Stones and staves – six meanings of a runic word

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Anyone who reads about runes soon meets the word stave. The runologist writes that the "branch" is damaged, the Edda speaks of "great staves", and the runestones themselves say that someone "raised staves and stones". These are not the same thing. Here are the word's six meanings, with what the stones themselves say about them.

1. The main staff and the branches

A rune of the younger futhark is almost always built around a vertical line, the main staff. From it, or across it, run shorter strokes: the branches. The rune i is only a main staff. Add a branch slanting across the middle and it becomes a or n, depending on which way the branch leans. A branch rising to the right from the middle makes a k-rune; two branches sloping down from the top make a t.

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That is why the branches are what the runologist looks for first. In the two parts of Södermanlands runinskrifter (1924–36) that we have as text, Erik Brate and Elias Wessén write "bst", branch, at least 218 times and "hst", main staff, 143 times. The branch is mentioned more often because it is what decides which rune it is. When only the main staff is left, the rune could be almost anything.

Two examples show how it sounds when a rune is damaged:

• Of a grave slab in Strängnäs (Sö 280), Brate and Wessén write: "the lower part of a staff, leaning slightly to the left; most likely u, possibly r". Only the main staff can be seen, and the choice lies between several runes.
• Of a fragment in Vada church, Magnus Källström writes in 2011: "a faintly curved branch of a k", and that the rune may also have been an f. Here it is the other way round: the branch can be seen, but the main staff is gone.

2. Stave means rune

In Old Norse a written character is a stafr, plural stafir. In the Eddic poem Hávamál, stanza 142, the reader is advised:

Rúnar munt þú finna ok ráðna stafi, mjǫk stóra stafi, mjǫk stinna stafi … "Runes you will find and readable staves, very great staves, very strong staves …"

The same pair of words, runes and staves, stands on the runestones. On the Nöbbele stone in Småland (Sm 16) the dead man is to be remembered "while the stone and the rune-staves live", meðan stæinn lifiR ok stafiR runa. On the Randbøl stone in Jutland (DR 40) it says: "Very long will these staves live for Þorgunnr." Much later, on a medieval Norwegian carving (N 13), Áslakr writes: Rúnar ek ríst ok ráðna stafi, "Runes I carve and readable staves" – almost word for word as in Hávamál.

The word survives in Swedish bokstav, "letter", and German Buchstabe. Whether the first element originally meant the book or the beech tree, which could be carved, is disputed.

3. The staves that stood beside the stones

The most puzzling meaning is found on five runestones, perhaps six. There staf is not a character but a monument, raised together with the stone:

• Vreta in Uppland (U 332): "Inga raised the staff and stones in memory of Ragnfastr, her husbandman."
• Stora Rytterne in Västmanland (Vs 1): "Guðleifr placed the staff and these stones in memory of Slagvi, his son, who met his end in the east."
• Bällsta in Uppland (U 226): "They raised the stones and worked(?) the staff also, the mighty one, as marks of honour."
• Balingsta in Uppland (U 849): "Ígull and Haukr made the staff, and Nasi and Ônundr raised the stone."
• Kolsundet by Husby in Södermanland (Sö 196): "Ingifríðr had this stone and staff raised in memory of Eyjulfr, her father."
• Fyrby in Södermanland (Sö 56), carved on an earth-fast boulder: the most rune-skilled brothers in Middle Earth "placed many a stone and staff" in memory of their father. Here scholars disagree: stafa marga may also mean the runes of the text.

Not a single one of the staves survives. The stones have lasted a thousand years; the staves have vanished completely. That suggests they were of wood, but what they looked like, whether they were carved or painted, we do not know.

The word has yet another meaning on the Forsa ring in Hälsingland (Hs 7), an iron ring with runes from the 800s. There the fines are to be paid "to the staff". According to Rundata's translation this concerns the restoration of a sanctuary. The staff is then something in law or cult, not a monument.

What research says

We have found little written about the staves. In her 2005 dissertation Kristel Zilmer divides the instances into two groups: where staf means the runes (Sm 16, DR 40 and possibly Sö 56) and where a staff is raised as a monument (the five above). Tomáš Vlasatý of Projekt Forlǫg has compared the staves with a contemporary eyewitness account. Around the year 922 the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan watched a chieftain's funeral among a people he called the Rus, on the Volga. When the ship had been burnt, he writes, they "built something like a round hillock over the ship … and placed in the middle of it a large piece of birch on which they wrote the name of the man and the name of the King of the Rūs". Vlasatý suggests that wooden poles may have been a cheaper alternative to stones, lasting at most about a hundred years. That is his suggestion. But the account shows that a wooden post with writing on it could be a memorial at this time. We have not found any excavation in which such a staff was found beside a runestone.

What the stones with staves have in common

We compared the five stones with a certain staff with all other Viking-age runestones in the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base, fragments and lost stones included, in the statistics program R:

Two things stand out:

• The staves stand in monuments with several stones. Three of the five speak of "the staff and the stones". Among all other runestones only one in thirty speaks of several stones. With five stones chance might give one hit, hardly three. The probability of so large a result by chance is 0.002, even allowing for the fact that we made seven tests.
• Two of the monuments belong with an assembly. At Bällsta the sister stone U 225 says that the sons "made here an assembly place", and at Kolsundet (Sö 196) an assembly is mentioned, in an uncertain reading. Among all other runestones only 9 of 2,625 mention an assembly. We saw this pattern while reading the texts, and the test was made afterwards. It is therefore a finding to be tested further, not a proof.

