The great Jelling stone tells us who ordered it: King Harald Bluetooth. It does not tell us who planned it, drew it, cut it or painted it. Since 2023 a name has circulated for the runes, Ravnunge-Tue, drawn from 3D scans of chisel marks, yet the authors of the study say themselves that the scans cannot prove a shared hand. This article separates what the inscription yields, what the tool-mark analysis shows and what is plain conjecture. It also asks about the pictures, because for the author of the Christ figure and the great beast I found no study at all in my sources.
The large stone at Jelling, catalogued as DR 42 (after the corpus Danmarks Runeindskrifter), is among the best-known monuments of the Viking Age. About its patron it leaves no doubt. About the people who made it, it is entirely silent: no signature, no “X carved these runes”, no hint of a workshop. To understand the stone one has to keep two things apart, the political will behind the monument and the manual labour that turned a block of granite into it.
We already cover Harald’s baptism, Gorm and Thyra and the meaning of the text in The Jelling Stones and Harald Bluetooth: Life, Baptism and Rule. This piece asks something different: who was the author in the craftsman’s sense? The question is attractive because research has approached it with new methods in recent years, and because it has produced a good deal of overstatement. I stay with what I found in the sources I read and mark everything else as conjecture.
The runes are in the Younger Futhark, the Viking-Age rune row shortened to 16 signs (see the Futhark comparison). In sense the text runs: King Harald had these monuments made, after Gorm his father and Thyra his mother, that Harald who won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. In the Rundata rendering, which I saw through a fetch of the English Wikipedia, the opening reads haraltr : kunukʀ : baþ : kaurua kubl : þausi : aft : kurm faþur sin, and the forms tanmaurk (Denmark) and, on the beast face, ala auk nuruiak (“all and Norway”) appear. I did not consult Rundata itself or the stone; spelling variants of single words (for instance þourui on Wikipedia, þąurui in the Antiquity rendering) remain unresolved for me.
King Harald commanded these monuments to be made after Gorm his father and after Thyra his mother – that Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.Jelling 2 (DR 42), sense of the inscription, my own rendering after the Danish and English versions (Kulturstyrelsen; Rundata via Wikipedia)
The verb matters. It means roughly “bade make”, Old Norse bað gera (West Norse) or bað gørwa (East Norse); on the stone itself the runes read baþ kaurua, kaurua being the runic spelling of the verb “make”. Harald appears as the one who gives the order. He does not claim to have cut the stone, and no scholar whose text I read thinks he did. The verb separates, on the surface of the stone itself, the one who commissions from the one who executes. The executor stays unnamed.
That is not a given. On other stones of the period carvers speak up, and later in Sweden they do so very often. More on that below. On the great Jelling stone the line is missing, and we have to live with the fact that the stone alone does not give us the name of the man or men who made it.
The stone carries three things on three faces: a face with the text in horizontal lines, a face with a large beast fighting a serpent, and a face with a figure of Christ in interlace. The brochure “Jelling-monumenterne” from the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces (read here only through a fetch tool, so page numbers are approximate) describes the Christ with wide-open eyes and outstretched arms, with a cross-halo, surrounded by interlace, and calls it the oldest known Norse depiction of the crucified Christ. The beast face carries the words “and Norway”, the Christ face the words “and made the Danes Christian”.
The same brochure remarks on the design: the horizontal arrangement of the text recalls a Latin manuscript, and the two picture faces resemble an open book. The Danish encyclopedia lex.dk likewise calls relief work, form of inscription and pictorial content “unique for the Viking Age”. Whoever composed such a programme had to know what a book spread looks like, how to place a crucifixion in a picture field and how to bring text, beast and Christ into an order that a viewer reads from face to face. How much of that was available in Denmark in the 960s, and where it came from, is not documented.
The brochure names no specific model for the Christ figure. Which manuscript, metalwork or ivory the planner had in front of him is therefore not established. Anyone who names particular books or churches is guessing.
When we speak of the stone’s “artist” or “master”, we blur at least five roles that could be filled by different people in a Viking-Age workshop:
The roles could coincide in one person. On some small runestones they certainly do. For the great Jelling stone, a carefully composed monument with an exceptional picture programme and text layout, it is not excluded that several hands took part. Neither option is proven.
