Around 2800 BC, farmers on Orkney raised a mound over a chamber built of massive stone slabs. Some four thousand years later, Norsemen broke in through the roof and scratched names, treasure rumours, boasts and remarks about women into the walls. Maeshowe is therefore two things at once: one of the finest Neolithic tombs in Europe and the largest collection of runic inscriptions in a single place outside Scandinavia. This article explains the building and the midwinter sunlight, reads the inscriptions according to Michael P. Barnes's edition, checks the episode in Orkneyinga saga, and keeps what is written on the wall apart from what was read into it later.
Between Stromness and Kirkwall on Mainland, the largest of the Orkney islands, a round, grassy mound rises inside a broad ditch. It is about 35 metres across and roughly 7 metres high. Inside lies a chambered tomb: a stone passage leads into a built chamber with earth heaped over it. Archaeologists name a whole type of tomb after it, the Maeshowe type, with a central chamber and small side cells.
Since 1999 Maeshowe has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Heart of Neolithic Orkney”, together with the Standing Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the village of Skara Brae. Historic Environment Scotland, the state heritage body, calls it the finest Neolithic building surviving in north-west Europe.
Maeshowe is also famous for its runes. They were not carved by the builders, who had no writing, but in the 12th century, when Orkney was ruled by Norse earls. How that island lordship came about is told in the article on the Earls of Orkney.
The entrance passage is about ten metres long and so low that adults have to stoop. Its walls are largely made of single sandstone slabs weighing up to three tonnes. At its end opens an almost square chamber about 4.6 metres across. The walls are corbelled: each course of stone projects a little further inwards than the one below, forming a beehive-like vault without mortar. Today the chamber is about 3.8 metres high; the original roof was probably higher. Three side cells open off the walls, each with floor, back wall and ceiling made from a single slab.
The round figure “2800 BC” is an approximation. There is no direct radiocarbon date from the tomb itself; samples came from the ditch and surroundings. Colin Renfrew, who excavated there in the 1970s, placed construction around 3200 to 2900 BC, while more recent accounts usually say “about 2800 BC”. Both mean the turn of the fourth to the third millennium. The builders were farmers whose pottery belongs to the Grooved Ware tradition, vessels decorated with incised grooves.
After some centuries of use the tomb was sealed. Nobody knows exactly who was buried in it. Renfrew's cuttings showed that the bank around the ditch was rebuilt in the 9th century AD. Some archaeologists suspect that Vikings reused the mound for a burial of their own; no such grave has been found. That Scandinavians settled Orkney in the 9th century is, however, well attested, as the article on the Vikings in Scotland and the Isles shows.
The passage faces south-west. In the weeks around the winter solstice the light of the setting sun shines down it and reaches the back wall of the chamber; Historic Environment Scotland speaks of about three weeks either side of the shortest day. The sun sets behind the hills of Hoy, and the beam lines up with the Barnhouse Stone, a single standing stone south-west of the mound.
Whether the builders meant it cannot be proved, because they left nothing in writing. The precision and the parallel with Newgrange in Ireland argue for intent, and most archaeologists assume it. How the low point of the year was later marked in the North is the subject of the article on the solstice.
A link to the Norsemen is often drawn because the saga places their visit at Yule. That is interpretation. The saga mentions no light, only a snowstorm.
The runes reveal when the Norsemen came. Their forms and language fit the mid-12th century; the Rundata database, based on Barnes's edition, dates every Maeshowe inscription that way. The Ness of Brodgar project gives a range of about 1125 to 1175. The visitors did not come through the blocked passage but broke in through the roof.
Two inscriptions name a group. In Barnes's numbering, no. 14 reads Jórsalamenn brutu haug þenna, “Jerusalem-men broke this mound”. No. 24 begins Jórsalafarar brutu Orkhaug, “Jerusalem-farers broke Orkhaugr”. Jerusalem-farers are pilgrims or crusaders. In 1151 Earl Rögnvald Kali Kolsson, founder of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, sailed for Jerusalem with a fleet and returned in 1153. That men from this voyage carved in Maeshowe is the usual reading, and the dating fits. It is not proven: the inscriptions name neither Rögnvald nor a year.
