the goggles do nothing

I chose this particular runestone, which is about 4km southwest of the Uppsala city center, as the destination for my own field trip as part of my Runology class. I checked the references sources and recorded the GPS coördinates, but tried to keep my hand over the rest of the page so I wouldn't see any transliterations or translations until I stood in front of the stone itself.

The hike to the stone took me past the 1970s bedroom community of Flogsta, where a lot of Uppsala students live, and it's this geographical designation which is most often associated with runestone #895. Yet just south of Flogsta the territory turns sharply rural, with red barns on rolling acres.

Part of this landscape is Hågahögen, a Bronze-age gravemound dating to about 1000 BC. In much later times (ca. 800 AD), a semi-legendary king called Björn at Haugi was said to have established his residence here, taking his name from the mound (haugi, which became håga as part of a fixed place-name, while the word for a mound evolved in parallel to hög -- thus Hågahögen is arguably redundant.) Such overlapping of Bronze- and Viking-age settlements and monuments is a pattern across Scandinavia (cf. Jelling in Denmark) but it's unclear exactly what meaning these sites had for medieval rulers, apart from their pre-manufactured monumentality.

The runestone I went to look at dates from about 1000 AD, long after Björn reigned. It stood originally at the foot of the Håga mound, but is now in the middle of a privately-owned horse pasture about 200 meters south. Modern repairs to a crack at the base of the stone have resulted in three iron bars which hold the roughly 6' tall piece upright. The stone has three main faces, of which two are carved. The inscription continues from one side to the next, in the middle a sentence. Here's the first side -- mouse over the picture to see the runes that are intact:

The inscription starts,

tan uk skali uk biarn
Dan and Skalli and Björn

litu risa stain
let [this] stone be raised

The inscription continues on the other side, which is much better-preserved and easier to read. I've rotated this image so that it's at a 90° angle -- mouse over to see the runes highlighted:

at borfast faþu-
to the memory of Borfast, father

Though the last runic character is clearly an "i" in the carving, we think that must have been a mistake: faþui just doesn't make any sense at all, so we suspect that the lone stave must have been intended to be an r originally, yielding faþur.

Here I am with the Swedish Minister of Higher Education and Research, Lars Leijonborg, as well as my professor Lotta from Seattle. Interestingly enough Lars is a big Selma Lagerlöf fan. Each of the Fulbrighters who had been in Sweden this year had a few minutes to stand up and present a summary of their research. Pictures from the rest of the event are online here.

The Spring plantings have started to appear along Uppsala's many pedestrian and vehicular bridges crossing the Fyris river.

Walpurgis (sv. valborg) is perhaps the highlight of the social calendar in Uppsala. The Swedish-language Wikipedia has an entire sub-article on the events of the day, which I’ll copy here and amend with my own annotations:

07.00-09.30 Champagne Breakfast on Castle Hill: Yes, most people are drunk by 7 am. Skipped this.

10.00-12.00 Waterfall Rafting on Fyrisån

The idea here is that student clubs build makeshift rafts and dress up according to a chosen theme (mimes, squid, clowns, etc). They float down the Fyris river and, at the sharp drop by the old mill, go over the waterfall. This usually means the end of of the rafts, but they’re judged on style at the precise moment they rush over the edge, wading out after they come out of the water downriver.

12.00-14.30 Herring Picnic Lunch: Nothing like pickled fish on top of the champagne from breakfast. Skipped in favor of less-traditional pasta.

15.00 Rector magnificus bids welcome to Spring from the balcony of the library by lifting his student cap, signaling great celebration and consequent stampede down Carolina Hill to the Champagne Gallop at various student clubs.

Anders Hallberg, the rector, steps out on the balcony:

…and puts on his hat, the “Mösspåtagning” which signals the arrival of spring:

I stayed for the hat-waving but skipped any and all galloping. An interesting part of Valborg is how it functions as a kind of Alumni Reunion weekend, with older folks who once attended Uppsala blending in with the rest of the student body:

21.00 Curator curatorum (Student Body President) gives Spring Speech on top of Castle Hill, followed by a concert given by Allmänna Sången.

