Viking runestones

Oslo

Copenhagen

Stockholm

class=notpageimage|

Clickable map of the geographic distribution of the Viking runestones in southern Scandinavia (modern administrative borders and cities are shown)

The Viking runestones are runestones that mention Scandinavians who participated in Viking expeditions. This article treats the runestone that refer to people who took part in voyages abroad, in western Europe, and stones that mention men who were Viking warriors and/or died while travelling in the West. However, it is likely that all of them do not mention men who took part in pillaging. The inscriptions were all engraved in Old Norse with the Younger Futhark. The runestones are unevenly distributed in Scandinavia: Denmark has 250 runestones, Norway has 50 while Iceland has none. Sweden has as many as between 1,700 and 2,500 depending on definition. The Swedish district of Uppland has the highest concentration with as many as 1,196 inscriptions in stone, whereas Södermanland is second with 391. ^{[1] [2]}

The largest group consists of 30 stones that mention England, and they are treated separately in the article England runestones. The runestones that talk of voyages to eastern Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East are treated separately in the article Varangian runestones and its subarticles.

The most notable of the Viking runestones is the Kjula Runestone in Södermanland, Sweden, and it contains a poem in Old Norse in the metre fornyrðislag that refers to the extensive warfare of a man called "Spear":^[3]

Below follows a presentation of the runestones based on the Rundata project. The transcriptions into Old Norse are in the Swedish and Danish dialect to facilitate comparison with the inscriptions, while the English translation provided by Rundata gives the names in the de facto standard dialect (the Icelandic and Norwegian dialect):