Eggja stone
The longest inscription in the older futhark: around 200 runes on the underside of a grave slab, describing a funeral rite and warning off the wrong kind of visitor. Almost none of it is securely translated.
At a glance
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- Date
- c. AD 650–700
- Found at
- Eggja farm, Sogndal, Vestland, Norway
- Signature
- N KJ101
The text
Why none is reproduced here.
Not reproduced. This inscription is either too long to quote in full or its reading is contested enough that printing one transliteration would suggest a settled text where there is not one. Look it up under N KJ101 in the standard catalogues, where the readings are given with their apparatus.
Discovery
Ploughed up in 1917 on the Eggja farm in Sogndal, lying face down over a man's grave. As at Kylver, the text was cut on the side turned towards the body, so whatever it was for it was not for a passing reader. Its runes belong to the very end of the older futhark, and several are already drifting towards Younger Futhark forms.
Why it matters
At roughly 200 runes it is several times the length of any other older-futhark text, which makes it the one place where that alphabet can be watched carrying sustained, partly metrical composition rather than a name, a maker's formula or a single word. Specialists agree on the general shape (protection for the grave, and the description of a funerary rite) and on remarkably little else.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this object that circulate widely and do not hold up.
Confident full translations of the Eggja stone are in wide circulation and should be treated with suspicion. Only parts of the text have an accepted reading, and the published interpretations are incompatible with one another: Krause and Jankuhn, Grønvik and others reach different results from the same runes, variously finding a shipwreck, a warning against necromancy, and a ritual procedure. No transliteration is given here for that reason.
Runes attested here (1)
Every dictionary entry that cites this object, with the reason it gives.
- AlgizElder
The longest older-futhark text there is, cut just as the alphabet was turning into the Younger Futhark, so its rune forms, this one included, sit between the two systems.
Sources
Full references on the sources page.