a blog by Peter Leonard
I chose this particular runestone, which is about 4km southwest of the Uppsala city center, as the destination for my own field trip as part of my Runology class. I checked the references sources and recorded the GPS coördinates, but tried to keep my hand over the rest of the page so I wouldn't see any transliterations or translations until I stood in front of the stone itself.
The hike to the stone took me past the 1970s bedroom community of Flogsta, where a lot of Uppsala students live, and it's this geographical designation which is most often associated with runestone #895. Yet just south of Flogsta the territory turns sharply rural, with red barns on rolling acres.
Part of this landscape is Hågahögen, a Bronze-age gravemound dating to about 1000 BC. In much later times (ca. 800 AD), a semi-legendary king called Björn at Haugi was said to have established his residence here, taking his name from the mound (haugi, which became håga as part of a fixed place-name, while the word for a mound evolved in parallel to hög -- thus Hågahögen is arguably redundant.) Such overlapping of Bronze- and Viking-age settlements and monuments is a pattern across Scandinavia (cf. Jelling in Denmark) but it's unclear exactly what meaning these sites had for medieval rulers, apart from their pre-manufactured monumentality.
The runestone I went to look at dates from about 1000 AD, long after Björn reigned. It stood originally at the foot of the Håga mound, but is now in the middle of a privately-owned horse pasture about 200 meters south. Modern repairs to a crack at the base of the stone have resulted in three iron bars which hold the roughly 6' tall piece upright. The stone has three main faces, of which two are carved. The inscription continues from one side to the next, in the middle a sentence. Here's the first side -- mouse over the picture to see the runes that are intact:
The inscription starts,
tan uk skali uk biarn
Dan and Skalli and Björn
litu risa stain
let [this] stone be raised
The inscription continues on the other side, which is much better-preserved and easier to read. I've rotated this image so that it's at a 90° angle -- mouse over to see the runes highlighted:
at borfast faþu-
to the memory of Borfast, father
Though the last runic character is clearly an "i" in the carving, we think that must have been a mistake: faþui just doesn't make any sense at all, so we suspect that the lone stave must have been intended to be an r originally, yielding faþur.