13 - Consulting the Dead

Summary

1. Traces of early belief

birgŋu(bo)r(o)swestarminu liubumeRwage

This inscription appears on the early fifth century rune stone from Opedal, Hordaland, Norway. Krause's translation is ‘Grave. Bora, my sister, dear to me, Wagar’. Alternatively, the last word might be the present subjunctive of Old Norse vægja ‘to spare’, which would give the translation: ‘Grave. May Bora, my dear sister, spare me’; Krause objects that this should have appeared in runic Old Norse as *wagije, but his own solution is also doubtful, since the single-element personal name *Wagar is not found elsewhere. Both interpretations share another difficulty: *birg(i)ŋu is equivalent to Old English byrging, which does not mean ‘grave’, but ‘the act of burying someone’. Some other early Norwegian memorials are ‘labelled’ with a noun referring to the monument and the genitive singular of a personal name, but that is not done here. The nearest burial is about twenty metres away, and unlike the tall bautarsteinar commonly found on grave-mounds, the Opedal stone is irregular in shape and unworked, and large and heavy enough (132 x 77 cm) to be difficult to move. It may always have lain flat on the ground where it was discovered.

Von Friesen had earlier taken birg as the imperative singular of bjarga ‘to save, defend’, and (i)ŋuboro or (i)ŋubor(g)o as the common Old Norse female name Ingibjõrg. In that case, the last word could be the dative singular of vágr ‘bay’, ‘sea’ (though von Friesen, like Krause, regarded it as a proper name). The inscription could then be interpreted: ‘Ingubora, my dear sister, preserve me at sea’; the site is beside Sørfjord. This would then be a prayer rather than a memorial, and that would suggest that at least some Migration Age Scandinavians believed that the spirits of individual dead female relatives could give them protection. Unfortunately, this is hard to support from other inscriptions.

There is, however, abundant evidence that dead female relatives in general were venerated in the pre-Christian Germanic world. Votive stones and altars from the Roman period dedicated to the matronae or matres are common on the lower Rhine, in eastern Gaul and in upper Italy.