (U 1087, Lövsta in Uppland).
Ragnfriðr let retta stæin þenna æftiR Biorn, sun þæiRa KætilmundaR. Hann fell a Virlandi. Ragnfríðr had this stone erected in memory of Bjôrn, her son and Ketilmundr's. He fell in Virland (U 346, Frösunda in Uppland).
Gufi ræisti stæin þennsi æftiR Olaf, sun sinn, dræng harða goðan. Hann varð drepinn i Æistlandum. Gufi raised this stone in memory of Ólafr, his son, a very good drengr. He was killed in Estonia (Vg 181, Frugården in Västergötland).
These are stones for young men who went in a following – with Ingvarr, among the Greeks, on viking raids to the west – and who were mourned by those who had borne and raised them, not by widows and children. The journeys seem to have belonged to life before one had a farm and a family of one's own.
Two words for two stages
The same line shows in the words. drengr – the word behind Swedish dräng, but on the runestones a title of honour for a capable young man, often in a following – stands on 6 per cent of the stones for sons and brothers and on 1 per cent of those for fathers and husbands (27 against 4 stones). þegn – often read as a man of standing with a farm of his own – goes the other way: 4 per cent for fathers and husbands against 1 per cent for sons and brothers.
HræfningR ok Gialli ok BrunulfR ok GefulfR sattu stæin þannsi æftiR Fot, faður sinn, harða goðan þegn. Sva hæfiR Asa es æigi mun sum kvæn æft ver siðan gærva. Hrefningr and Gjalli and Brynjulfr and Gjafulfr placed this stone in memory of Fótr, their father, a very good þegn. Thus has Ása made, as no other wife in memory of her husband will (Vg 59, Norra Härene in Västergötland).
That drengr and þegn may belong to different stages of life has been suggested before (Goetting 2006; Sukhino-Khomenko 2024). What we add is the measurement with region, time and carver held constant. Here we must be careful: the difference is large in the whole material, but the words are too few to hold in both halves separately. One half has too few drengr stones to test, and þegn does not reach the threshold in either half. It is a pattern to test, not a result.
How sure we are
What it means
Runestones are no parish registers. They tell of those who did not come home, and it was the survivors who chose what would be said. But that is exactly why the pattern says something. The man who died in the east or the west was most often someone's son or brother, and the one who raised the stone was a parent or a sibling. Fathers and husbands more often got stones that do not say how they died – they probably died at home, and a death at home was nothing to tell.
Our hypothesis is that the journeys belonged to youth, to the time before one inherited or built a farm of one's own. The young man was a drengr, one of the following; the older man was a þegn, a man with a farm and responsibilities. The journey was a stage of life, not a profession.
It can be tested further: if the journeys belonged to the young, stones for those who died abroad should seldom name children or a wife, and the travel stones should more often be raised by a single parent than by a whole band of siblings. Our discovery engine has already seen the latter as a pattern: travel stones are raised by fewer people.
Caveats
- The stones mainly remember those who died. Those who came home seldom got a stone, so the material says nothing about how many went.
- Sons and brothers were most often young, fathers and husbands older – but not always. A brother could be married and a father young.
- The relations are read with rules that are wrong on about one stone in twenty, mostly where the text has gaps.
- drengr and þegn can also say something about standing and following, not only about age.
Sources
- Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
- Goetting, Lauren 2006. “Þegn and drengr in the Viking Age”. Scandinavian Studies 78 (4).
- Sukhino-Khomenko, Denis 2024. Thegns Around the North Sea. University of Gothenburg.
- Vitki's people module (r/people.R) and the locked analysis plan are open on GitHub. On the virtues on the stones: Gentle in speech and free with food.
- Photos: Wikimedia Commons, with photographer and licence in the captions.