a blog by Peter Leonard
In August 1911, an upholsterer in Sigtuna named Fredrik Haglund found a copper box on the shores of Lake Mälaren. The artifact weighed about 2kg, and contained granular metal with the consistency of coffee grounds, wrapped in paper or thin cloth. It was sent to the Statens Historiska Museum for investigation, unfortunately after the contents had been emptied out at the site. The box originally contained a pair of merchant’s scales, as we will see below.
The first person to examine the box at the museum, T. J:son Arnede, realized that there were runes carved around the outside edge of the container. Cut with a sharp knife with a somewhat rounded tip, the runes wrapped around both the top and bottom halves of the container:
Rune expert Otto von Friesen, writing in a 1912 article in Fornvännen, was the first to try and interpret this long line of carvings that curved around the box. But what fun is reading the answer before trying it yourself? Starting from the top left of the top row, we can transliterate the runes to latin letters thusly:
tiarfr×fikaf×simskum×mÄ…ni×skalaR×þis[aR]×i…Ä…ti×inuirmuntr×faþi×runÄ…r×þisar
This doesn’t seem like the makings of a page-turner, but let’s see what we get when we take the first part and normalize the spelling to something approximating Old Norse:
Runic: tiarfr fik  af simskum mÄ…ni  skalaR þisaR  i …Ä…ti
Norse: Djarfr fikk av sæmskum manni skalar þessar i …andi
Much better! We know the subject is a man named Djarfr, because he’s in the nominative. His name is rare in West Norse, but is found often enough in the language spoken in Sweden at this time. Djarfr got “these scales” (skalar þessar, plural accusative) from a man (af manni, dative singular) who is described as sæmskum, an adjective that was unknown before this item was found.
The best guess is that the adjective (semskr in uninflected form) refers to Sambia or possibly Zemgale, areas in North Prussia (present-day Russian Kaliningrad) and Latvia, respectively. At least Sambia was frequented by Viking traders and which sent in return businessmen to Birka, the trading island outside of present-day Stockholm.
The phrase i …andi is unfortunately partial effaced, but we can extrapolate from the context that it must also refer to the place that Djarfr got these scales: “in …land.”
(Interestingly, the runes record only ati instead of andi, but we know that rune-carvers almost always felt it unnecessary to carve an N-rune between a vowel and a dental consonant. And the T-rune stood for both [d] and [t] during this period, giving us -andi where only -ati is written.)
Continuing on, after the damaged section:
Runic: in uirmuntr faþi runąr þisar
Norse: en wærmuntr faði runor þissar
Here we have the rune-carver’s signature: “and Vermundr made these runes.” We have a record of the name Vermundr from the Landnámabok, the record of Iceland’s settlement, so we can confirm it was an attested man’s name.
The carving on the box then continues with an extremely complex and archaic dróttkvætt verse, consisting of a harsh warning not to steal the scales from the merchant. Sort of a primitive burglar alarm. This section, however, is rather complex and probably deserves an entry of its own.