The Gotland picture stones are upright, image-covered limestone slabs raised on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland between roughly AD 400 and 1100 – around 700 stones and fragments are known today. They show ships under sail, riders, battles, women offering drinking horns and scenes that echo the myths of gods and heroes. Because they are centuries older than the Edda, they form a unique picture archive of the North. Here are the most famous stones, how they are dated, what they are made of, the question of colour and what the latest research has found.
Picture a meadow in northern Gotland some time in the eighth century. Next to a cairn, a slab rises almost four metres high, its top rounded like a mushroom cap, covered in images: men with swords, a horse, a tree with a hanged man, and at the bottom a ship with a bellying sail. There is not a single word on it. Anyone passing by probably knew the story. We only know scraps of it. That is exactly what makes the picture stones of Gotland so seductive – and so treacherous.
At Glanz & Gravur we work with stone and image every day, so we look at these slabs with a craftsman's eye. In this article we keep three things firmly apart: what the evidence shows, what later texts tell us, and what remains modern interpretation. Few Viking Age topics see guesses sold as facts as often as this one.
A picture stone (Swedish bildsten) is an upright stone slab whose front face is decorated with images, ornament or both, while the back was usually left rough. This type of monument is almost exclusively at home on Gotland; a few related pieces are known from nearby regions such as Öland and Courland in present-day Latvia. Elsewhere in Scandinavia people raised runestones instead, where the inscription is the point and pictures are an extra.
Sizes vary enormously. The monumental Viking Age stones reach three to four metres, and some of the earliest slabs are almost as tall. In between come the so-called dwarf stones of the sixth and seventh centuries, often less than a metre high.
The honest answer is that the number keeps growing. The archaeologist Sune Lindqvist published his two-volume standard work Gotlands Bildsteine in 1941–42. According to Sigmund Oehrl, Lindqvist's edition covered about 280 stones and fragments, out of a slightly larger number already known. When the research project Ancient Images 2.0 began in 2019, about 570 picture stones and fragments were registered; by 2024 the figure had risen to around 700. The new online edition hosted by Gotland Museum now assigns numbers up to roughly 750, though a single number sometimes covers several fragments.
Where do all the new finds come from? Mostly from churches. When Gotland built its more than 90 medieval stone churches, old picture stones were reused as floor slabs, thresholds, steps or wall stones. According to a 2023 report in the Swedish science magazine Forskning & Framsteg, almost half of the known stones sit in church buildings, so every restoration can bring a new find to light.
Lindqvist sorted the stones by shape, technique and decoration into five stages labelled with letters. These Lindqvist types are still the shared vocabulary of research, even though the dates have since been revised. The current online edition, built by Sigmund Oehrl and an international team, therefore speaks explicitly of the "Lindqvist type" and dates the groups as follows:
| Type | Current dating | Shape and decoration |
|---|---|---|
| A | c. 400–600 | tall, axe-shaped with a slightly convex top; large whirl or rosette discs, rowing boats, animals and warriors in the corners |
| B | c. 500–700 | mostly small "dwarf stones"; outline carving, waterbirds, early ships |
| C/D | 8th–10th century | large mushroom-shaped stones in low relief with stacked picture fields; riders, battles, sailing ships |
| E | 11th to early 12th century | runestone-like, serpent band with inscription, sometimes Christian crosses |
The most important shift concerns the large narrative stones. Lindqvist still separated a group C from a group D and placed some key monuments early – the great Stora Hammars stone around 700, for example. Later scholars arrived at later dates: Eshleman argued for 790–840, Lisbeth Imer for after 750, others for the tenth century. Today C and D are usually merged and placed broadly in the eighth to tenth centuries. So if an older book tells you a stone dates "from 700", that is an estimate made more than 80 years ago, not a fixed fact.
The early stones reveal a surprising cosmopolitanism. Their whirl discs, rosettes and a reclining crescent moon have close parallels on Roman grave monuments. But Gotland's stonecarvers did not copy; they reinterpreted. The crescent, according to Lindqvist and more recent research, became a rowing boat. Gotland sat in the middle of the Baltic as a trading hub – the island's enormous silver hoards, which we cover in our article on the Gotlanders, tell the same story. Images travelled with the goods.
