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This mostly concerns the American runestones, such as the Kensington runestone or the Oklahoma runestones. Especially since the late 20th century, runestones in the style of the Viking Age were also made without pretense of authenticity, either as independent works of art or as replicas as museum exhibits or tourist attractions. [4]
A runestone is typically a raised stone with a runic inscription, but the term can also be applied to inscriptions on boulders and on bedrock. The tradition of erecting runestones as a memorial to dead men began in the 4th century and lasted into the 12th century, but the majority of the extant runestones date from the late Viking Age.
Modern runestones (as imitations or forgeries of Viking Age runestones) began to be produced in the 19th century Viking Revival. The Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base ( Samnordisk runtextdatabas ) is a project involving the creation and maintenance of a database of runestones in the Rundata database.
The oldest known runestones date to the early 5th century (Einang stone, Kylver Stone), although the Svingerud Runestone, discovered in 2021, is dated even earlier. The longest known inscription in the Elder Futhark, and one of the youngest, consists of some 200 characters and is found on the early 8th-century Eggjum stone , and may even ...
Some details in ancient runestones that indicate a carver’s individual style are visible to a trained expert’s eye, such as the language or the basic shape of the runes. Other details are ...
The early runestones were simple in design, but towards the end of the runestone era they became increasingly complex and made by travelling runemasters such as Öpir and Visäte. A categorization of the styles was developed by Anne-Sophie Gräslund in the 1990s. [1] Her systematization is considered to have been a break-through and is today a ...
The physicist Anders Celsius (1701–1744) further extended the science of runes and traveled around Sweden to examine the bautastenar (megaliths, today termed runestones). Another early treatise is the 1732 Runologia by Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík .
In the early modern period and modern history, related folklore and superstition is recorded in the form of the Icelandic magical staves. In the early 20th century, Germanic mysticism coined new forms of "runic magic", some of which were continued or developed further by contemporary adherents of Germanic Neopaganism.