The question about the craftsmen is not new. In 1979 the journal Kuml (vol. 28, pp. 205–218) printed an article titled “Kong Haralds mishandlede Jellingsten”, “King Harald’s mishandled Jelling stone”. I know only the abstract. According to it, the paper contradicts two Norwegian scholars, the runologist Aslak Liestøl and the archaeologist Erling Johansen, who had assumed that two stonecutters worked on the stone and made mistakes in dressing it, with damage from weather, wind and fire added. The article counters that such an undertaking required careful planning, from the choice of stone to the inscription and the religious motifs. It also suggests that the craftsmen were chosen for their skill in German ornament and Danish runic work; the sentence is cut off in the fetch I had, so I report it with reservation. The statements on authorship are inconsistent: Erik Moltke is named, while the metadata list Barbara Bluestone.
What follows? First, by 1979 there was a scholarly dispute about whether the stone was made by one hand or two. Second, as far as the abstract shows, the article argues from plausibility and planning logic rather than from measurements. Third, the idea of a team of specialists, with separate responsibility for image and script, has been in the air ever since without being demonstrated.
The most important recent contribution came from Lisbeth M. Imer, Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt and Henrik Zedig in “A lady of leadership: 3D-scanning of runestones in search of Queen Thyra and the Jelling Dynasty”, published in 2023 in Antiquity (vol. 97, issue 395, pp. 1262–1278). I saw the summary of the Cambridge Core page through a fetch tool, not the full text.
The team examined seven runestones from southern Jutland: Jelling 1 and 2, Bække 1 and 2, Læborg, Horne and Randbøl. In all, 129 runes were sampled, between 8 and 38 per stone. The grooves were scanned in three dimensions and measured: groove angle, ideal depth, an index of cutting rhythm and the spacing of individual strike points. Comparisons followed with stones by known carvers, among them eleventh-century Swedish stones by Åsmund Kåresson, together with spelling, language and typology of the inscriptions. The result: the runes of Jelling 2 and Læborg cluster together, and the authors attribute both to the carver Ravnunge-Tue. The name comes from a stone; according to skjalden.com (a blog, hence a secondary source) the Læborg stone carries a signature of this man in which he calls Thyra his queen. I know the wording only by that route.
The study states plainly what it cannot do. The authors write that on the basis of the 3D scans one cannot prove that both stones were carved by the same hand, and they consider that the groups may be “analytical groups” rather than individual carvers. Jelling 1, Gorm’s small stone, is too weathered for firm conclusions. The pairing of Læborg and Jelling 2 also rests not on groove data alone but on typology and spelling. And Thyra’s name is spelled differently on the two stones (according to the fetch, Læborg “þurui”, Jelling 2 “þąurui”), which can point to different hands or to one writer who varies.
The method comes out of Swedish runestone research. A rune is made by working a groove out of the surface; angle, depth and the spacing of single strike points leave traces that can be measured. The assumption behind it is that every practised craftsman works with a technique of his own that recurs. That is plausible but not unproblematic. The authors themselves list limitations: weathering alters the depth and shape of a groove, beginners work less evenly and are harder to tell apart, and the rock is crystalline in every case but not identical.
There is also a basic limit: a cluster of measurements is not a person. It shows similarity in technique and cutting rhythm, which can come from one carver, from two apprentices of the same master or from two men using the same tool. Anyone who reads “Ravnunge-Tue made Jelling 2” would do better to understand “the runes of Jelling 2 resemble those of Læborg in measurements and spelling”.
The attribution did not go unchallenged. The blog skjalden.com reproduces voices from interviews, which I know only through that page and therefore pass on only as “according to”. There, the runologist Michael Lerche Nielsen finds the attribution unlikely and points to deviant rune forms. The archaeologist Søren Sindbæk considers the burden of proof not yet met. Henrik Williams notes that the scans cannot establish a shared hand and that the 3D method has not been independently verified. Imer herself, again according to that account, regards it as almost certain that Ravnunge-Tue carved only two of the seven stones examined; two stones that mention his name were not by him.
The last point is a useful lesson in source criticism. A name on a stone does not automatically mean that the named person cut it. According to the blog, Bække 1 names Ravnunge-Tue, Fundin and Gnyple as those who made “Thyra’s mound”; that describes a working party or a commission, not necessarily the hand on the rune. Here too, without the stone or the primary publication in front of me, I can relay the wording but not check it.
The 2023 study concentrates on runes. Whether the pictures come from the same person stays open; according to skjalden.com, Else Roesdahl and Søren Sindbæk, among others, regard the author of the ornament as an unsolved question. That is remarkable, because the picture is what makes the stone famous. The rune text follows a fixed formula and a less ambitious carver could have set it. The Christ figure, woven into bands and tendrils, is a venture in design.
