The exception at Randers – where the Danes prayed on their stones

Tóki the smith raised the stone in memory of Þorgísl, Guðmundr's son, who gave him gold and freedom.

So reads a stone at Hørning, south of Aarhus. It is usually read as a freed man's thanks to his former master. Tóki had been unfree. Þorgísl gave him his freedom, and Tóki cut his memorial.

The same name stands on a stone at Grensten, 38 kilometres further north, near Randers:

Tóki the smith raised this stone in memory of Hrifli, son of Ásgeirr Bjôrn's son. May God help their souls.

Rundata ascribes both stones to the same Tóki the smith. And the second ends in a way almost no Danish runestone does: with a prayer.

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The Christian realm that did not pray

About 965 Harald Bluetooth had it carved on the Jelling stone that he had made the Danes Christian. Yet the Danes almost never prayed for their dead on the runestones. Of the 175 dated Danish runestones from before 1050 with a readable text and a known place, only five have a Christian prayer. In Uppland and Södermanland, the land of the Svear, one stone in four prayed at the same time.

Two of the five stand near Randers: Tóki's stone at Grensten and a stone at Ålum, 6.6 kilometres away. The other three stand in Skåne, and all three have ties abroad. Two were raised for men who died in London and on Gotland, and the third was, according to Rundata, made by a Swedish carver.

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The district around Randers is rich in runestones, 41 dated ones within thirty kilometres of Ålum. Only those two pray. In the rest of Jutland none of 53 does.

Is it more than chance? That cannot be shown with numbers. The runestones stand close together around Randers, and if one draws five stones at random among all the dated Danish ones, two of them stand as close to each other in 21 cases in a hundred. Nearness alone, then, says little. What makes Randers interesting is that several traces point to the same district.

The family at Ålum

At Ålum two stones stand side by side, according to Rundata perhaps cut by the same hand.

Végautr raised this stone in memory of Ásgeirr, his son. May God well help his soul.

Þyrvé, Végautr's wife, had this stone raised in memory of Þorbjôrn, Sibba's son, her cousin, whom she cared for more than for a son of her own.

The first prays. The second is written in a way that stands out. Vitki has a model that has learnt to tell Danish runestones from Swedish ones by wording and spelling, not by faith or journeys. It gives each stone a number from 0, written like a Swedish stone, to 1, written like a Danish one. Þyrvé's stone gets 0.08 and is the 6th most Swedish-written of 174 Danish stones. She had it raised, as they wrote in the Mälaren valley, and in the word betr, 'better', Rundata reads, with some uncertainty, a dotted rune. Végautr's own stone stands at 0.39, also more Swedish than most Danish stones (the middle lies at 0.63).

The name is worth noting too. In Denmark Végautr is found only on the two stones at Ålum. In Sweden it is found on five stones, from Småland and Östergötland to Södermanland and Uppland.

The name Ásgeirr appears both on the Grensten stone and on Végautr's stone, but with different fathers: Bjôrn and Végautr. They are two different men.

The smith

Tóki himself wrote the Danish way. The Hørning stone is among the most Danish of all (0.91, place 147 of 174), and the Grensten stone lies in the middle (0.61). The Swedish way of writing, then, belonged to the family at Ålum, not to the smith. But the prayer is found with both.

What it may mean

Our hypothesis is that there was a small Christian circle near Randers in the first half of the eleventh century, and that the prayer came there with people who had ties to Sweden. Végautr's family bore a Swedish name, wrote as they wrote in the Mälaren valley and prayed as the Svear did. Tóki the smith, who may have been given his freedom by Þorgísl, took the prayer onto a stone of his own.

The hypothesis stands on weak legs, and that should be said clearly. It rests on four stones. The distance between the prayer stones may be chance. That it is the same Tóki on both stones is Rundata's attribution, not a certain fact. And a stone written the Swedish way need not have been raised by a Swede; the way of writing may have come with a carver.

But the hypothesis can be tested.

How it can be tested

1. The hand behind the stones. The National Museum of Denmark will 3D-scan the Danish runestones in 2027–2031. The scans can show whether the same hand cut the Grensten stone, the Hørning stone and the stones at Ålum. If Tóki also cut the Ålum stones, the Swedish way of writing came from the patrons, Végautr and Þyrvé. If another hand cut them, the way of writing may have come with a carver.
2. More stones in the district. If there was a Christian circle, other stones near Randers, without a prayer, should have other Christian traits: crosses, words for the soul or church names.
3. The name. If the family had ties to Sweden, the name Végautr or the family's other names may be found in later Danish sources from the same district.

Caveats

• It is four stones, and the numbers cannot tell a real connection from chance.
• Dated stones with readable texts and known places are counted. Damaged stones may have had prayers that are lost.
• The likeness model says how a stone is written, not who wrote it.
• The Hørning stone's word frælsi is usually read as freedom from slavery, but that is an interpretation.

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.
• Jacobsen, L. & Moltke, E. 1941–42. Danmarks runeindskrifter. Copenhagen.
• Imer, L. M. 2016. Danmarks runesten. En fortælling. Copenhagen: Gyldendal and the National Museum of Denmark.
• Photo: Wikimedia Commons, with photographer and licence in the caption. Map and figure: Vitki's analysis in R.