Work Songs and Whetstones: From Sutton Hoo to Straum

Introduction

The late Elmer Antonsen (1929–2008) was one of the few runic scholars ever to attempt to explain his interpretational method formally, and is most important (and influential) for the overtly neo-Bloomfieldian approach that he brought to his analyses of the older runic corpus. An expert in historical Germanic phonology, Antonsen had a manner of assessing early Nordic texts that may be epitomized in his treatment of the inscription on a whetstone from Straum i Hitra, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway, which is usually referred to in the runological literature by the Bokmål spelling Strøm. The Straum inscription can be dated only broadly to between the second and seventh centuries AD, and is one of the few early runic finds to which Antonsen devoted an entire paper (i.e., Antonsen 1975b; cf. Antonsen 1975a, no. 45; 1986, 335–6; 2002, 155–61). Antonsen interpreted the early runic text on the Straum whetstone, however, without considering the broader archaeological and epigraphic typology of the piece or the metaphorical association of whetstones with authority (later delineated by Stephen Mitchell in Scandinavian Studies in 1985). These suggest that the Straum inscription represents a martial expression, not the record of an agricultural work song that it has long been taken to be.

Methodology

As a historical phonologist, Antonsen’s approach to runological decipherment understandably prioritized structural linguistic analysis. Yet Antonsen also attempted to establish a typology of early runic inscriptions and to use that in interpretations of texts with contested meanings (Antonsen 1980; 2002, 207–36). He separated the early inscriptions into several standard categories, including maker’s inscriptions, commemorative texts, and magico-religious epigraphs. These three categories are widespread in ancient epigraphy, particularly in early Latin and Greek contexts. But Antonsen also argued for the existence of further inscriptional types peculiar to the early runic tradition. Rather than relying on a more broadly established comparative typology, Antonsen proposed the existence of categories of early runic texts that appear otherwise unparalleled.

The reason that early epigraphic texts tend to fall into standard types may be explained by Eric Havelock’s notion of craft literacy (1963, 39). When alphabetism was first adopted in ancient societies, its use tended to be restricted to certain specialist employments and craftsmen. Maker’s inscriptions typically appear on objects such as weapons and jewelry as indications that the associated object was made by a craftsman proud enough of its quality to put his name to it, while commemorative epigraphs are usually commissioned by relatives of the deceased and erected by specialist stonemasons. Magico-religious texts are similarly created by specialists of less workaday occupational types. The restriction of inscriptions to these three basic categories is common not just to Old Latin and archaic Greek tradition, but also to Etruscan, archaic italic, and archaic Celtic or Lepontic epigraphy.

Yet there are some early runic texts that have been traditionally argued to fall outside this basic threefold categorization. One of these is the inscription on the whetstone from Straum, which has been argued, since it was first published in 1908, to represent a kind of text quite unlike anything found elsewhere in runic or indeed early European epigraphic experience (Olsen 1908). A typological perspective on the Straum text, however, suggests that this traditional interpretation is likely to be wrong. The default assumption when an early runic text is found should be that it fits into one of the three basic types established for early epigraphy more generally. Only if it is quite clear that it is an exceptional inscription should we allow it to stand outside this basic threefold typology. Moreover, if there are two equally possible explanations and one of these fits into one of the three standard types and the other does not, then the interpretation that suggests that the text is exceptional should be regarded as a form of special pleading and, hence, be discounted.

As Antonsen recognized, typological analysis is one of the best ways of controlling the epigraphic aspect of historical imagination (cf. Collingwood 1946, 232–49). Early runic studies has been especially prone...