Nor is it certain that all the inscriptions come from one visit. The hands differ, and some texts seem to reply to others. Barnes considered most or all of the carvers to be visitors from outside Orkney.
Orkneyinga saga, the history of the Orkney earls written down in Iceland around 1200, contains a brief scene that can be linked to Maeshowe. Earl Harald Maddadsson, then about twenty, was contending with his kinsman Erlend Haraldsson for the islands. At Yule he crossed to Orkney with four ships and a hundred men, lay two nights off Graemsay and landed at Hamnavoe, today's Stromness. On the thirteenth day of Yule, early in January, the men set off on foot for Firth. Caught in a snowstorm, they sheltered in Orkahaugr, and there two of them went mad. This held the party up so badly that they reached Firth only after nightfall.
That is all the saga says: no runes, no treasure, no break-in. Identifying Orkahaugr with Maeshowe has been standard since the 19th century; Joseph Anderson wrote in 1873 that the Orkahaug “seems to be Maeshow”. Inscription no. 24, which itself names Orkhaug, and the mound's position on Harald's route support it. The exact meaning of the name is not settled; it is usually connected with the name of Orkney.
Erlend was killed on the island of Damsay in December 1154. Many accounts therefore place Harald's Yule journey in the winter of 1153/54; the saga gives no year. That puts the return of the Jerusalem-farers and the night in the mound in the same months. Whether the same men did the carving cannot be said.
The saga does not explain why two men lost their minds. In 2015 Ragnhild Ljosland and Alexandra Sanmark examined how 12th-century people thought about burial mounds: in the sagas, mounds are places of the walking dead and of treasure, and breaking in carries risk. The terse note reads like an echo of such story patterns, not like a medical report.
It depends on how you count. James Farrer numbered 32 inscriptions in his report of 1862. Older inventories, among them Audrey Henshall's survey and a 1937 paper by W. Mackay Mackenzie, list 24 separate inscriptions. The standard edition, Michael P. Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney (Uppsala 1994), has 33 numbers, including bare names and fragments. “About 30” or “more than 30” is therefore right. The differences arise because lines that belong together are counted as one inscription by some and as two by others.
There are also three pictures: an animal described as a dragon or a lion, a walrus and a serpent knot. Most Scandinavian runic inscriptions stand on memorial stones; Maeshowe is a place of spontaneous wall graffiti. The script is the Younger Futhark, the 16-character rune row of the Viking Age and Middle Ages, mostly in its short-twig variant with short side strokes. How the rune rows differ is shown in the Futhark comparison; an overview of the script is given in the article on runes.
At least six inscriptions revolve around treasure. No. 25 claims: Útnorðr er fé folgit mikit, “To the north-west great wealth is hidden.” No. 26: “It was long ago that great wealth was hidden here.” No. 27: “Happy is he who can find the great treasure.” No. 28 names a culprit: Hákon einn bar fé ór haugi þessum, “Hákon alone carried wealth out of this mound.” No. 4 sounds like testimony: “It will be true, what I say, that the wealth was taken away. The wealth was taken away three nights before they broke this mound.” No. 8 is only partly legible and also seems to speak of well-hidden wealth.
Anyone opening an old mound in the 12th century expected grave goods. Apparently nothing was found, and the sentences swing between explanation, assertion and mockery. Ljosland and Sanmark read the group as a little story the visitors wrote on the wall together. That is plausible; different carvers could just as well have hit on the same theme independently. Maeshowe has never yielded a treasure.
Most of the inscriptions are signatures: a name followed by reist, “carved”. No. 5 is the shortest: Vémundr reist, “Vémundr carved”. No. 17 names Óframr, son of Sigurðr, no. 16 Arnfinnr, son of Steinn. No. 2 brags: “Eyjulfr Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up.” No. 22 reports: “Benedikt made this cross.”
No. 19 is often rendered “Hermund Hardaxe carved these runes”. The normalised reading is Hermundr Harð<eksi> reist rúnar. The first part of the nickname, “hard”, is clear; the second stands in angle brackets in the edition, meaning it has not been securely identified as a word. “Hardaxe” is a natural guess, not an established fact.