Stylistically the literature usually assigns beast and tendrils to the Mammen style, a late Viking-Age animal style with sturdy, rounded animal bodies and leafy tendrils. It is named after a grave find at Mammen in Jutland (more in our overview of Viking-Age art styles). A caveat: in the culture-agency brochure I read, the style name does not occur for this stone, and I did not verify the classification myself. It is widespread, but here it should be taken as the literature’s placement, not a measured result. For the forms themselves, see our guide to drawing Nordic animal styles.
For the question of the master this matters: a style name tells us how something looks, not who made it. That a design is in Mammen style suggests its author mastered that vocabulary of forms. It says nothing about origin, training or name.
Today the Jelling stone is grey with reddish areas. It was meant to look otherwise. The culture-agency brochure says the stone was “surely painted in strong colours”; it does not say which colours have been found on this stone. According to the English Wikipedia, citing a Danish teaching portal (EMU), small paint remains survive, and on their basis a plaster cast of 1955 at the Danish Church in London was painted in bright colours. I did not check that at the primary source. That runestones were colourful is also stated in the Antiquity study in general terms, without analysing the paint of these stones. A pigment study of the Jelling stone that I could consult is not among my sources. For the wider topic see our article on the colours of the Viking Age.
For the question of authorship it follows that painting may have been a stage of its own, carried out perhaps by someone other than the carver. That is a hypothesis; there is no proof. Nor did I find an answer to whether the surviving remains still date from Harald’s day or from a later repainting.
If the name is missing, the setting remains to be asked about. Three scenarios suggest themselves, and none can be decided from the sources I read.
First, a craftsman in the king’s circle. The stone was set up at Jelling, a place where Harald evidently had large building projects carried out (see Jelling). The tool-mark analysis links Jelling 2 to a stone at Læborg, some 30 kilometres away (according to skjalden.com), in the same region. That suits a regional craftsman but does not rule out a specialist from elsewhere.
Second, a team of specialists. If the design was as unusual in style and structure as the culture agency and lex.dk say, a draughtsman may have fixed the programme and a carver executed it. The Kuml paper of 1979, as far as I could see, speaks of craftsmen with different skills. That too is an interpretation, not a finding.
Third, a foreigner. The culture agency names the pressure of Otto the Great as political background and reads the inscription as a possible answer to the southern neighbour, so that an attack could not be justified as a crusade against pagans. Whoever concludes from this that the design came from the Ottonian realm goes beyond the source. Whether a foreign draughtsman or merely foreign models were involved is unknown. More on the relationship with the empire in the article on Harald Bluetooth; for conversion in general see Christianisation of the Germanic peoples.
No documented answer exists here either, only reasonable considerations. The stone is a declaration of the king’s will. In the first person of the text it is Harald who speaks, not the craftsman; a line such as “Tue carved” would have turned the message into a joint work. Against this, the Læborg stone, according to the account, does name a carver, and Bække 1 seems to name craftsmen. So the difference lies not in a custom of never writing craftsmen’s names in that time and region, but in their absence on this one stone. Whether the inscription stayed anonymous on purpose, whether there was no room or whether naming the master on royal stones was never usual cannot be decided.
Sweden shows how different it can be: there signing is common in the eleventh century, and the Antiquity authors use stones by Åsmund Kåresson as comparison. How many carvers actually signed I cannot quantify from my sources. For tenth-century Denmark the record is thinner, and the great Jelling stone is a special case.
Anyone setting runes after the model of the stone can take over the layout: Younger Futhark, word dividers, horizontal lines. A “hand of the Jelling master” cannot be imitated, because nobody knows whose hand it was. In our workshop we take such originals as models without inventing an author for them.
Who made the great Jelling stone? We do not know. The inscription names Harald Bluetooth as patron. For the runes there has been a hypothesis since 2023 that the carver Ravnunge-Tue cut them, who is also said to have signed the Læborg stone; the authors themselves concede this cannot be proved.
Is Ravnunge-Tue securely attested? As a name on a stone, yes; as the author of the Jelling runes, no. The attribution rests on 3D scans, typology and spelling, and according to the blog account it was criticised by several specialists.
Did Harald design the stone himself? That cannot be shown. The inscription presents him as patron. Who supplied the design, a cleric, a court craftsman or a specialist, is unknown.
Was the Jelling stone painted, and who painted it? That it was painted is regarded as certain; the culture agency writes of strong colours. Who applied the paint is not recorded.
Why is there no artist’s name on the stone? That is unresolved. It may be that the statement was meant to belong to the king alone. All that is attested is that the name is missing, while other stones of the region name craftsmen.
The Jelling stones · Harald Bluetooth · Gorm the Old · Viking-age art styles · The Rök Stone.
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