Why Stone?

What we have left is not what was written. It is what the ground could bear. The Scandinavian Runic-text Database holds 6,753 runic inscriptions from the whole North and from abroad, and of the Viking Age's, 3,264 are cut in stone against 34 carved in wood. No one believes the proportion was like that when they were written. Wood was the cheap, light material, the one in your hand; stone was the heavy one. So the question is not only what they wrote, but whether they knew that only one of the two would remain – and what, in that case, they chose to put in stone.

What is not left

Wood and bone survive only where the ground is wet enough to keep the air out. That is why the Viking Age's 34 wood inscriptions come from a handful of places – 8 from one excavation in Trondheim, a few from Hedeby, Sigtuna, Oseberg and Dublin – and nearly all of the Middle Ages' 1,221 from the town layers of Bergen (391 from Bryggen alone), Trondheim and Lödöse. The bones come from Sigtuna (37) and Lund (14). This is not a picture of where people wrote on wood but of where a fire or a waterlogged quarter happened to preserve it.

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That means one question cannot be answered with numbers: whether wood was more common than stone in the Viking Age, and by how much. But two others can. What did people write on the different materials where both survive? And did the stones themselves say anything about why they were stone?

The material chose the words

We took every legible inscription and gave each one a rough class by what the text does: remembers someone, names a person or an owner, prays, writes the rune row, charms, says who made the object, or communicates something else.

The difference is not a shade but another kind of writing. On the Viking Age's stones, 61 per cent are memorials – N raised the stone in memory of M – and the typical text is 11 words long. On the same period's bones the typical text is 4 words: a name (26 per cent), a practice of the rune row (14 per cent), or a challenge like the one on a rib from Sigtuna, Rað þu!, “interpret this!”. Metal carries names alone in 64 per cent of cases, mostly because the moneyers of Lund put theirs on the coins: Þorsten i Lundi. And the few wooden sticks say who carved – Saxi risti runaR þessaR on a stick from Roskilde harbour – or something as everyday as the words on a wooden bolt from Trondheim: Vindauga lokað, window closed.

The medieval wood from Bergen shows what the Viking Age's wood must have been full of: names and owner's marks (27 per cent, 138 of the objects are labels for goods), prayers (11 per cent), messages (14 per cent) – Kyss þú mik, kiss me, on a turned bowl, and letters where Sire Jón sendir Gunnari Hvít kveðju Guðs ok sína, Sir Jón sends Gunnar White God's greeting and his own. Wood was for what was to be said once, to one person, now. Stone was for what was to be said to everyone, and for a long time.

Bone and wood are almost empty of memorials. Of the Viking Age's 163 inscriptions in bone and wood, 0 are memorials. Remembering the dead was done in stone, not because it could not be written on a stick, but because a stick was not the point.

Did they know?

Yes. They wrote it. 32 of the Viking Age's 3,264 stones say explicitly that they are to remain standing, and some say for how long.

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Hiær mun standa stæinn miþli byia. – Here the stone shall stand between the villages. (U 729, Ågersta)

Þy mun goþs manns um gætit verþa, meþan stæinn lifiR ok stafiR runa. – So the good man will be remembered, as long as the stone lives and the staves of the runes. (Sm 16, Nöbbele)

Þæt skal at minnum manna, meþan mænn lifa. – This shall be in memory of men, as long as men live. (U 114, Runby)

E mun standa, mæþ sten lifiR, witrind su. – Ever shall it stand, as long as the stone lives, this testimony. (DR 212, Tillitse)

Æi meþan verald vakiR, liggR mærki hiar. – As long as the world wakes, the monument lies here. (G 343, Visby)

The stone at Års in Jutland speaks in its own person: Sten kwæþsk hersi standa længi, the stone declares that it will stand here long (DR 131). The Rök stone begins with the words Aft Vamoþ standa runaR þaR, in memory of Vámóðr stand these runes (Ög 136), and at Randbøl in Jutland a stone says that þeR stafaR munu Þorgunni miok længi lifa, these staves will live very long for Þorgunnr (DR 40). They knew. The stone lives, two of them say, and the staves live, says a third – a strange word for a material chosen precisely because it does not.

And they knew where. Hiær mun standa stæinn næR brautu, here the stone shall stand near the road (U 707); a þingstaþi, at the assembly place (Sö 137); a biargi, on the hill (DR 296); miþli byia, between the villages (U 729). The place is part of the message: where people pass, see and read. A rune stick was put into a hand. A stone was set where everyone would walk.

When was stone chosen?

Stone was not something that arrived. The oldest inscriptions in the North, from the second century to the seventh, are 181 in metal – bracteates, brooches, weapons, with names and charms such as laþu, laukaz, alu – but also 70 in stone, most of them dated by Imer's chronology to the time between about 160 and 700, a few into the eighth century. The Kylver stone on Gotland has the whole rune row cut into a grave slab as early as about AD 400.

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What arrived was not the stone but the custom of letting it speak of a dead person: the memorial stone. The Blekinge stones of the seventh century and Rök in the ninth have it, and in a couple of centuries around the year 1000 the North raises 3,264 of them, more than everything else ever written in runes put together. Then it ends, and the stone changes room: the Middle Ages' 794 stone inscriptions sit in the church – grave slabs, wall stones, fonts, bells – and say an Ave Maria for the dead or the maker's name, while only 3 per cent are still memorials of the old kind. Memory moved in under the church floor. Everyday life went on in wood, as it presumably always had, and that is why Bergen's thousand sticks look the way they do.

So the answer to when stone was chosen is: always, for what was to remain. What changed was what people wanted to remain. For a few hundred years they wanted it to be a person's name by the road, without priest and without church, with a promise that the stone would live as long as people live. That promise has held for a thousand years, and it is the only promise from the Viking Age we can check.

And we?

It is easy to look at them indulgently: they believed the stone would live. But turn the question around. What of what we write today will anyone be able to read in a thousand years?

Not the CD. Discs burned in the 1990s are already in many cases unreadable; the dye layer fades, the layers come apart, and soon there is no player anyway. Not the hard drive, not the cloud: what lies there remains only as long as someone pays for the electricity and copies it over to the next format, every ten years, without interruption, for a hundred generations. Our photographs outnumber those of all earlier generations together, and most of them will vanish with an account no one logs into any more. The book fares better, but twentieth-century paper yellows and cracks from its own acid, and it is parchment and vellum, not the paperback, that have proved to last a thousand years. What we have done is choose wood again: the cheap, light material that holds everything and that no one expects to remain.

Some have noticed. On Svalbard an archive lies in a closed mine where text is photographed onto film meant to withstand five hundred years of cold; it is our age's runestone, and it says the same thing as the Ågersta stone: here it shall stand. But it is an exception, and it is not where we write. The people of the Viking Age also wrote mostly in wood, and they knew it. The difference is that they had a material for what was to last and a definite idea of what deserved it: a name, a family, a place by the road. Deyr fé, deyja frændr, cattle die, kinsmen die, said Hávamál, but a reputation never dies. The stone was that word made in granite.

So the question can be put to us, not only to them. If you could choose one message to cut in stone, one that people would read in a thousand years when everything else is gone, without you to explain it, without your time to set it in – what would it be? Those who raised the stones answered in eleven words. Most of them chose someone else's name.

Sources

• Scandinavian Runic-text Database, version 3.1 (ODbL).
• Imer, L. M. 2007. Runer og runeindskrifter. Kronologi, kontekst og funktion i Skandinaviens jernalder og vikingetid. Diss. University of Copenhagen.
• Barnes, M. P. 2012. Runes: A Handbook. Woodbridge.
• Photos: see the captions.