Gotland is essentially one huge limestone platform. The rock formed during the Silurian, around 443 to 419 million years ago, when the area lay near the equator and was covered in reefs. Almost all picture stones are cut from this material. A geological study carried out for the new edition sampled more than a hundred stones. The result: of the more than 570 stones then registered, only 23 are sandstone, and all of those come from the Burgsvik area in the south of the island.
What fascinates us as stone people is the selection. The craftsmen preferred thick-bedded reef-debris limestone; for the dwarf stones of type B they mainly used crinoidal limestone, made from the remains of sea lilies. Finer-grained stone was favoured for types A and D, coarser stone for the large C stones. No quarries were needed, as far as we know today: suitable slabs lay on the surface, especially along the coast. Some carvers even worked fossils into their designs on purpose. Anyone who engraves slate knows the feeling: the stone has its own say.
The bold red or black lines you know from photographs are modern. Swedish researchers painted the stones around 1900 and above all during Lindqvist's work, to make the shallow reliefs visible for the camera. Lindqvist himself warned that his results should not be taken as exact in every detail. In 2023 Sigmund Oehrl put it more bluntly: many researchers apparently had not understood that these paintings are interpretations.
Were the stones originally coloured? Very probably. The online edition says they were "probably painted", and faint traces of paint survive on a few stones. Pigment analyses of runestones show that black, white, yellow, red and blue were used, and some late hybrids between picture stone and runestone also preserve paint residues. Fine incised details such as belt buckles on some figures suggest that paint once picked out things that now disappear into the relief.
Exactly what the stones looked like, nobody knows. A multispectral examination of a newly rediscovered early stone found no paint, even though old notes mentioned some; X-ray fluorescence analysis was planned as the next step. Oehrl hopes one day to reconstruct the original colouring digitally. Brightly painted replicas in museums and open-air sites are therefore proposals, not snapshots of the past.
Their function changed over 700 years. Many stones stood in open country beside old roads, visible from far away. Others were raised at cemeteries and burial mounds, and some stood in groups that may have formed small cult or meeting places.
The most direct clue comes from inscriptions. The Tjängvide I stone, found in 1844 and now in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, says in short-twig runes that someone raised the stone "in memory of Hjôrulfr, his brother". That is the same memorial formula we know from hundreds of runestones. Type E stones are almost always memorials of this kind, raised by relatives for the dead. The earlier groups have no writing, but their find contexts often speak a similar language: type B stones are almost always found near cemeteries, and a link to graves is assumed for type A as well. A stone from Uddvide had been built into a grave with fifth-century brooches, an important support for the early dating.
Reuse began long before the churches. In the late Viking Age, older picture stones were taken from cemeteries and built into new graves, for example as cover slabs; one warrior stone from around 400–600 later served as a grave lid at Väte. Researchers such as Martin Rundkvist read this as a deliberate link to the ancestors. A picture stone could commemorate one person and, generations later, become an ancestral relic in its own right.
Lärbro Tängelgårda I belongs to type C/D, stands about two and a half metres tall and is now in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. It is a textbook case of how much interpretation can hide in a museum label. The museum reads the fields from top to bottom: a battle with birds of prey above the fallen; below it a dead man on an eight-legged horse, standing for the bier; then the dead man's arrival in Valhalla, welcomed by a woman with a drinking horn while he and other men hold rings; and a ship at the bottom.
Striking details are the rings, interpreted as oath rings, and the unusually many triangular knot signs beneath the horse. Today we know these under the modern name valknut – a word nobody used in the Viking Age. That the scene shows Valhalla is a widespread and well-argued reading, but it is a reading. The online edition more cautiously lists Tängelgårda I among stones depicting funeral rites.
Gotland's most impressive picture stone stands in the open air. Stora Hammars I measures 3.91 metres, 3.48 of which are visible today. It was found with other tall picture stones and three cairns in a meadow in Lärbro parish, broken and lying face down. Since 1923 it has stood in the open-air museum at Bunge in the north of the island – on loan from the Stockholm museum, because local people objected to its removal to the capital. The price: the stone is badly weathered and only protected from frost in winter.
