Rökstenen som visdomsdikt

This article goes through the different interpretations of the Rök runestone that have been proposed during the last 120 years and presents new contributions to the so-called standard interpretation. It is proposed that the function of the Rök runestone was to give the death-doomed son answers to certain questions about the Einherjar and Ragnarök that he supposedly would be asked upon his entrance into Valhǫll. The motif and the questions are similar to those of Vafþrúðnismál, Alvíssmál and Gylfaginning. The Rök runestone should hence be seen as wisdom poetry, as defined by de Vries (1934) and Schorn (2017). Later interpretations that particularly deviate from the one proposed (Ralph 2007, 2021, Holmberg et al. 2020, Williams 2021) are scrutinized and partly argued against. I do not agree that the runestone deals with the sun and its demise but maintain that it i.a. contains a drapa over the mythological hero Dietrich/Þjóðrekr/Þiðrekr of Bern. A completely new interpretation is offered for question 12, which is read as hværʀ hæstʀ sē kunnaʀi ’t vēttvąngi æn kunungaʀ tvæiʀtigiʀ svāð ą̄ liggia ’Which horse is more famous on the battlefield than twenty kings that lie on it?’ The answer must be Sleipnir, the horse that Ōðinn rides on when he gathers the Einherjar on the battlefield. By using 3D-scans of the runestone, the last rune on line 23 is read as u (in agreement with von Friesen 1920) instead of l. With shift cipher, it yields the word niþʀ niðʀ ’descendant’. Moreover, the last rune on the top side of the stone is read as s instead of i, which yields the form vīavars ’of the temple warden’, which in agreement with Vǫluspá and Hymniskviða is interpreted as a heiti for ÞōrR. In partial agreement with Ralph (2007, 2021) lines 26–27 are interpreted as Ōl ne ryðr sifi Vīavars ’The troll woman never clears away the relative of the temple warden’. The troll woman is interpreted as a heiti for the axe, as described in Skáldskaparmál 61 and ’the relative of the temple warden’ as a kenning for Þōrs son, named in the previous question. The meaning is that Þōrs son will never die on the battlefield, which is explained by Vafþrúðnismál 51, which says that Þórs sons will survive Ragnarök. Thus, the whole ciphered section gets a coherent interpretation, as opposed to previous proposals.