When one thinks of Vikings, one thinks of England and the North Sea. But the way of the Swedes led east – and the Kälvesten stone is one of the oldest witnesses of it.
When one thinks of Vikings, one pictures longships off the English or Frankish coast, raids on monasteries, the North Sea. But for the Swedes the great road led not west but east – across the Baltic, along the Russian rivers and through endless forests as far as Byzantium and the Caliphate. The Kälvesten stone in Östergötland is one of the oldest witnesses of this eastern movement, and at the same time one of the earliest datable runestones at all.
The stone dates from around 800 – from the very dawn of the Viking Age, before the famous westward expeditions really began. It bears one of the oldest inscriptions in the younger futhark and is thus a linguistic as well as historical link between the Vendel period and the Viking Age proper.
The inscription commemorates a man named Eyvindr, mourned by his mother (or kin). He went to war „in the east" with a leader named Eivísl and fell there. This terse text already says much: around 800, Norse warriors travelled in war-bands upriver into the east, into foreign lands, and did not always return.
„… set this stone in memory of Eyvindr, who fell in the east with Eivísl." — Kälvesten stone (Ög 8), c. 800
The word „east" (austr) is a key term here. It means that wide, half-legendary world beyond the Baltic that the Norse called Austrvegr, the „eastern way" – and later Garðaríki, the „realm of strongholds", the land of the Rus.
From Sweden the Norsemen crossed the Baltic into the river systems of present-day Russia and Ukraine. Over the Volga and Dnieper, with boats they laboriously hauled overland past the rapids, they reached Constantinople – which they called Miklagarðr – and the trading cities of the Caliphate. They exchanged furs, amber, honey, wax and slaves for Arab silver, whose coins reappear in their tens of thousands in Swedish hoards.
Many served as mercenaries and bodyguards – the famous Varangians, from whom the Byzantine emperors formed their guard. Others founded trading places and principalities; the Rus dynasty that later ruled over Kiev arose from this movement. It is one of the great, often overlooked stories of the Viking Age – and the Kälvesten stone stands at its very beginning.
Where exactly Eyvindr’s last voyage led the stone does not say – „east" could mean the Baltic, the Rus or already Byzantium. This openness is no flaw but precisely the appeal: the stone stands at the start of a development whose full scale no one could yet imagine. A grieving person raised a fallen warrior a monument – and thereby held fast, without knowing it, the first verse of a world history.
For us Kälvesten is a favourite example of how much a few runes can tell. They join the wholly personal – grief for a son, a companion – with the wholly vast, the trade routes of half a continent. It is exactly this span that makes rune-stone culture so fascinating, and it is the spirit in which we still bind signs into lasting material today.
Longships · Runes · Hedeby & Trade · Remembrance & Burial.
Kälvesten stone (Ög 8), Rundata. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; on the eastern expansion: Władysław Duczko, Viking Rus.