Six picture fields are stacked one above the other. At the top, two armed men flank a seated figure, probably a woman. The third field is the most debated: a man with a noose beneath a bent tree, a bird of prey, interlocking triangles, a kind of altar and four armed men – generally read as a hanging or a human sacrifice. If you think of Odin as "god of the hanged" and of the accounts collected in our article on Germanic sacrifice, you are not wrong, but the stone names no god. Below follow a ship with warriors and a woman, a horse with a man lying beneath it, and, as the largest field, a sailing ship almost a metre high. The ship-and-woman scene has an almost exact parallel on the Stenkyrka Smiss I stone – a sign that certain scenes were fixed visual formulas viewers recognised.
The reading most often proposed for the whole programme is the legend of Hildr, the endless battle of the Hjaðningar that Hildr rekindles every night by sorcery, known from Bragi's Ragnarsdrápa and Snorri's Skáldskaparmál. Other scholars, including Karl Hauck and Anders Andrén, thought of the Völsung legend; a reading as the Trojan War has not found acceptance. Lindqvist himself changed his readings several times over the years. That is as much as one can honestly say about this stone – and it is already a great deal.
For centuries, ten picture stones lay as paving slabs beneath the wooden floor of Ardre church. They only came to light again during the restoration around 1900. The largest and most famous is Ardre VIII, dated to the eighth or ninth century – Oehrl speaks of around 800. It is now in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm.
Several scenes crowd onto this stone that can be linked to stories from the much later Edda. The most secure is the legend of Wayland the Smith: a smithy, the beheaded sons of the king, and the hero escaping in the shape of a bird – exactly the motifs of the Eddic Völundarkviða. Oehrl considers Ardre VIII possibly the oldest evidence of the Wayland legend anywhere, and the only one from eastern Scandinavia. Its famous Anglo-Saxon counterpart in whalebone is the subject of our article on the Franks Casket.
Other scenes are read as Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, as Loki's punishment after Baldr's death, and as a ride on an eight-legged horse. A woman with two swords on the right fits no known myth – a gentle reminder of how many stories have been lost.
The name Smiss turns up more than once in picture-stone research, because farms of that name exist in several parishes. Best known is the small stone from Smiss in När parish, catalogued as När Smiss 3 and popularly called the "Snake Witch" (Swedish Ormhäxan). It is only 82 centimetres tall, was found in a cemetery and belongs to the early stones, usually dated to the fifth or sixth century, though some place it in the Vendel period. You can see it today in Gotland Museum in Visby.
It shows a squatting figure holding a snake in each hand, with three intertwined animals above. The interpretations are a panorama of research history: comparisons with the Celtic Gundestrup cauldron, with Daniel in the lions' den, with the god Cernunnos, with a sorceress, with Odin in female form, with the ancestress Hvitastjerna from the Gotlandic Guta saga. In 2010 Oehrl proposed a Nordic healing god in the manner of Asclepius. The only consensus is that the motif was widespread in the ancient world and is unique on Gotland.
Ships are the most common motif of all. The early stones show rowing boats; Vendel and Viking Age stones show sailing ships with chequered sails, rigging and waves. These are among the earliest depictions of Nordic sailing ships and matter to maritime historians as well – more in our article on dragon ships. They are usually read as ships of the dead, an image of the journey to the otherworld. That fits boat burials and stone ships, but it remains an interpretation: a ship can also simply stand for seafaring and status.
The rider welcomed by a woman with a drinking horn is one of the most frequent Viking Age scenes. Most scholars link the woman with the valkyries and the scene with arrival in the hall of the slain, as described in the tenth-century poem Eiríksmál, where Odin has his hall made ready for an arriving king. Oehrl points out that the composition goes back to a late Roman model, the ceremonial arrival of the ruler (adventus). There are counter-readings: on Tjängvide I the scene has also been read as Sigurd on Grani, or as a living man greeted by his wife. Most scholars take the eight-legged horse there and on Ardre VIII to be Sleipnir; a minority read the eight legs as a way of showing speed. To set image beside text, see our article on the Einherjar.
