Strängnäs stone

[2] The inscription consists of just two words, both of them notable in the study of Germanic languages – Erilaʀ and Wodinʀ[3] – which are of such mythical character that the stone's authenticity has often been questioned.

[4] The first word is compared to that of the Heruls, a Germanic tribe with a traditional homeland in Scandinavia, and to the title jarl and its Anglo-Saxon form earl.

[6] Curator Carl Gustaf Blomberg reported to the Swedish National Antiquarian Sven B. F. Jansson that the stone had probably been inserted among bricks when an iron stove was installed in a private home at the end of the 1870s.

Denna inskrift kommeratt sätta myror i huvudet på oss runforskare.Schnell published a picture of the stone with a caption that agreed well with Jansson's and a tentative dating to the 5th century.

The island was historically an important settlement, and the Old Norse Ynglinga saga tells that Selaön (ON: Sila) was where the legendary king Granmar of Södermanland went to a feast at one of his farms.

Elisabeth Svärdström at the Swedish National Heritage Board answered him that it was by appearance Proto-Norse, but both she and Jansson considered it to be a recent inscription.

It had taken several months before a proper study could be performed on the circumstances surrounding the find, and so information was lacking, and moreover the iron stove proved to be of a type that was produced no earlier than 1910.

The Germanic morpheme *wōð- has different derivations formed with n-suffixes, i.e. the suffix -ana- in Óðinn and the variant -ina- in Middle English Wednesdei (with i-umlaut ō ē).

[5] The PN *wōðu- is found in the male name Wōðurīðaʀ in the dative case form woduride (with i-stem derivation) on the Tune stone, and with the prefix un- in unwodi͡ʀ on the Gårdlösa fibula, which would mean 'not raging'.

[14] The theonym Óðinn is unattested in runestone inscriptions with the Elder Futhark, but appears in the form Wodan on the Nordendorf I fibula from the second half of the 6th century,[15] and on the Ribe skull fragment from c.

The commonly discussed word erilaʀ, which is also associated with the tribe Heruls and the title Jarl, appears with some variations in nine or ten inscriptions: 1kJ 16 Bratsberg, 27 Kragehul, 29 Lindholmen, 156 Veblungsnes, 169 Rosseland, 70 Järsberg, 171 By, 128 Väsby and Äskatorp, and in a recent find from Trollhättan 2009.

[6] As early as the fall of 1962, restorer Arne Strömberg, head of the Heritage Board's technical department, performed a geological analysis of the stone.

[26] Runo Löfvendahl at the Heritage Board studied the stone in 2002, and noted that no traces could be found of vegetal growth, and that there were tar stains, although not in the grooves.

For example, three petroglyphs in another type of quartzitic sandstone that dates to the Nordic Bronze Age have been preserved in an almost pristine state in Järrestad near Simrishamn.

[4] In 2007, Laila Kitzler-Åhfeldt created a model with an optical 3D scanner,[2] for a pilot study in preparation for the formal publication of the inscription that would take place in 2011, in Fornvännen, nearly 50 years after the original discovery.