Runes about a Snow-white woman: The Lund Gaming-piece Revisited

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Abstract

A small, well-preserved, wooden runic object was found in a well in the city of Lund in Scania (Skåne) in 2004 and has puzzled researchers ever since. It is presumably a gaming-piece for a board game. The dating of the archaeological layer in which the object was found suggests that it ended in the well between c. 1220 and 1235. The reading of the individual runes is in almost every case certain. The reading order of the lines, the interpretation of the linguistic content and the provenance, however, have caused disagreement among those who have studied the object. The inscription was tentatively discussed in the author’s Ph.D. dissertation from 2007, but many questions remained unsolved. This paper reviews the discussion so far, and offers a more coherent linguistic interpretation. It also suggests a probable provenance for the object.
Translated title of the contributionRuner om en snehvid kvinde: Gensyn med Lund-spillebrik
Original languageEnglish
JournalFuthark International Journal of Runic Studies
Volume3
Pages (from-to)89-104
Number of pages15
ISSN1892-0950
Publication statusPublished - 2013

Keywords

  • Faculty of Humanities

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