The other differences point the same way but may be chance, since the stones are so few. The staves belong to the early part of the runestone period: three of the four with a style group are carved in RAK, Fp or Pr1, roughly 980–1050, and the mid-year is 1030 against 1060 for the other stones in the Mälaren valley (the probability of chance is 0.070, and 0.28 after adjusting for seven tests). All five stand in the Mälaren valley, where three in five runestones are. Two of five are signed by a carver, against about one in ten otherwise.

Taken together, the staves are mentioned in large, public monuments with several stones, sometimes at an assembly place and mostly early. That is what the figures show. What the staves were, we still do not know.

4. Staveless runes

On a few stones the carver has almost entirely left out the main staves. What remains are the branches and short stumps of the staff, a kind of shorthand. They are called staveless runes or, after the province where they are mostly found, Hälsinge runes. The best-known example is the Malsta stone in Hälsingland (Hs 14).

They also occur in Södermanland. Of the Aspa stone (Sö 137), the Swedish National Heritage Board's database Runor notes: "the last row with staveless runes except the last word". The image at the top of the article shows the difference. In the upper rows the main staves stand as tall strokes across the whole band; in the bottom row many runes are only short slanting strokes.

5. The rune staff and the prime staff

A rune staff is a calendar, usually carved on a wooden stick, where runes and signs mark the days and feasts of the year. It was used from the Middle Ages and in places into the 1700s. Another word for it is prime staff, after the golden number, the number that gives a year's place in the nineteen-year lunar cycle and is needed to work out Easter.

The word is found on seven medieval inscriptions on Gotland from 1324 to 1553, most of them on grave slabs: G 12, G 55, G 78, G 124, G 182, G 306, G 308. They give the year through the Sunday letter and the "prime staff" in the Easter table. On the slab in Hemse church (G 55) from 1459, for example, it says that hagal was the Sunday letter that year, and that the prime staff was the one "in the twelfth row of the table".

6. Magic staves and alliteration

Magic staves (galdrastafir) are Icelandic magical signs from manuscripts from the 1500s onwards, for example Vegvísir. They are sometimes called runes, but they are signs of their own and many hundreds of years younger than the runestones.

Alliteration (Swedish stavrim, "stave rhyme") is the rhyme of initial sounds in Old Norse verse: words beginning with the same sound bind the line together. The Nöbbele stone's formula above is an example: meðan stæinn lifiR ok stafiR runa. The stone and the staves rhyme with each other.

How we did it

• The runestones' own words: every normalization in the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (version 3.1, 2018) containing staf-, with Rundata's translations. Words like stafn, "stem (of a ship)", are left out.
• Staveless runes: the notes in the Swedish National Heritage Board's database Runor (2020).
• Main staff and branch: the abbreviations "hst" and "bst" counted in the two parts of Södermanlands runinskrifter that we have as text. The text is machine-read, so some instances may have been missed.
• The statistics on the staves: the five stones with a certain staff were compared with all other Viking-age runestones, fragments and lost stones included, using Fisher's exact test. Inscriptions on grave slabs, rock faces and loose objects such as coins and rune sticks are left out. Fisher's test suits a group this small. We made seven tests, and the p-values are adjusted for that (Holm's method). "Several stones" means that the text has stæina, stæinaR or stæinum; "assembly" that it has þing, with Bällsta counted as one monument (U 225 and U 226). The assembly test was made after we had seen the pattern. The scripts are scripts/stavar_data.py and scripts/stavar_stats.R.
• The image of the Aspa stone: raking light from the north-west, computed in Vitki from the open 3D scan.

The images come from Vitki, an open tool for runestone research that you can download and run on your own computer from GitHub.

Sources

• Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
• Runor, Swedish National Heritage Board, the 2020 edition of the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base.
• Brate, E. & Wessén, E. 1924–36. Södermanlands runinskrifter (Sveriges runinskrifter 3). Stockholm: KVHAA. Digitised by the Swedish National Heritage Board.
• Källström, M. 2011. U Fv1971;212B Vada kyrka. Ett digitalt supplement till Upplands runinskrifter, version 0.1. Swedish National Heritage Board.
• Hávamál, stanza 142, in Guðni Jónsson's edition of the Edda (heimskringla.no). The translation is ours.
• Ibn Fadlan, Risala, in James E. Montgomery's translation: Ibn Faḍlān and the Rūsiyyah. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 3, 2000, pp. 1–25.
• Vlasatý, T. 2022. "Þorbjǫrn the Skald Carved the Runes". Projekt Forlǫg.
• Zilmer, K. 2005. "He Drowned in Holmr's Sea – His Cargo-Ship Drifted to the Sea-Bottom, Only Three Came Out Alive": Records and Representations of Baltic Traffic in the Viking Age and the Early Middle Ages in Early Nordic Sources. Tartu: Tartu University Press, p. 156.
• Kitzler Åhfeldt, L. 2024. 3D-data Runstenar i Södermanland [Dataset]. Swedish National Heritage Board. doi:10.5281/zenodo.11951255. CC BY 4.0.