The most famous signature is no. 20, carved in several parts above a side cell. Rundata gives the normalised text as: Þessar rúnar reist sá maðr, er rúnstr er fyrir vestan haf, með þeiri øxi, er átti Gaukr Trandils sonr fyrir sunnan land.
“These runes were carved by the man who is the most rune-skilled west of the sea, with the axe that Gaukr, Trandill's son, owned in the south of the land.”Maeshowe, inscription no. 20 after Michael P. Barnes (1994); normalised reading from the Rundata database (Or Barnes20); our own translation
“West of the sea” means, from a Norwegian point of view, the islands to the west. “The south of the land” is usually taken to mean Iceland. Gaukr Trandilsson lived in the 10th century at the farm of Stöng in southern Iceland; Njáls saga mentions him, a saga of his own is lost, and he was killed by his foster-brother Ásgrímr. An axe that would by then have been a century and a half to two centuries old? An heirloom is conceivable. More likely the carver alluded to a story his audience knew. Vivian Busch and Jana Krüger have shown that the text follows the rules of skaldic metre, the court poetry of the Norse: the boast is also a small poem. How weapons otherwise carried runes is covered in the article on runes on weapons.
High above the entrance is no. 1, only partly preserved: “That is a viking … then came here underneath.” Whether víkingr means “viking” or is a personal name has been debated. Judith Jesch thinks the common noun more likely, used by a 12th-century person with stories of the old sea-raiders in mind. It does not describe a Viking raid: the carvers were Christians, Benedikt carved a cross, and the Jerusalem-farers had been on pilgrimage.
No. 23 reaches far back: Sá haugr var fyrr hlaðinn heldr Loðbrókar. Synir hennar, þeir váru hvatir, “This mound was built before Loðbrók's. Her sons, they were bold; such were men as they should be.” The reference is apparently to the sons of Ragnar Loðbrók, famous figures of saga.
The pronoun stands out: hennar, “her”. The inscription treats Loðbrók as a woman, whereas the Icelandic stories know Loðbrók (“Hairy-breeches”) as a man's nickname. Why is unclear; a divergent tradition, a misunderstanding or a joke have all been suggested. What is certain is that the name was known on Orkney around 1150 and could serve as a yardstick for a mound's age. Together with Gaukr's axe and the “viking” of no. 1, this shows the visitors had saga material in their heads. Ljosland and Sanmark speak of “mini-narratives”.
No. 21 transliterates as igikærþ ir kynæna in u^ænsta, normalised Ingigerðr er <kynæna> in vænsta. It is usually translated “Ingigerðr is the most beautiful of women”. Vænsta, “the most beautiful”, is clear; the word before it is difficult, so Rundata adds a question mark to the translation. The core remains a compliment to a woman about whom nothing else is known. Why such lines are not love spells is explained in the article Runes for love, harmony and partnership.
No. 9 is near the entrance: “Ingibjôrg, the fair widow. Many a woman has gone stooping in here. A great show-off. Erlingr.” The line about stooping women fits the low passage literally; modern readers often hear a double meaning, but whether it was intended cannot be shown. Who the “great show-off” is remains unclear too.
No. 10, in a side cell, is crude: it names a woman called Þorný and a Helgi who carved, using a verb for sexual intercourse that guidebooks like to tone down. Henrik Williams has pointed out that the verb normally takes a man as its subject; here it is a woman. Boast, insult or joke – we cannot tell.
Finally, no. 24 ends, after the line about the Jerusalem-farers, with Hlíf, matselja jarls, reist: “Hlíf, the earl's housekeeper, carved.” A matselja is a woman who serves out food, a housekeeper or cook. Whether Hlíf carved herself or someone else added her name, and which earl is meant, cannot be settled.
Two inscriptions are written in twig runes, a form of cryptic runes. The rune row is divided into three groups, the ættir. Each rune can then be given by two numbers: the number of its group and its place within it. For twig runes you draw a vertical stave and add as many twigs on the left as the group number and as many on the right as the position. If you know the system, it reads easily; if not, you see a thicket of strokes. The order of the groups was often reversed as well.
