Following the discovery of the Svingerud stone - labelled the oldest datable rune stone - my own fascination with runes has increased significantly, and I am using this opportunity to reflect more on the role of runes and their significance for medieval literacy and medieval cultures of memory - meaning the cultural structures that facilitated the maintenance, dissemination and even construction and forgery of memory. Due to the durability of their medium and the notable continuity in legibility, runic inscriptions are particularly fascinating, and serve to remind us of the nebulous spectrum of literacy, wherein written messages can be accessible to a much wider audience than we often expect.
Since rune stones are technologies of memory, and vehicles for the maintenance of information and knowledge, they perform this duty to memory in many different ways. Some stones are commemorative, serving to remind future generations of individuals or of great deeds, or a combination of both. Other stones are more pragmatic in function, yet also important. One example of this latter type is the Nørstebø rune stone (c.1050-c.1100) from Oppland in Eastern Norway (Nørstebø means "northernmost field" in Norwegian). The stone is placed by the entrance of the humanties library of the University of Oslo. One of the many perks of visiting this library is to pass by this and two other rune stones, presented to the public as books in stone, a very apt metaphor.
The Nørstebø rune stone is particularly interesting to me because of how it reminds us of the durability and longevity of certain technologies of memory. The inscription of the stone records, in James Knirk's translation, that "Finnr and Skopti put up this stone when they divided their land, Váli's sons". In other words, the stone is a border marker that serves to remind future generations where one property ends and the other begins.
This kind of stone marker is a physical proof of the historical agreement that shaped the landscape for later generations, a kind of security against the future failing memory of individuals, and the loss of oral transmission of the event. Because of their tangibility as forms of evidence, border markers in stone remained an important technology of memory also in later centuries. In my own native village, Hyen, located in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often encounter such border markers in stone. Indeed, there is one right outside the kitchen window in my childhood home, and they can also be found in the middle of the woods. The border markers - known as "merkesteinar", marking stones - do not carry any inscriptions, with possible and very sporadic exceptions. They are significantly younger than the Nørstebø stone, and the ones we encounter in the woods back home are probably not older than a couple of hundred years at the most.
The lack of inscriptions on these modern border markers from Hyen are interesting, because they remind us of how technologies of memory have changed. When the Nørstebø stone was set into the ground, there was no central store of memory, no archive or library which could provide confirmation about the ownership of land and of the significance of the stone. With the combination of more widespread literacy - although the runic inscription also points to a significant degree of literacy - and the centralisation of memory in the administrative expansion of the modern era, it was no longer necessary to write on these border markers. The stones were important because they provided physical, tangible evidence of an agreement concerning property, but the details concerning that agreement - names, price of the transaction, duration of the agreement and similar issues - are housed elsewhere, in a central archive. In other words, the modern border markers found in my native village exist in a memory culture wherein memory is sustained by other forms of technologies of memory, namely written documents stored in a centralised archive. Some aspects of memory culture expressed through the Nørstebø stone are thereby retained, while other aspects are replaced with other technologies.
The combination of change and continuity is in and of itself not surprising, but we do well to remember that certain technologies are perfected at a very early stage, and continue to be used even though there are other ways to perform the tasks that these technologies were made to perform.
The Nørstebø stone, University of Oslo, humanities library
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