An ancient marble lion that now sits outside the Arsenal in Venice carries serpent bands filled with runes on its flanks. On the parapet of a gallery in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, someone scratched a Norse man's name. On an island off the mouth of the Dnieper, a small memorial stone for a man called Karl turned up in 1905. These are among the most distant traces that Viking Age Scandinavians left in their own script. They are also a lesson in how far a reading and wishful thinking can drift apart. This article separates what is on the stone, what scholars have supplied, and what the nineteenth century simply made up.
Runes were the script of the Germanic-speaking peoples and remained in use in Scandinavia well into the Middle Ages. In the Viking Age, roughly 800 to 1100, people wrote with the Younger Futhark, a row of only sixteen signs. How it differs from the older row is explained in the Futhark comparison; a general introduction is in the article on runes.
Most Viking Age runic inscriptions stand on memorial stones in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Outside Scandinavia they are rare, for practical reasons. A man who died abroad usually got his memorial at home, where family and neighbours would see it. On the road, people carved in wood, bone or metal if they carved at all, and little of that survives. On the steppe around the Black Sea, suitable stone was scarce as well.
That makes the handful of inscriptions in Venice, Istanbul and on the Black Sea all the more striking. They come from men who travelled south across the Baltic and down the Russian rivers, along the route described in the article on the Varangian route. The runestones in Sweden raised for men who went to "Greece" form the counterpart at home.
The Piraeus Lion is a seated lion of white marble, about three metres tall. It is a work of Greek antiquity; most accounts place it in the fourth century BC, a few suggest an earlier or slightly later date. A precise date cannot be established with certainty. For centuries it stood in the harbour of Piraeus near Athens, and in the Middle Ages it even gave the harbour its Italian name, Porto Leone. Travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe it as a fountain; the hollow throat and the trace of a pipe can still be seen.
The lion owes its journey to Venice to the war between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. The Venetian commander Francesco Morosini took Athens in 1687, the campaign in which the Parthenon was hit. When the Venetians withdrew in 1688, they carried off the lion and other ancient lion figures as booty, which is why sources give either 1687 or 1688. Since then the lion has stood by the gate of the Arsenal, the old Venetian shipyard, as an emblem of Saint Mark, whose symbol is the lion.
The Swedish History Museum in Stockholm owns a full-size plaster cast. It was made in Italy in the 1890s and shipped to Stockholm so that the runes could be studied more easily.
Narrow, winding bands ending in animal heads run across both shoulders and flanks. These are rune serpents, snake or dragon bodies carrying the runes, as on hundreds of memorial stones in Uppland. The bands are the strongest argument that the inscription is genuinely Scandinavian and Viking Age, and they can be dated by style even where the runes are barely legible.
They are hard to read for several reasons. The marble spent nearly a thousand years in the open, by the sea and then in the lagoon, and air pollution keeps attacking it. Impact marks from gunfire, linked to the fighting of 1687 or to later target practice, are visible on the original and the cast. The right side suffered most. According to the most recent study, about four fifths of the runes on the left side are legible, but only about half on the right.
The Swedish diplomat and linguist Johan David Åkerblad recognised the signs as runes towards the end of the eighteenth century.
The first detailed interpretation came in 1856 from the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn, secretary of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries in Copenhagen, in a publication titled "Inscription runique du Pirée". Some accounts give 1854 or 1857; the printed work available as a scan bears the date 1856. On the right side Rafn read a long narrative: Asmund carved these runes together with Asgeir, Thorleif, Thord and Ivar at the bidding of Harald the Tall, although the Greeks forbade it. On the left side he found words such as Romania and Armenia.
That reading shaped the lion's reputation for a long time. "Harald the Tall" suggests Harald Hardrada, who served in the Varangian Guard in the 1030s and early 1040s and later became king of Norway. A prince who crushes a revolt in Athens and has it carved into an ancient lion makes a fine story. It just is not on the stone.
Working from squeezes and drawings, Rafn filled gaps generously and read signs where the surface shows only scratches. Modern scholarship treats his interpretation as a document of its time, not as a reading. Dating adds a further problem: the stylistically youngest inscription on the right side is now placed in the late eleventh century, when Harald had long left Byzantium. He fell in England in 1066. The link with him is therefore considered doubtful.
In the early twentieth century the Swedish runologist Erik Brate took up the lion. His work is usually dated to 1913 or 1914; the sources I was able to read disagree. Brate read far more cautiously than Rafn. He saw memorial texts by men from Sweden and found the name of the Swedes, svear, in the inscription. His reading was long regarded as the best available. He too had to fill many gaps, guided by the fixed formulas of runestones such as "X had this stone raised in memory of Y". Such additions are informed, but they remain additions.
The most thorough study is by the runologist Thorgunn Snædal, who worked for the Swedish National Heritage Board. She travelled to Venice three times and spent about fifteen days in all at the lion, studying the signs in different light. Her results appeared in 2014. The key finding: the lion carries not one inscription but three, made at different times by different people.