Sacrificial scenes appear on Stora Hammars I and on the Garda Bote stone, where a lancer also follows an eight-pointed star – a motif unusual in Germanic art but close to late antique medallions of warrior saints or emperors. Alongside these come horse fights, ceremonial drinking and oath-taking, funerals and processions. Researchers now see the journey of the dead as the main theme of the later stones. Other scenes have been linked with the endless battle of the Hjaðningar, Gunnar in the snake pit and possibly Sigurd. On a dwarf stone from Väskinde a stag devours a serpent, a typically Christian image – the Gotlanders were looking far beyond their island long before they were baptised.
And because the reliefs are often less than a millimetre deep, readings change. Where Lindqvist saw a winged figure with a wreath on Klinte Hunninge I, an older drawing by Olof Sörling shows a snake, and Oehrl could not find the figure on the new 3D model. On top of that, the texts we compare the stones with were written down in thirteenth-century Iceland – more on that in our article on the Edda.
The heart of the collection is in Visby. Gotland Museum, known locally as Fornsalen, was founded in 1875 on the initiative of Pehr Arvid Säve and stands on Strandgatan. Its oldest building houses the Bildstenshallen, the Picture Stone Hall, one of the museum's key permanent exhibitions. Stones from every period stand side by side there, including the "Snake Witch" from Smiss. If you want to see the shift from whirl disc to sailing ship in a single afternoon, this is the place.
Several masterpieces, however, are in Stockholm: in the Swedish History Museum you will find Tjängvide I, whose rider the museum even uses as its logo, Ardre VIII and Tängelgårda I. Stora Hammars I stands in the Bunge open-air museum in northern Gotland, and many more stones can still be found in the landscape or in the walls of village churches – the new online edition even gives their coordinates. For travel tips, see our overview Experience the Vikings.
For 80 years Lindqvist's edition was the basis of nearly all work on the stones – a blessing and a curse, because his painted photographs are not neutral. In 2012 Gotland Museum published the volume Gotland's Picture Stones. Bearers of an Enigmatic Legacy, an international state of research that reopened questions of workshops, carving traces, chronology and interpretation. The archaeologist Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt has studied the tool marks of individual carvers and workshops in several publications.
The big leap came with Sigmund Oehrl. In a pilot study (2013–2016) he documented stones using RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging: photographs taken under many light directions that can be freely "relit" on screen) and photogrammetry. His habilitation thesis Die Bildsteine Gotlands. Probleme und neue Wege ihrer Dokumentation, Lesung und Deutung appeared in two volumes at the end of 2019. The same year saw the start of Ancient Images 2.0, led by Stockholm University with Gotland Museum as its main partner and the Visby company Viospatia handling photography and scanning, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
The team produced high-resolution 3D models – "digital twins" that can be rotated, zoomed and virtually lit from any angle – so nobody needs to paint the stones any more to see what is there. Old archive notes, drawings and photographs were digitised alongside. Since 2025 the result has been available as a free, bilingual online edition from Gotland Museum, with a profile, a 3D model and location data for each stone. Parallel studies look at the origin of the rock, traces of paint and the question of why pagan picture stones ended up in medieval churches.
We work with a laser, not a chisel. But the principle is the same: one surface, one image, one story meant to be understood without many words. That idea lies behind our motif after the Atli stone, and it guides every engraving we make on slate. When we design Norse motifs, we look at the originals – and at what research says about them, not at what a TV series made of them.
How old are the Gotland picture stones? They were made between about AD 400 and 1100, from the Migration Period to the early Middle Ages. The large narrative stones with ships and riders mostly date from the eighth to tenth centuries.
How many picture stones are there on Gotland? Around 700 stones and fragments are known today (as of 2024). New ones keep turning up during church restorations.
Do the picture stones show Odin and Valhalla? Some scenes fit well with Odin's horse Sleipnir or an arrival in Valhalla. But no names appear on the stones; these are well-founded interpretations based on later Icelandic texts.
Were the picture stones originally painted? Very probably, and faint traces survive on a few stones. The red and black paint you see on many stones today is modern and was added to make the carvings visible.
Where can I see Gotland picture stones? In the Picture Stone Hall of Gotland Museum (Fornsalen) in Visby, in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, at the Bunge open-air museum and in and around many churches on Gotland.
What is the difference between a picture stone and a runestone? A picture stone tells its story mainly in images and usually has no writing; a runestone is all about its inscription. Only the late Gotland stones of the eleventh century combine both.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
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