Most runestones say: he had this stone raised in memory of his father. The stone on Frösön says something else. Östman, Gudfast's son, had it raised, had a bridge built – and had Jämtland christened. A few hundred metres away, archaeologists found in 1984 beneath the floor of the church the remains of a birch and, all around it, bones of bears, elk and pigs. Two finds that together tell how a land between kingdoms changed its faith. We go through the evidence piece by piece and keep it apart from saga and interpretation.
Jämtland lies in the heart of Scandinavia, east of the mountains that now divide Norway from Sweden. To the west the passes lead down to Trøndelag, to the east the rivers run towards the Gulf of Bothnia. In the middle lies the large lake Storsjön, and in the lake the island of Frösön. Anyone who wants to understand the history of the Jamts has to keep this position in mind: they could be reached from both sides, and for a long time belonged wholly to neither.
The Jamts of the Viking Age were farmers, hunters and traders. Furs, iron from the bog ore of the forests and antler were sought-after goods. That they were not Vikings in the sense of sea raiders goes without saying for an inland country. Why "Viking" is an activity rather than a people anyway, we explain in our piece on Danes, Swedes and Norwegians. It also helps to remember that the land was not empty at the edge of the world: in the north and west lived the Sámi, whose hunting and trading networks touched those of the farmers. What the sources allow us to say about that relationship is gathered in our article on the Sámi in the Norse sources.
The Frösö stone is the northernmost raised runestone in Scandinavia and the only one in Jämtland. It originally stood at the eastern tip of Frösön, on the Östersund, the narrow waterway between island and mainland, at a place where people crossed. When a new bridge was built there in 1969 to 1971, the stone was moved to the lawn in front of the provincial administration building, where it stands today. It is usually dated to between 1030 and 1050; a more exact date is not possible. In the runic database Rundata it carries the signum J RS1928;66.
The inscription is partly damaged and some runes are restored. In normalised form it reads:
Austmaðr, Guðfastar sunr, lét ræisa stæin þenna ok gørva brú þessa, ok hann lét kristna Jamtaland. Ásbjǫrn gørði brú, Trjónn ræist ok Stæinn rúnar þessar.
"Östman, Gudfast's son, had this stone raised and this bridge made, and he had Jämtland christened. Åsbjörn made the bridge, Tryn and Sten carved these runes."Runestone J RS1928;66, Frösön; normalised reading following the Samnordisk runtextdatabas, our translation
The reading calls for caution. The word "stone" is only partly preserved, and the names of the carvers are rendered differently by different editors. The core sentence, lét kristna Jamtaland, is clearly legible. In this form it is unique: no other runestone claims that someone brought a whole land to Christianity. Most stones are memorials to the dead, often kinsmen who died far away. This one is an account of a deed, made on the doer's own behalf.
The names are instructive too. Austmaðr means "East-man", Guðfastr roughly "he who holds fast to God", a name that may come from a Christian family. Ásbjǫrn joins áss, "god" (in the old sense: an Æsir god), with bjǫrn, "bear": a pagan-sounding name in an inscription about conversion. And the carver's name Trjónn ("snout") is said to be especially common in Jämtland. These readings are proposals from name studies, not certainties, but they show how fluid the border between old and new world was in the names themselves.
The stone does not say. The name means literally "East-man", and some have concluded that he came from the east, from Sweden. That is possible, but a name proves no origin; it can have been a by-name, a nickname or a family name. Östman could afford to have a bridge built and two rune carvers employed, so he was wealthy and respected. Whether he was a local chieftain, a representative of a king or both cannot be decided. Equally open is how the conversion went. "He had Jämtland christened" can mean that he brought priests into the land, that he pushed the acceptance of the new faith through at an assembly, or simply that he saw himself as the man under whom it happened.
The bridge fits the subject. Bridge-building appears frequently on eleventh-century runestones, especially in the Mälaren region of Sweden, and counts as a Christian work: one did something for the public and for the good of one's soul. The word appears twice on the Frösö stone, a sign that Östman cared about the bridge at least as much as about the stone. How the change of faith went in the North as a whole is shown in our article on the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples. Jämtland is a small but rare case, because here the change was cut in stone by a man who claimed it for himself.
In time the stone belongs to the years after the battle of Stiklestad. There, in 1030 in Trøndelag, just across the mountains, King Olaf Haraldsson fell, and a year later he was declared a saint, which increased missionary pressure in the Norwegian sphere of influence. More on the battle is at Stiklestad. That Östman's work is linked with this development is conceivable, but the stone names neither Olaf nor a bishop.
The name Frösön is usually interpreted as "island of Freyr", the god of fertility and prosperity, about whom we write in Freyr and the Vanir. The reading is widespread but, as with many place names, not beyond doubt. Place names containing gods' names are collected in our article on gods in place names.
