On what a stone has to say

When I was my son’s age, I discovered fantasy literature in the form of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien particularly captured my imagination with the utterly realistic world he created. The major contributing factor of this realism of course was Tolkien’s facility with language. Tolkien’s own love of languages, etymology, and literature infected me and played perhaps too great a role in my decision to study language–probably because my own love of reading blossomed in the midst of hobbits and elves on the fields and hills of Middle Earth.

Key to the hobbits’ adventures was a dwarvish map written in a runic script. The runes were a secret and magic script that led the way to treasure and dragons and access to the world learning outside the Shire. True to Tolkien’s own personality, each hobbit that leaves his home becomes in his own right a scholar of the land that adopts him, brining back the language, learning, and history of that land.

It was a pleasant surprise then, when I discovered in my courses on the history of the German language, that Tolkien’s dwarvish runes were not original to him, but borrowed from the nordic germanic tribes. For the Norsemen too, runes were possessed of a magic wielded only by the select few. I suppose the magic still holds, even if the secret is widely known: if you put something into writing, you call it into being, and therefore you gain power over it as you make it present again – re-presenting it – in the text. The Norse understood this in a way that we have forgotten.

When I went to Sweden this summer I hoped I would find some of these runes. They were often engraved into standing stones–like Stonehenge in England. The stones themselves had meaning both in the way they were arranged and in the act of erecting them. They stand, like the Norse ideal of manhood. Upright. Proud. Immovable. Strong. Timeless. They are Standhaft. When I see them, my own Viking heritage stirs. They represent all the things we cannot always be, but wish we were, and I wanted to find one for myself.

I had heard of prehistoric Norse cemetery that had been discovered south of Stockholm, and which happened to be within walking distance of my hostel. I set out to find this cemetery on a beautiful June morning; the sun was bright and the air fresh after the rain of the previous day. About a mile down the path I began to see a series of stone circles sticking up out of the forest floor. There were other geometric shapes as well, mostly triangles and quadratic figures. It was a curious experience. The stones themselves are ageless: unshaped by any hand, they seem as old as the earth itself. But at some point someone gathered them together and arranged them, and even this act is removed from me by over a thousand, maybe two thousand years. For all that time they have remained, unmoved, a more constant part of the environment than even the generations of trees that have sprung up and died around them. Their permanence served as a contrast to the transience of the human hands that placed them, and my distance from those people, despite the fact that I was standing on the very place where they must have stood long before. The signposts said they were grave markers, but if there was any significance to the layout of the stones, it remained unclear to me, except that their very placement gave the stones meaning. It set them apart so that they were no longer just stones, but a message–Remember us, even though we are gone, we were here. This was our place. We lived. We worked. We created. We were.

At the time I was only struck by the beauty of their extreme age and their stunning simplicity. I was also mildly disappointed that they lacked any runes–any writing to connect me to them. All these other meanings come to me as I sit and write about them months later, when I realize that they had much to say and indeed were able to say much despite their silence. But at the time I resigned myself to the fact that this was as close as I was going to get to Norse paganism and so I set of in search of the coast and the seagulls.

On my way to the airport, however, I made one final stop at the castle Gripsholm in Mariefeld. The afternoon was getting on, but the day was just as beautiful as it had begun. I knew nothing about the castle except that Kurt Tucholsky used to take his vacations there. However, as I walked around the castle, I was surprised to find these two rune stones standing in the courtyard. I do not know if they have always stood on this spot, or as I suspect, they were moved here by the builders of the castle. It doesn’t much matter to me either way. As I looked at them, I remembered the one with the snake’s head from pictures in my graduate classes. Between the unexpected surprise at discovering them and the delight at touching a thousand-year-old inscription (okay maybe only 900 years) it was the perfect end to my trip to Sweden.

At one time I could puzzle out the sound of the language on the stones from the runes, even if the language itself was beyond me. But now I can’t remember the value of most of the symbols. In English it reads this stone was set up by Tola in memory of her son, Harald. He was Ingvar the Far-traveled’s brother They fared like men far after gold and in the east gave the eagle food. They died southward in Serkland.” According to the marker next to the stone, “Giving the Eagle food” means they killed enemies, and the “Far Traveled’s” expedition to Serkland is mentioned in many other rune inscriptions. These rune stones are therefore Cenotaphs, grave markers erected in memory of one who died far away and whose body cannot be returned home. They represent an absence, a symbol of what is not there.

To me these rune stones and the standing stones that predate them become a metaphor for language. Words are symbols for ideas or objects that are not there. The words we use re-present an absence, and even though the sound or shape of a word is meaningless in itself, the use we put them to–the way we arrange them opens them to an infinite number of possible meanings.

The stones do nothing. They just “stand there.” They exist in the moment of nunc stans (Thank you Scott Abbott), of “standing now” in the present. Yet they carry with them a connotation of extreme age, of events long past, of the people who touched them and placed them and wrote upon them. The language of a good book or a good poem does the same thing for me. The words only exist as I read them–before that they were just marks on a page. But as my eyes pass over them, the words connect me to an author who is absent–sometimes long absent. Whatever other message they might bear, Their texts become a monument that says, remember me. I was here. This was my space. I worked. I lived. I created. I am.