Asfergstenen og det gode selskab

Abstract

The Asferg stone belongs to a group of Danish Viking-Age runic stones, consisting as so often of a standard appraisal of the virtues of some late chieftain, but falling short with respect to one or two wordings that seem to make no sense. This has been ascribed to malpractice by the author or by the carver, casting doubt on the validity of the whole text as a witness of linguistic facts. I suggest a reading of the sequence kuþru : þin : that makes sense both runologically, linguistically and textually, namely as gōðrø‾ ðinn, West Norse *góðrǿðinn ‘eloquent’. Thus, the outcast Asferg stone is promoted to the status of a reliable linguistic witness of Early Old Danish, including the archaic accusative word form bruþr ‘brother’. I draw some conclusions concerning the synchronic and diachronic shapes of kinship terms in Early Scandinavian, including the Malt stone form fauþr, read by me as fǫðr, but taken by several runologists to be a carving error for a two-syllable accusative form, e.g., faður ‘father’.