The Rök stone, the longest riddle in the runic world

No other rune stone has caused so much debate. The one at Rök, in the Swedish province of Östergötland, bears some seven hundred and fifty signs on every face, in what is considered the longest known runic inscription. It was carved in the ninth century, probably in the first half, and it is a literary text even before it is a memorial one: a mosaic of allusions, riddles and secret scripts that scholars have been trying to untangle for more than a century and a half.

A stone walled into a church

For centuries the stone remained hidden. It had been reused as building material in the wall of a structure attached to Rök church, and only part of it was visible. In 1862 it was removed and later set up in the open beside the church, where it still stands beneath a protective roof. It is a granite block about two and a half metres tall, with the text spread across its faces, sides and top.

The opening is clear: Varinn wrote these runes in memory of his son Vémóðr, who had died. From there on, however, the text becomes a sequence of questions and allusive sentences, introduced by formulas that can be translated as “I say this” or “I tell the young”. The father seems to offer to his son's memory a repertoire of stories known to his audience, but not to us.

Theodoric on horseback

One of the most famous passages speaks of Þjóðríkr, who rides on his steed, with his shield slung, prince of the Mærings. Most scholars recognise in him Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy from Ravenna and died in 526. In Ravenna stood an equestrian statue of him, which Charlemagne had moved to Aachen at the beginning of the ninth century: some believe that news of that statue had reached as far as Sweden.

That a Swedish carver of the ninth century should remember a ruler who had died in Italy three centuries earlier shows how far Germanic legends travelled. Theodoric, under the name Dietrich von Bern, would also become a hero of medieval German epic. In the German tradition he is linked to Verona, the Bern of the poems, and to the court of the Hunnish king Attila.

Secret runes and interpretations

The Rök stone uses almost the whole repertoire of runic writing of its time. The main text is in short-twig runes of the Younger Futhark, but some parts are in the Elder Futhark, by then out of use and therefore already a learned choice. Other parts are in cipher runes: systems in which a rune is indicated by its family and its position, marked with strokes, or replaced by the next rune in the row. The text was meant to be difficult.

Interpretations are many. For a long time the text was read as an evocation of heroic deeds or of revenge. An interpretation put forward in 2020 by a group of Swedish scholars links it instead to fear of climatic catastrophes, such as the long winter that followed the volcanic eruptions of the sixth century, and to the themes of Ragnarök. No reading is shared by all, and several passages remain obscure.

This very obscurity makes the Rök stone a unique monument. Alongside the thousands of inscriptions that repeat simple formulas, here a father chose to honour his son with a learned work, rich in poetic memory. Reading it today means entering a conversation of which we know only some of the rules, and accepting that certain answers were lost together with the world that knew them.