More tangible is what came to light in 1984 during work in the medieval church of Frösön. Beneath the chancel, in the area of the altar, archaeologists found the stump of a birch and, around it, a dense layer of animal bones: brown bear, elk, red deer, pig, sheep or goat, cattle and other species. Noticeably many skulls and jaw pieces. A few human bones also turned up.
The osteologists Ola Magnell and Elisabeth Iregren re-examined the material in 2010. According to their radiocarbon dates the deposit belongs to the late Viking Age. Cut and chop marks show that bears and pigs were butchered and eaten; bones were deposited, not whole animals. The slaughter seasons point to activity in late autumn, in spring and perhaps around midsummer. They consider the human bones more likely remains of disturbed burials than sacrifices.
The picture is that of an open-air place where a tree stood, where meals were held and parts of the animals left behind. The word blót for sacrifice and sacrificial feast suggests itself, and Magnell and Iregren use it. What role the bear in particular played is open. How such places appear in the sources is gathered in our article on blót sites; for the meaning of sacred trees read sacred trees.
That bear bones appear in particular has fuelled interpretations. Several are on the table. Those who start from the place name think of a Freyr cult in which animals were sacrificed and eaten. Others point to Sámi bear ceremonies: ethnographic reports of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe rituals around the slain bear among the Sámi, with special treatment of the bones. Whether those reports may be projected back into the eleventh century is disputed, since some 600 years lie between them. A third line sees the bear as part of the general Norse animal lore; more in The Bear in the North and in the survey of sacred animals.
Read soberly, the finds give no proof for any of these derivations. A bear is a big game animal, its meat a feast and its pelt a trophy. Skulls and jaws can mark a hunting prize or a ritual treatment. The find fits all explanations, and that is exactly why it is unsuited to a single assignment.
That the church was built exactly over this spot is hardly chance. The pattern is known from other places: the new faith took over the place of the old and made it its own. Here we have a find that can be joined with the sentence on the runestone into a story – a pagan cult place in the late tenth or early eleventh century, soon a church above it, and a few hundred metres away a man who claims the conversion of the land for himself.
The story should not be made too smooth, though. When exactly the cult place was abandoned and when the first church stood in its place cannot be fixed to the decade. The present church is younger, and whether there was a wooden building before it is uncertain. The link between Östman and the site beneath the church is an obvious guess, not evidence.
For Jämtland there is astonishingly little writing. From the Viking Age itself one text survives, the Frösö stone. Everything else comes from the time after and from the pens of outsiders. The main sources are two royal histories. One is Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla of about 1230, the other the Sverris saga. It was begun in 1185 under the supervision of the Norwegian king Sverre himself, written by the Icelandic abbot Karl Jónsson, and counts as close to events but partisan. Both works view Jämtland from Norway. How the Jamts saw themselves we do not know, because no sagas of theirs survive.
That is the basic rule for what follows: what Snorri tells about the ninth and tenth centuries was put on paper a good 300 years after the events. That does not make it worthless, but it requires treating every detail as tradition and not as report. A general introduction to this kind of source is in our piece on the sagas of Icelanders.
According to Snorri, a man named Ketil Jamti, son of an earl Önund from Sparbu in Trøndelag, went eastward over the mountains with a large following, took his livestock and goods, and cleared land in the region later called Jämtland. Later, when Harald Fairhair subdued all of Norway, more people from Trøndelag and Naumdal had to flee there. Why Ketil himself left, Snorri does not say. Scholars treat the story as a founding tale of the kind many landscapes received: it explains the name by giving it an ancestor. The country name is certainly not derived from a Ketil; if anything, the by-name Jamti arose from the country name. The meaning of the name Jämtland itself is unresolved.
That people from Trøndelag crossed the mountains in the ninth and tenth centuries is nevertheless plausible. The passes are short, the language was the same and the connections stayed close. The influence of the earls of Lade, who ruled Trøndelag, also reached east; we trace it in our article on the earls of Lade. How large and how early this influx was cannot be derived from the sagas, however.
The best-known passage is in Snorri's saga of Hákon the Good, chapter 14. It sums up how Jämtland came into the view of kings:
"Ketil Jamte, a son of Earl Onund of Sparabu, went eastward across the mountain ridge … Until Hakon's time nobody cared about them. Then he entered into friendly intercourse with Jamtaland … and they promised him obedience and payment of taxes, and became his subjects … He gave them laws, and rights to their land."Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hákonar saga góða, ch. 14, after the English translation by Samuel Laing, London 1844 (public domain); selection and abridgement ours
The reason Snorri adds is that the Jamts were of Norwegian origin and therefore preferred the rule of the Norwegian king to that of the Swedish one. That is the view of a Norwegian court historian. It serves to justify Norway's claim to Jämtland. Whether Hákon the Good really collected taxes in the tenth century we do not know; the sentence may equally project later conditions into the early period. That the Jamts lived "without a king" in the tenth century is not an implausible observation, but it is only indirectly visible in the sources.
