Dynastic History|Jelling Runestones — The Claim Harald Cut in Granite

Around 965 a king had a boulder of pink granite set up between two burial mounds at Jelling and had three of its faces carved: a beast tangled with a serpent, a figure of Christ in knotwork, and four lines of runes. The runes say that Haraldr ordered the monument made for Gormr his father and Thyrvé his mother — "that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian."

Every clause of that is the claim of the man who paid for the cutting. Harald Gormsson's hold on Norway was brief and did not outlast him. "Made the Danes Christian" compresses a conversion whose fullest early account comes from the Saxon monk Widukind of Corvey, writing in Harald's own lifetime, who tells it as a contest of miracles staged at court by a priest named Poppo carrying heated iron. Runemaster and annalist were both working for interested parties, and no Danish account from outside the court survives to check either.

What the stone stands in the middle of is the more legible record. The two turf mounds are each about 70 metres across and up to 11 metres high, built of stacked turf laid grass-side down, stripped from pasture somewhere and carried here. Beneath them ran a setting of stones in the shape of a ship, reconstructed by the excavators at about 354 metres, and a timber palisade enclosed the whole complex. Nobody counted that labour, and no one recorded who owed it.

The church beside the stones is medieval, standing where at least three earlier timber churches burned. UNESCO listed the monuments in 1994. Since the early 2010s the two stones have stood in glass-and-bronze cases against Danish weather, with the exhibition centre Kongernes Jelling across the road.

📸 Cover: The large Jelling stone photographed in 2010, before the protective cases were installed, Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons