This is probably one of the most personal texts I’ve written about history, but sometimes it comes close. So, this time, I allowed myself some emotions in this blog.

It was Friday the 2nd of July in the summer of 2021, and we at least remember it as one of the hottest days of the summer.

We had just been to my grandmother’s grave, for me, the first time in many years and for my son, the first time ever. There, she rests with her son Harry, the uncle neither I nor my sisters ever met, simply because Harry, born in 1930, did not live to be older than eight.
After we visited the grave, we planned to visit the area’s most famous rune stone, and we walked and walked. The walk felt long partly because we first walked a couple of kilometres in the wrong direction and suddenly found ourselves in an elderly woman’s garden, asking for the Nasta Stone. We were told to turn around and walk through Närke’s agricultural landscape, which has stayed almost the same throughout the centuries.

The lands cultivated today have often been cultivated for a very long time. We sat under an oak tree for a while, and each drank a soft drink. How long has that oak been there? Not as long as the area is old, but at least a couple of hundred years.

Before we arrived, I knew nothing about the text on the Nasta stone. I did not know that it was erected by the mother Tored over Lydbjörn, her capable son.
The fact that he was adequate should not be interpreted as meaning that he had to do for lack of better. The expression certainly means that Lydbjörn was everything a mother could wish for: hardworking and helpful. Reliable, probably. A good son.
It was something of an emotional… shock? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I was extremely touched. There we had walked from the place where my grandmother rests with her son, whom I know from her diaries she worried about while he was ill and mourned deeply when he finally died.
My son and I wandered through an ancient cultural landscape from one woman and her son only to come ”face to face” with another woman and her son, who lived almost a thousand years before my grandmother, Harry, me and my son. I think I cried a little when I read the carving.

On many runestones, siblings are mentioned, and they are also involved in raising the stone over their brother or sister.
Often, you can read on the stones that someone raised a stone over X, G’s mother and daughter of Ö. Or that a father, his wife and the dead man’s siblings raised the stone.
But on the Nasta Stone, Tored raised the stone over his son.

Was Tored a widow when Lydbjörn died? Was he her only child? Half of all children died before the age of ten during the so-called Viking Age, and it has been speculated that ancient people, against that knowledge, adopted a distant relationship with their children and treated them as miniature adults. However, there is nothing in the sources to indicate this; even if they early on were taught to do gender-specific chores, they were treated as children.

Archaeological finds contain Viking Age toys, and only a couple of hundred years later, during ”saint investigations”, there are testimonies of how parents prayed intensely to those they felt could help to save their children’s lives when they were sick or injured. History may be ”another country”, and people may have done things differently there, but there is nothing to suggest that the love for a child you carried and raised was different a thousand years ago than today.

So Tured lost his son. Was he a child? There is nothing else to go on besides that he was ”adequate”. A good son is a good son. There are no references to him having died due to a conflict; he travelled neither east nor west, which is reported on some other stones. Some say that someone’s son died because he travelled to Särkland (the region around the Caspian Sea), like those who took part in the Ingvar raids. Lydbjörn is just dead.
And Tured is devastated enough to raise a stone over him.
The stone is nearly a thousand years old, erected during the last century of the so-called Viking Age. In southern Sweden, with the exception of pockets in Svealand, Christianity had taken over. In Mälardalen, which belongs to Svealand, a number of stones contain a concluding hope that God will preserve the soul for whom the stone is erected or an appeal that the passerby should say a prayer over the soul for the same one.
This is missing on the Nasta stone, and we know that it would take until the 1130s before Svealand could be considered ”fully” Christianized. The loop that decorates the stone also lacks the Christian cross found on many of the 11th-century runestones, and its motif has been compared to the Jelling Stone in Denmark.
As a result, the Nasta stone has been described as one of Närke’s by far most beautiful by the rune researcher and antiquarian Sven B.F. Jansson, and this despite the stone’s runes being worn.

One more thing distinguishes the Nasta Stone from other rune stones: the name Lydbjörn. It occurs only on another stone in Sweden, the Skarpåker stone in Södermanland (Sö 154).
There is information that it was used as a paving stone for a period, and when Sweden’s first antiquarian, Johannes Bureus, first described it in the first part of the 17th century, he said that it was lying in a pile of other stones.
In 1673, King Charles IX’s Eriksgata was to pass through the kingdom. As a preparation, the antiquarian Johan Haroph raised the stone again because the majesty would pass this particular road through the landscape. On this occasion, a drawing was also made of the stone.

At that time, the stone stood, as it probably did from the beginning, on the south side of the road, which suggests that the route is ancient. In 1952, the stone, which had once again begun to tilt and threatened to fall over, was moved to a place about six meters north of the highway.
Hardorph says that then, in the 17th century, he heard stories about how people in the village sacrificed, among other things, buttons to the stone in the hope of being cured of various ailments. This returns in the 18th century when the vicars G.J. Herdman and G. Kjellin write about people in ”ancient times” sacrificing buttons at the stone to prevent crop failure and famine.

In the 19th century, barely 200 years after Johan Hardorph had the stone erected, it began to tilt again, and in 1863, it once again lay down. Already in the 1840s, a farmer in the area wanted to improve the stone’s runes and, in the process, created marks in the runic loop that were not runes at all.
Most runestones are also raised by the upper class. Carving the runes into a stone took time, and whoever did it would be paid. There could also be a problem finding a stone suitable for becoming an erected runestone. Those who raised runestones had resources, as confirmed by the number of runestones raised by Estrid and her granddaughter Jarlabanke in today’s Vallentuna in Stockholm.

So who was Turid in Viking Age Rinkaby in Närke? We will probably never know.

But the region has always been fertile, and becoming a prosperous farmer in the 11th century was maybe not difficult. In the immediate area, seven different burial fields from the Iron Age have been identified.

It’s also known, as a result of an archaeological inventory in 2022, that Rinkaby is also the site of a settlement during the Roman Iron Age.

Just a few kilometres away, in Glanshammar, traces of a Viking-era royal farm have been identified, and in Hassle, also in Glanshammar, finds from 600 BCE have been found, where the find is considered a sacrifice in a pool of water, consisting of three Halstatt model swords, until the 15th century when it was more about what people lost while farming the land, than actual deposits.

Källor:
Sveriges Runinskrifter. Band 14:1: Närkes runinskrifter – Sven B.F. Jansson
Nasta. Runstenar i Sverige – Riksantikvarieämbetet

Images:
Rinkaby church – blog owner
Nasta stone 1 – Magnus Källström/Riksantikvarieämbetet
Duck – Christer Åhlin/Statens Historiska Museer
Nasta stone 2 – Pål-Nils Nilsson/Statens Historiska Museer
Hassle treasure – Statens Historiska Museer