The oldest runs across the left foreleg and belly. Its serpent band resembles a runestone from Orkesta in Uppland (U 341), dated to around the 1020s. Snædal reads in it that men in the harbour carved runes in memory of a man whose name is rendered as Haursi or similar and who is called a farmer. He fell, it seems, before he could receive his share. One sentence runs, in her translation: the Swedes did this on the lion. That would be one of the earliest attestations of the word svear and the first occurrence of the word "lion" in a runic inscription.
The second and shortest inscription is on the left hind leg. Normalised it reads drængiaR ríst rúnar, roughly "young warriors carved the runes". The word drengr means a young, brave man, often a retainer. According to Snædal, the rune forms do not reveal with certainty whether the carvers came from Sweden, Norway or Iceland.
The third and youngest inscription is on the right side and chest. It is the most accomplished, a carefully planned band of about a hundred runes with a dragon's head. Snædal compares the loop with the late, interlaced animal style seen on the portal of Urnes stave church and dates the inscription to around 1070 to 1100, possibly later. What this style looks like is shown in the articles on the Urnes portal and on Viking art styles. Names are legible: Åsmund, regarded as the carver, as well as Asgeir or Eskil and probably Torleif. The rest is too damaged for a continuous text.
Rafn's names Asmund, Asgeir and Thorleif reappear in Snædal's reading. He had recognised genuine names and built a story around them that the stone does not support.
The inscriptions name no patron in Constantinople and no campaign. That their authors were Varangians is an inference, though an obvious one. Varangians was the name Byzantines and Eastern Slavs gave to the Scandinavians who came south along the rivers of Eastern Europe. Many of them entered imperial service. Their story, and that of the emperor's guard, is told in the article on Miklagard and the Varangians.
Byzantine forces were often in action in Greece, the Aegean and southern Italy in the eleventh century, and Norse mercenaries waiting in the harbour of Athens fit that picture. Which operation is unknown. Suggestions range from the wars against the Bulgarians around 1018 to the wars against the Normans at the end of the century.
Hagia Sophia, built under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century as the cathedral of Constantinople, surpassed anything travellers from the North had seen. Norse sources call the city Miklagard, the "great city". Its gallery parapets carry graffiti from many centuries, runes among them.
The best-known runic graffito was discovered in 1964 on the parapet of the south gallery and published in 1970 by the Swedish runologist Elisabeth Svärdström. Popular texts often quote "Halfdan carved these runes". That is not what it says. Only the end of a name, -ftan, is securely legible, and it is interpreted as the Norse name Halfdan (Hálfdan). The first signs are almost completely worn away. About fifteen indistinct signs follow. A formula such as "carved these runes" is conceivable but cannot be read.
A second runic graffito is in the north gallery, on the parapet of a niche. Its history is tangled. The Uppsala scholar Folke Högberg noticed it in 1975 and reported it to Stockholm in 1984, but it was not published. The Swedish archaeologist Mats G. Larsson found it independently in 1988 and published it in 1989 in the journal Fornvännen. He read ari: k and took it as the man's name Are followed by the beginning of another word, perhaps "Are made …", the carver having stopped after the k. Högberg and the Norwegian archaeologist Svein Indrelid read the name as Árni instead and see it as a simple name graffito.
Indrelid also recorded five further possible runic graffiti in the building and handed them to the Norwegian runic archive in 1997. As far as I know they remain unpublished.
When the graffiti were made cannot be said with certainty. Larsson himself stresses that date and author remain open. The rune forms fit the Viking Age, and the Varangian Guard was most strongly Scandinavian in the eleventh century. A guardsman scratching his name during a long service is a plausible picture, but a merchant or pilgrim from the North is just as possible.
The small stone from the island of Berezan is a very different case. The island lies off the mouth of the Dnieper and the Southern Bug, on the route that led from the Dnieper out to the open sea and on to Constantinople. In his treatise on the administration of the empire, written in the mid-tenth century, Emperor Constantine VII describes the Rus resting on the island of Saint Aitherios on their way south. That island is usually identified with Berezan.
The stone was found in 1905 by the Odessa professor Ernst von Stern while excavating a burial mound that dates back to the sixth century BC and was later reused for many further burials. It lay in a later grave and was probably not in its original position. It is small, about 48 centimetres wide and 47 centimetres high, and is now in the museum in Odesa. Its Rundata signum is X UaFv1914;47, after its first publication in Fornvännen in 1914.
Unlike the lion, the inscription is fully preserved. Transliterated it reads krani : kerþi : (h)alf : þisi : iftir : kal : fi:laka : si(n), normalised Grani gærði hvalf þessi æftiʀ Karl, felaga sinn: "Grani made this vault in memory of Karl, his partner." The word hvalf means a vault, probably a built or vaulted grave structure. It occurs almost only on Gotland, which is why Grani and Karl are thought to have been Gotlanders. A félagi is someone who enters into a félag, a partnership with shared stakes, often in trade. Whether the two were merchants or members of a war band is judged differently.
The stone is usually placed in the late Viking Age, unornamented, in a form one would expect around the year 1000 or in the eleventh century. There is no precise date. It is one of the very few runestones known from Eastern Europe at all. How this world between the Baltic and the Black Sea fitted together is explained in the articles on Kievan Rus and the Vikings in the East.
