The Kylver stone: the oldest complete futhark

In 1903, during farm work at a holding called Kylver, in the parish of Stånga on the Swedish island of Gotland, a limestone slab came to light. It was part of a grave and bore twenty-four runes carved in a row, followed by a tree-shaped sign and a short word. It was the oldest known record of the entire futhark, the runic alphabet in its oldest and fullest form.

A grave and an alphabet

The slab is usually dated to around 400 AD. It lay inside a burial and its inscribed face was turned towards the dead person, not outwards. This detail has prompted much debate: an inscription that no living person could read does not seem meant to communicate, but to act in some way inside the tomb. Many scholars see in it a ritual or protective use of the runic row, though its precise meaning remains unknown.

Today the Kylver stone is kept in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. It comes from an island among the richest in carved monuments in the North, also home to the famous Iron Age picture stones. The island also has many Viking Age rune stones, written in a local variety of Norse, Old Gutnish.

What it says

The twenty-four runes follow the order we also know from other sources, with a few small differences: two runes of the second family appear in reverse order compared with other rows, and some forms are carved in an unusual way. After the row comes a sign resembling a fir tree, made of a stave with repeated slanting branches, interpreted either as a multiplied tiwaz rune or as a symbol in its own right.

Then follows the word sueus, which reads the same from left to right and from right to left. A palindrome, then, whose meaning has not been explained. Enigmatic formulas of this kind recur in early runic epigraphy, alongside words such as alu or laukaz, the leek, whose value scholars still debate.

The other complete rows

The Kylver stone is not the only carved futhark. The Vadstena bracteate, a sixth-century gold medallion found in Östergötland, shows the row divided into three groups of eight: it is the first direct evidence of the runic families. An almost identical bracteate, struck from the same die, was found at Motala, and another very similar one at Grumpan, in Västergötland.

Far from Scandinavia, a stone column found at Breza, in Bosnia, preserves part of the futhark, perhaps carved in the sixth century by a member of a Germanic people present in the Balkans. The Thames scramasax in England also bears a complete row, in the twenty-eight-rune Anglo-Saxon version. These are scattered witnesses, but they agree on the order of the runes.

These rows written out in full, with no message to convey, are among the most fascinating puzzles of runology. Perhaps they were exercises, perhaps invocations of the very order of writing, perhaps both. The Kylver stone, with its runes hidden in the darkness of a grave, remains the oldest document of this special relationship between alphabet and the sacred.