page_title: Sæbø sword
section_title: Inscription
hierarchical_section_title: Sæbø sword / Inscription
caption_attribution_description: Remnants of an inscription in silver inlay on the blade of the 8th-century Sæbø sword (Bergen Museum, 2004 photograph).
context_page_description: The Sæbø sword is an early 9th-century Viking sword, found in a barrow at Sæbø, Vikøyri, in Norway's Sogn region in 1825. It is now held at the Bergen Museum in Bergen, Norway.
  The sword has an inscription on its blade, which has been identified as a runic inscription incorporating a swastika symbol by Stephens. The blade is poorly preserved, and the inscription barely legible, but if Stephens' interpretation is correct, the sword would be a unique example of a Viking-era sword with a runic blade inscription.
context_section_description: The sword was described in 1867 by George Stephens, an English archaeologist and philologist who specialised in the runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, in his book Handbook of the Old-Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England.  In this work he showed a drawing of the sword with a very clear inscription comprising five runes or rune-like letters with a swastika symbol in the middle.  According to Stephens the inscription reads oh卍muþ from right to left.  He interpreted the swastika as being used in rebus-writing to represent the syllable þur for the god Thor, and thus expanded the reading to oh Þurmuþ meaning "Owns [me], Thurmuth".  This reading was inspired by the idea that the swastika was used as a symbol of Thor (more precisely, of Thor's hammer) in Viking Age Norse paganism.  It was the subject of scholarly discussion at the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archæology at Budapest in 1876, where the prevalent opinion was that the swastika stood for "blessing" or "good luck".
  In 1889, in a review of a book by A. L. Lorange, Stephens noted that the sword had been treated with acid whilst at the Danish Museum, with the result that the sword and its inscription were severely damaged, and consequently the inscription shown in a colour plate in Lorange's book was undecipherable.
caption: Remnants of the inscription as on display at Bergen Museum
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