This I did attend, which proved to be quite atmospheric. Representatives of all the Student Nations had their respective flags and banners fluttering atop the hill next to the castle at sunset, while 420-year-old Gunilla bell was rung. The renowned choir Allmänna Sången sang while attired in evening gowns and tuxedos. The tradition of student choirs in Uppsala dates back to the early 19th century, and like many other things in Swedish academic arose under the influence of Germans who came northwards to work. Swedish Radio broadcasted the talk and the concert live from the top of the hill.

The gallery of photos from Valborg is online here.

Some pictures from a walk along the northern edge of Kungsholmen.

A panel on citizen participation in the creation of public spaces in Stockholm. To the left, the moderator Zanyar Adami, former editor of the journal Gringo. Just to the right of the screen is John Higson, an Irishman who moved to Stockholm and decided to try and liven up the cultural scene there. The result was Street, a culture center and marketplace modeled on London's Camden Locks project, transplanted to the Hornstull area of Kungsholmen. Higson was upfront (in Irish-accented Swedish) about the challenges that he still faces trying to improve Stockholm's cultural life -- how much paperwork and how many meetings he has to conduct with all sorts of government offices in order to accomplish a project. It's clear, however, that the Stockholm municipal authorities appreciate his European vision for expanding their capital's cultural life

I walked through Street back in 2004, when the project was just getting off the ground. Even back then, the summer weather brought out a mixture of musicians...

fashion designers...

and sculpture explorers:

This bit of unholy prayer from a runestone in Sjonhem parish, Gotland. The carved memorial, which dates from the 11th century, is a memorial to Rodfos, son of Rodvisl and Rodälv, who died in southern Romania:

rąþuisl:auk:rąþalf:þau:litu:raisa:staina:æftir:sy[ni:sina:]þria:
þina:eftir:rąþfos:han:siku:blakumen:i:utfaru
kuþ:hiælbin:sial:rąþfoaR:kuþ:suiki:þa:aR:han:suiu

The interesting line here is the last one, which reads roughly: May God help Rodfos’ soul, and may God swike those who swoke him.

That peculiar verb, attested in Runic Swedish as svīk(v)a and classical Icelandic as svíkja, has a meaning of to betray, deceive, cheat, or defraud. (There are also some interesting attestations of compounds with the noun: svikadrykkr: poisoned drink; svikamaðr: traitor; svikdómr: treason.)

The OED gives the surviving meanings of the corresponding English verb to swike, which are admittedly obscure ‘except in Scottish dialect’: “To act deceitfully, to cheat, to ensnare,” and perhaps most interestingly: “to prove false to, to disappoint the expectation of.”

This last sense, I think, comes the closest to the emotion on the Sjonhem runestone: Radfos was swicken by “blakumen,” probably Romanians (lit. Walachians) who were out of the range of that familial revenge that would normally be meted out. Thus Rodfos’ family made a decidedly un-Christian appeal to a higher power in their search for vengeance.

The Fulbright Chair in American Studies at Uppsala this year, Walter Jackson (North Carolina State University) gave a talk on Gunnar Myrdal and his critique of racial inequality in the USA. Jackson focused on Myrdal’s 1944 study of race in America, An American Dilemma — a first edition of which is here held aloft by Erik Åsard, director of the Swedish Institute for North American Studies:

Jackson knows quite about Myrdal’s research trips to the States, which were interrupted by the onset of World War II as well as a number of personal crises with the Myrdal family. He talked about the ways that Myrdal used his identity as a foreign outsider to break into both black and white social milieus in the American south: “I’m from Sweden and don’t know anything about the race problem, what can you tell me?” was apparently his winning line. At the same time, Myrdal’s status as as a member of the Swedish Parliament allowed him access to high-ranking politicians and policy makers in all ranks of local and national government.

Jackson also spent some time on the book’s controversial last few chapters, which as we now know were authored by an American graduate student rather than Myrdal himself. However, Myrdal took full responsibility for their content, despite his lack of personal oversight. The degree to which he himself agreed with their contents (most notably, that African-American culture was characterized by pathology) is still argued over.