Snorri also relates that in the dispute between Olaf the Saint and the Swedish king Olof the Jamts went over to the Swedish king and rejected the demands of the Norwegian. We record this statement as part of the tradition but have not checked its details against the saga text. The close ties with Trøndelag and the shifting allegiance to two kingdoms are plausible; the particulars are plausible only as narrative.
The Jamts had an assembly of their own, the Jamtamót. The name is unusual: while nearly everywhere in the North one spoke of the thing, here it is mót, meeting. The same thing is meant, an assembly of free farmers that gave judgments and settled common matters. According to the regional literature, which relies mainly on Carl-Göran Ekerwald and Bo Oscarsson, it met annually in late winter around 12 March, in the big market week, and survived the submission to Norway but lost its judicial role in the late fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, after the Swedish occupation in the Northern Seven Years' War, the Dano-Norwegian king Christian IV is said to have banned it; it nevertheless continued in secret under cover of the market week.
How old the Jamtamót is we do not know. Popular literature often says it arose soon after the Icelandic Althing of 930. There is no evidence for that; the assembly becomes tangible only in medieval sources. That it met in late winter and was joined with a market comes from later tradition. We therefore present the Jamtamót as a real institution of unknown beginning.
We stand on firmer ground in the later twelfth century. According to the Sverris saga, a clash took place in 1178 on the frozen Storsjön between the Jamts and the troops of Sverre, called the Birkebeiners. The saga, which arose in Sverre's circle, describes the king's victory; the Jamts, it says, mostly received sword blows in the back, which suggests flight or surprise. After this defeat Jämtland belonged politically to Norway. How far the saga's account is embellished remains open, since the only detailed source was the victor himself.
Politically Jämtland then stayed with Norway until it passed to Sweden in 1645 in the peace of Brömsebro. Ecclesiastically, though, it remained with the archbishopric of Uppsala throughout the Middle Ages. A land that paid taxes to one king and prayed in the church of the other kingdom: that describes the Jamts' position better than any border line.
Economy lay behind these situations. The interior supplied what was in demand on the coast and in the south: furs, antler, hides and iron. In the Viking Age Jämtland was thus part of a far-reaching trade system that led to the markets of the coast, as we describe in our article on Viking trade. The passes to Trøndelag were not only roads of trade but also access routes for tax collectors, missionaries and armies.
How much of this is archaeologically tangible can only be sketched roughly here: the land is explored well enough, through cemeteries, settlement traces and individual hoards of the Viking Age and early Middle Ages, to show settlement around Storsjön, but too thinly to find individual saga figures in it. That goes for Ketil Jamti as for any chieftain of the period.
Attested in its own time is the Frösö stone of the eleventh century: Östman, Gudfast's son, a bridge and the christening of Jämtland. There is no more writing from the Viking Age for Jämtland.
Attested archaeologically is the cult place beneath the church of Frösön with birch stump and animal bones, among them several brown bears, radiocarbon-dated to the late Viking Age.
Later tradition are Ketil Jamti, the taxes to Hákon the Good, the move to the Swedish king under Olaf the Saint and the subjugation by Sverrir. Much about the Jamtamót belongs here as well.
Modern interpretation are the derivation of Frösön from Freyr, the role of the bear, the link between Östman and the cult place and the image of an independent peasant republic that regional history likes to draw.
What remains is a land between kingdoms that left its own history in two places: in one sentence on stone and in a layer of bones beneath an altar.
What does the Frösö runestone say? That Östman, Gudfast's son, had the stone raised and a bridge built and that he had Jämtland christened. Åsbjörn made the bridge, Tryn and Sten carved the runes. The stone is dated to about 1030 to 1050.
Why is the stone special? It is the northernmost raised runestone in Scandinavia and the only one in Jämtland. It is also a rare case in which not a dead person but a deed is praised, namely the christening of a land.
What was found beneath the church of Frösön? During work in 1984 archaeologists found beneath the chancel the stump of a birch and a dense layer of animal bones, including bear, elk, red deer, pig, sheep or goat and cattle, plus a few human bones. Radiocarbon dates point to the late Viking Age.
Was a bear sacrificed at the cult site of Frösön? That is an interpretation. What is attested are butchered bear bones with cut and chop marks, but the find does not say for whom or for what purpose the animals were slaughtered.
What is the Jamtamót? The assembly of the free Jamts, comparable to a thing but under another name. It is certainly a real medieval institution; its age and the claim that it was founded after the Icelandic Althing of 930 are not attested.
When did Jämtland come to Sweden? Politically in 1645 with the peace of Brömsebro. Before that it belonged to Norway after the subjugation by King Sverre around 1178; ecclesiastically it was assigned to the archbishopric of Uppsala.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Danes, Swedes, Norwegians · The Christianisation of the Germanic Peoples · The Earls of Lade · The Kvens · Olaf Tryggvason – missionary king and the fall at Svolder · Uppsala.
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