Narsaq stick

Yet another side has a series of carefully carved symbols of unclear meaning, possibly cipher runes or some sort of tally.

Relatively mundane ideas include that the text is a play on words, a pedagogical exercise in runic ambiguity or a riddle.

[2] The site was placed under conservation order but in 1945 the restrictions were lifted since surface examination of the ruins had not indicated that they were especially valuable.

[4] In the summer of 1954, archaeologist Christen Leif Pagh Vebæk undertook excavations at the site and found various remains, including arrowheads which could be dated to the oldest period of Norse settlement in Greenland.

[7] Erik Moltke argued that it must have been carved in Greenland since only in a tree-poor country would a self-respecting rune-carver deign to use such a wretched piece of wood.

[18] There are similarities between this sentence and runic inscriptions from Norway, in particular B 566 from Bergen which reads in part huatsasaerisasasiksasaerisasa and has been taken to mean "What did he see who looked into the tub?

Texts similar to that on B 566 are also found on B 617 from Bergen and A 162 from Trondheim[20] and there is a further possible parallel on a bone discovered in Sigtuna in Sweden in 1995.

[30] The second sentence (bibrau : haitir : mar : su : is : sitr : ą : blanị) is mostly straightforward but the first and last words are difficult.

Moltke took its first component to be bif- ("movement" or "shaking") as in Bifröst and gave Bifrau, Bifrey and Bifró as possible renderings.

[33] Ólafur Halldórsson suggested the rendering Bifbrá which he took to mean "mirage" like Icelandic tíbrá and Faroese lognbrá and to answer what he saw as a riddle in the first sentence.

[30] Helgi Guðmundsson saw Bifrǫ́ as the most likely option and points out that Norwegian and Swedish rå is a word for vættir or mythical beings.

[27] He took this to be dative of Bláinn, one of the names of the primordial giant out of whose skull the blue sky was made.

[28] Helgi Guðmundsson argues that the expected dative of Bláinn is Bláni and that this fits well with what can be seen of the runic word.

[1][30][31][36][37] An alternative proposal by Jón Helgason is to take blanị to represent blánni, the dative singular of blá ("pond" or "marsh") with the suffixed article.

[17] Jonas Nordby is less certain that the carvings are based on a cipher system, suggesting that they might be some form of tally.

[40] Helgi Guðmundsson pointed out that a virgin sitting on the sky was reminiscent of Christian ideas but that this did not seem to throw any light on the text.

[42] He also suggested a similarity to lines from the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál: "Hræsvelgr he is called who sits at the end of the sky".

[29] Jón Helgason suggested that the stick had a pedagogic function with the inscription intended to illustrate the ambiguity of runic writing.

He makes a lighthearted suggestion that the carver was Erik the Red himself and the pupil his son Leif and stages a conversation between the two.