A number of both Swedish and American Fulbright grantees came to Uppsala for the event, as well as tours of the cathedral, museum, and other local sights. Here we are atop the castle hill:

Finally, a shot of the sun slowly going down over the Fyris river, taken on a stroll southward along the banks towards the municipal park:

In August 1911, an upholsterer in Sigtuna named Fredrik Haglund found a copper box on the shores of Lake Mälaren. The artifact weighed about 2kg, and contained granular metal with the consistency of coffee grounds, wrapped in paper or thin cloth. It was sent to the Statens Historiska Museum for investigation, unfortunately after the contents had been emptied out at the site. The box originally contained a pair of merchant’s scales, as we will see below.

The first person to examine the box at the museum, T. J:son Arnede, realized that there were runes carved around the outside edge of the container. Cut with a sharp knife with a somewhat rounded tip, the runes wrapped around both the top and bottom halves of the container:

Rune expert Otto von Friesen, writing in a 1912 article in Fornvännen, was the first to try and interpret this long line of carvings that curved around the box. But what fun is reading the answer before trying it yourself? Starting from the top left of the top row, we can transliterate the runes to latin letters thusly:

tiarfr×fikaf×simskum×mąni×skalaR×þis[aR]×i…ąti×inuirmuntr×faþi×runąr×þisar

This doesn’t seem like the makings of a page-turner, but let’s see what we get when we take the first part and normalize the spelling to something approximating Old Norse:

Runic: tiarfr fik  af simskum mąni  skalaR þisaR  i …ąti
Norse: Djarfr fikk av sæmskum manni skalar þessar i …andi

Much better! We know the subject is a man named Djarfr, because he’s in the nominative. His name is rare in West Norse, but is found often enough in the language spoken in Sweden at this time. Djarfr got “these scales” (skalar þessar, plural accusative) from a man (af manni, dative singular) who is described as sæmskum, an adjective that was unknown before this item was found.

The best guess is that the adjective (semskr in uninflected form) refers to Sambia or possibly Zemgale, areas in North Prussia (present-day Russian Kaliningrad) and Latvia, respectively. At least Sambia was frequented by Viking traders and which sent in return businessmen to Birka, the trading island outside of present-day Stockholm.

The phrase i …andi is unfortunately partial effaced, but we can extrapolate from the context that it must also refer to the place that Djarfr got these scales: “in …land.”

(Interestingly, the runes record only ati instead of andi, but we know that rune-carvers almost always felt it unnecessary to carve an N-rune between a vowel and a dental consonant. And the T-rune stood for both [d] and [t] during this period, giving us -andi where only -ati is written.)

Continuing on, after the damaged section:

Runic: in uirmuntr faþi runąr þisar
Norse: en wærmuntr faði runor þissar

Here we have the rune-carver’s signature: “and Vermundr made these runes.” We have a record of the name Vermundr from the Landnámabok, the record of Iceland’s settlement, so we can confirm it was an attested man’s name.

The carving on the box then continues with an extremely complex and archaic dróttkvætt verse, consisting of a harsh warning not to steal the scales from the merchant. Sort of a primitive burglar alarm. This section, however, is rather complex and probably deserves an entry of its own.

In between sessions at the Fulbright Seminar I set off on a walk around Berlin, passing by the new American Embassy which is nearing completion on Brandenburg Tor:

The new headquarters of the large Axel Springer publishing company stands on the former site of a church:

I went through the Jewish Museum in 2003, so this time I just spent some time walking around the exterior of the building:

From the Museum I walked south, crossed the river and into the more urban area of Kreuzberg:

Lunch was at the Marheineke Markthalle, where I finally settled on some amazing falafel (only €2!) after passing by a number of booths with terrific assortments of food, such as that shown below. The cost/quality ratio food in Berlin, and especially Kreuzberg, is enough to make me wish I had learned German instead of Swedish as a foreign language.