Most evidence for journeys to Byzantium stands not abroad but in Sweden. Around thirty runestones, the so-called Greece runestones, name men who had gone to "Greece", as the North called the Byzantine Empire. Most are in Uppland, several in Södermanland, a few in Östergötland. Many mourn the dead: sons, brothers, fathers who died "among the Greeks" or "in Greece".
Perhaps the most impressive is the boulder at Ed in Uppland, U 112, a huge glacial erratic beside an old church path. It has been known since Johannes Bureus's first runological journey in 1594 and carries two inscriptions in the Urnes style from the mid-eleventh century. On one side a man named Ragnvald commemorates his mother; on the other he speaks of himself. I made the following translation from the transliteration as given in Rundata.
"Ragnvald had the runes carved in memory of Fastvi, his mother, Onæm's daughter, who died at Ed. May God help her soul. – Ragnvald had the runes carved. He was in Greece, was leader of the retinue."Runic inscription U 112, Ed (Uppland), sides A and B, mid-11th century; own translation from the Rundata transliteration: rahnualtr lit rista runar efʀ fastui moþur sina onems totʀ to aiþi kuþ hialbi ant hena / runa rista lit rahnualtr huar a griklanti uas lis forunki
The phrase liðs forungi, "leader of the retinue", is usually taken to mean that Ragnvald commanded a unit of the Varangian Guard. The stone does not say so in as many words; it says that Ragnvald was in Greece and led a lið there, a crew or troop. The link with the Guard is natural but remains an interpretation. Ragnvald raises a monument to himself in his own lifetime, and the prayer for his mother shows him to be a Christian.
The Ingvar stones form a group of their own, about two dozen runestones mainly in Södermanland and Uppland. They commemorate men who went east with a leader named Ingvar, to Serkland as the stones say, the land of the Saracens, probably the region around the Caspian Sea. Icelandic annals place Ingvar's death in 1041. Almost none of those named came back. More on this is in the article on the Ingvar runestones.
According to Byzantine tradition, Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent several thousand warriors to Emperor Basil II in 988. From them grew a bodyguard whose core in the eleventh century was Scandinavian; later many Anglo-Saxons joined. Its best-known member, Harald Hardrada, arrived around 1034 and stayed about a decade.
The men who wrote at Piraeus, in Hagia Sophia or at the mouth of the Dnieper probably belonged to this milieu of mercenaries, traders and retainers. How far Norse warriors also ranged across the Mediterranean is the subject of the article on Vikings in the Mediterranean.
The three sites show three levels of certainty. The Berezan stone is complete and clearly legible; the only debate concerns the meaning of individual words. The Hagia Sophia graffiti yield one or two names, no more. The Piraeus Lion lies in between: some words and names are secure, whole sentences arise only through reconstruction.
Anyone wanting to test a reading can ask a few simple questions. Does it distinguish secure from supplied signs? Runologists put uncertain readings in brackets and mark gaps. Does the reading come from examination of the object in changing light, or from old drawings? Does the content match the formulaic language of runestones, or does it tell a story found on no other runestone? Rafn's lion, with its revolt, punitive expedition and Greek prohibition, fails the last test. How scholarship deals with such questions is explained in the article on runes and scholarship.
Imagination is not the same as forgery: Rafn believed what he read. With the Kensington Runestone in Minnesota the stone itself is in question; on the Piraeus Lion the runes are undisputedly genuine, and only what they say is in dispute.
A well-preserved counterexample of runic graffiti lies in Orkney: in the chambered tomb of Maeshowe, visitors in the twelfth century left dozens of inscriptions, presented in the article on the Maeshowe runes.
Can you still see the runes on the Piraeus Lion today? Yes, but only with effort. The lion stands openly accessible outside the Arsenal in Venice. The serpent bands are visible in raking light, individual runes only in places. The cast in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm is easier to study.
How old are the runes on the lion? They date from the eleventh century. According to Snædal, the oldest inscription was made around the 1020s and the youngest roughly between 1070 and 1100.
Where exactly are the runes in Hagia Sophia? On the marble parapets of the upper galleries: the Halfdan graffito in the south gallery, the Are or Árni graffito in the north gallery by a niche.
What is the Berezan stone? A small runestone from the island of Berezan off the mouth of the Dnieper, found in 1905. Grani raised it for his partner Karl. It is now in the museum in Odesa.
What does "Greece" mean on runestones? It means the Byzantine Empire with its capital Constantinople, not just modern Greece. Anyone who went "to Greece" usually entered imperial service or traded within the empire.
Related articles: Miklagard and the Varangian Guard, The Varangian route, Harald Hardrada, The Ingvar runestones, Vikings in the Mediterranean, Kievan Rus, Viking art styles, Elder and Younger Futhark compared, The runes of Maeshowe, Runes: script, history, meaning.
Miklagard and the Varangians · The Varangian route · The Ingvar runestones · Harald Hardrada · The runes of Maeshowe.
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