W. G. Collingwood noted in 1908 that Magnus Olsen had interpreted the two twig-rune inscriptions as verse. Barnes speaks of a rare display of twig-rune versatility and suspects that visitors imitated the game elsewhere on Orkney. I have not been able to check which numbers the two carry in Barnes's edition; older editions number them differently. A cipher on a wall that hardly anyone saw probably served the same purpose as no. 20: showing that you could. It reveals no magic.
On a buttress on the north-east side of the chamber an animal is incised, according to W. Mackay Mackenzie only about 8 by 7 centimetres. It has a scaly body, an open mouth with something hanging from it, and a tail that seems to pass through its body. James Farrer compared it in 1862 to “one of the great Saurians”. As the “Maeshowe Dragon” it has become an emblem of Orkney; some descriptions call it a lion.
J. Storer Clouston in 1932/33 saw a hybrid modelled on the stylised lion of the period and read the tail through the body as a sword. Mackenzie disagreed in 1937: this was artistic variation, the scales were decoration and the supposed fish in the mouth was the tongue. He placed the beast in the tradition of the Scandinavian “Great Beast” seen on the Jelling stones and the St Paul's runestone in London, named the Heggen weather-vane from Norway as the closest parallel, and dated the carving to the 12th century with Romanesque influence.
In 2016 a team examined several carvings with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), in which a surface is photographed under light from many angles so that the finest cuts show up. The researchers suggested a closer look at the head and mouth, since the creature may be holding something in its jaws. “Dragon” or “lion” is a modern choice; the carving bears no label. More on dragon imagery is found in the article Dragons and serpents in the Norse world.
The English antiquarian and Member of Parliament James Farrer began digging in July 1861 with the landowner's permission. The passage was choked, so he had the chamber broken into from above, much as the Norsemen had done seven centuries earlier. Apart from rubble the chamber was empty; a fragment of a human skull is recorded. The runes were discovered soon after. In 1862 Farrer had a report printed that numbered 32 inscriptions and set out readings by Carl Christian Rafn, Peter Andreas Munch and George Stephens. Munch already linked the Jerusalem-farers with Rögnvald's voyage. Farrer's methods are now regarded as crude; some scratches he dismissed as unimportant are now considered possible Neolithic motifs.
Consolidation work under V. Gordon Childe followed in the 1950s and Renfrew's excavations in the 1970s. Michael P. Barnes published the standard edition of the runes in 1994. In 2015 the Orkney Rune Rede conference in Kirkwall was devoted to the inscriptions, and in 2016 the RTI study followed. As far as I could establish, Maeshowe can only be visited on a guided tour; check details with Historic Environment Scotland before travelling.
How old is Maeshowe? The tomb was built around 2800 BC; Renfrew estimated 3200 to 2900 BC. When the Norsemen arrived it was about four thousand years old.
How many runic inscriptions are there? Between 24 and 33, depending on the count. Barnes's edition (1994) has 33 numbers, including names and fragments.
What do the inscriptions say? Mostly “X carved these runes”, plus treasure rumours, two notes on Jerusalem-farers, remarks about women, the sons of Loðbrók and the boast of the most rune-skilled man west of the sea.
Can you see the solstice light? Yes, in the weeks around 21 December when the sky is clear; Historic Environment Scotland also streams it by webcam.
Is Orkahaugr really Maeshowe? Very probably: inscription no. 24 calls the mound Orkhaug, and the location fits Harald's route. There is no further proof.
The Earls of Orkney · Runes & their meaning · Runes for Love & Bond · The Vikings in Ireland, Scotland & the Isles · Largs 1263.
All History & Finds articles →
The Manimi are one of five names Tacitus uses to describe the Lugian league between the Oder and the Vistula. Some …
Read more →The Marcomanni are the people through whom Rome twice learned how dangerous an organised Germanic confederation could …
Read more →The Marsi were a small Germanic tribe between the Rhine, Ruhr and Lippe, and almost everything we know about them is in …
Read more →