Circumstantial Thegns and the Runic Studies
Channel: Denis Sukhino-Khomenko
Date: 2019-11-20

This is my presentation from the 13th Runic Council, "Runes in Western Sweden", held at the University of Gothenburg on October 11th, 2019.

Across modern Denmark (province of Jutland, islands of Funen, Lolland, and Bornholm) and Sweden (provinces of Väster- and Östergötland, Småland, Skåne, and Södermanland) are scattered half a hundred of runic commemorations of certain thegns (ON þegn). The personal designation þegn has hitherto been translated both as a high-ranking officer in the king’s retinue and as a landholding yeoman. In the absence of a satisfactory context, when interpreting those inscriptions scholars had to largely rely on the external evidence, such as contemporary circulation of the same lexeme in Old English, the skaldic verse, and later Old Norse literary and legal prose.
The current contribution to the heldagsrunråd avoids bringing forward new explanations of who or what the runic thegns were, as this shall be an integral part of the author’s future PhD thesis, but instead aims at raising a number of more fundamental questions surrounding the relevant corpus. These include but are not limited to:
1. Are the previous datings of the rune stones in question (very often established in the first half of the 20th century but for the Swedish corpus improved by Anne Sofie Gräslund’s stylistic datings) still valid?
2. Are there contextual or linguistic features in the þegn-stones corpus which can reinforce these datings?
3. What can be deduced from the surrounding runic context of the individual þegn-inscription, such as the names of the rune-carvers, family members, and other textual content, artistic features etc., in the modern research?
4. Finally, are there any caveats in quoting the Samnordisk runtextdatabas on these inscriptions?
In my talk, I should like to point out some peculiarities and puzzles I have found as a non-runic scholar, but I hope heldagsrunråd’s contribution can help me improve this section in my PhD thesis, scheduled to be defended here in Göteborg in autumn 2021. My presentation will be in English but the dissussion may also be in Danish or Swedish.