SYMHC Classics: Jelling Stones

This 2016 episode looks at the beginning of Denmark's monarchy and its link to two large rune stones at Jelling. Is it possible that the stones were part of an effort on Harald Blátand's part to revise the history of his parents, Gorm and Thyre? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 0:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.

• 1:28Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:42Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:16Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. The Nation of Denmark was a big part of our recent episode on Icelandic bishop Jón Arison. But Denmark's role was almost as a faceless antagonist. So we thought we'd bring out an episode on Denmark as today's Saturday classic. It's the Yelling Stones and the origins of Denmark's early royalty. This episode also talks a bit about the Christianization of Denmark, which is another connection to the episode on Jón Arison. This originally came out March 14, 2016. Enjoy.

• 2:52Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 3:01Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:05Holly Frey?

  Hey Tracy, do you want to time travel quite a ways today?

• 3:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do.

• 3:09Holly Frey?

  Put on whatever outfit works for that. That's comfy. So we're traveling back in time about 1,000 years or so to Viking Denmark. And we've talked about before, it's come up kind of in passing, that the word Viking gets used to kind of lump together a lot of different things. So we're not gonna talk about Viking things a whole lot. Just know that this falls under that category.

• 3:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, and sometimes we will get emails from people that say, could you do a podcast on the history of the Vikings? And that answer is no, because...

• 3:40Holly Frey?

  Well, it would be an entirely new podcast brand.

• 3:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 3:45Holly Frey?

  It would be a whole series, a hundred part series called The History of the Vikings. It would be great. There's a lot of stuff. And part of it, as we'll discuss today, is that a lot of that history is still contentiously debated among historians. So, I mean, it's rich and fertile soil to do an entire podcast about, but you know, we cover all kinds of history. So today, we're doing this one little narrow bit. And we're talking about the Yelling Dynasty of Denmark. If that's something you want to go do a search for on your own, Yelling is spelled with a J at the beginning. So it's like gelling. If you look at it and you're normally an American English speaker. So the Yelling Dynasty... Dynasty is often referred to as the beginning of the Danish monarchy.

• 4:28Holly Frey?

  And that point, just as many points that we'll talk about, is argued by historians, and rightly so, because there were certainly people there who had leadership of some sort before that. But this is when it first started being called Denmark. And this is a time and place in history where our knowledge is really pretty fuzzy. So keep all of that in mind as we go forward.

• 4:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  So part of the problem with this particular piece of history stems from the fact that around the year 1200, two different historians wrote the first known written accounts of Denmark's early royalty. Both Sven Agasson and Saxo Grammaticus described the people and events involved in great detail, but those two accounts contradict each other in a whole lot of instances. We don't even know how much of the writing in each case is the recording of oral history that had been handed down, which would automatically include some shifts in its accuracy, versus how much could have been author embellishment and the result of viewing the information through their own contemporary lenses. So there's a lot of fuzziness.

• 5:33Holly Frey?

  There is. It's one of the reasons I'm sometimes reluctant to do things from this period. I feel like we have to caveat everything and go, you don't know this for sure. So that will happen, just brace. And to start off in a nebulous place, we do not know when Gorm de Gamle, or Gorm the Old, who is often cited as the first king of Denmark, was born. As a personal side note, that is Gorm, G-O-R-M, for my nerdy friends out there. If you think I didn't type this G-O-R-N every single time initially, rest assured that I did, but there is absolutely no Star Trek reference in this. Estimates for Gorm's birth date are all over the place, from the late 800s through the early 900s.

• 6:16Holly Frey?

  And we do not know as well who Gorm's mother was.

• 6:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Gorm's father, Hardik Had left his son an estate of land that he had claimed through force and Gorm augmented the family's property holdings. This was a time when Denmark wasn't one United Kingdom. It was just this assortment of provinces and each was governed by a chief who served as its king. Eventually, Gorm had accumulated a really significant chunk of land.

• 6:44Holly Frey?

  And Gorm married a woman named Tyra, or Tyre, sometimes you'll hear it pronounced. In both the Sven Agasson and Saxogrammaticus accounts, she came from England, although we do not know if that is accurate. The identity of her parents is unknown, although she may well have been part of a powerful or wealthy family. There's certainly some indication of that and thus that she was strategically important in marriage. Her father has been guessed at as any number of historically significant figures, from Ethelred of Wessex to the king of Jutland at the time, who was Harold Klack.

• 7:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  According to legend, Gorm promised to give Tyra all of Denmark as a mourning gift. That is a gift given by a husband to his wife the morning after their marriage is consummated. But according to customs of other Scandinavian cultures at the time, the mourning gift was actually inherited by the wife only after the husband's death. So kind of keep this bit tucked away in your memory because toward the end of this episode, we're going to talk about this establishment of lineage and inheritance.

• 7:47Holly Frey?

  Gorm and Tyra had children, and depending on what source you look at, the number and sexes of those children vary. You might see only Harold Bloten Gormsen listed as a son, or Harold and his brother Knud Danasst. Sometimes there's another son, and on occasion, there's also a sister mentioned. So somewhere between one and four children. According to one legend, if it mentions the brother Knud, Knud was killed in a skirmish with another power and Tyra had the entire hall of the royal house either painted black or hung with black cloth. And walking in and seeing that darkened hall was how Gorm found out the news of his son's demise.

• 8:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a side note, the name Bloten in Harold's name translates to Bluetooth. We don't know why exactly he had that name, although the most common speculation is that he had a visible, a visibly damaged or rotten tooth. And yes, we're going to come back to that name and modern technology later on.

• 8:46Holly Frey?

  And I should mention, I should have mentioned it at the top of the episode. This was suggested by a listener, I believe, on social, and I don't have the name attached to it, so whoever you are, thank you, because this was lovely. And he specifically mentioned it because of the name Bluetooth. So, going back in, when his queen Tyra died, Gorm had a rune stone erected in her memory. This stone is significant in that it's the first known time a king of Denmark referenced his country by that name. It's also the oldest known example of a Danish king's words. And this stone refers to Tyra as the pride of Denmark. Sometimes you'll also see it written out as the adornment of Denmark.

• 9:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some histories, though, indicate that Tyra actually outlived her husband. There are also medieval texts that are really unclear as to this whole timeline. Tyra's impact on the narrative of Denmark's early history as a monarch is also characterized in just a lot of different ways. Sometimes it's credited, she's credited with saving the country from conquest. Sometimes she's credited with saving Denmark from a famine. She's also, in some writings, cast as the architect of a fortifying wall along Denmark's southern border, although archaeologists have determined that the wall that this tale refers to was built long before her time as queen, in the early 700s or maybe even earlier.

• 10:02Holly Frey?

  And so, we don't know the exact year of Tyra's death, but because Gorm referred to himself as king on her rune stone, and again, as we said, this is all nebulous, and we're going to talk a lot about the stones and the timeline in a moment. But based on his rune stone, it appears to have been after his reign began, which was 934. And in the winter of 958, 959, Gorm the Old died. And at the time, he was possibly laid to rest in the same burial mound as Queen Tyra, now known as the North Mound. But again, we do not know the exact location of Tyra's burial, so this is another one of those hazy points. We are going to come back to Tyra's resting place and this stone, as I said, in just a bit.

• 10:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Harald Blatton Gormsen became the king of Denmark when Gorm died. And at the time, the Viking kingdom was polytheistic. But Harald perhaps knew that converting to Christianity would open the door to trade with other European powers, and so he decided that the Danes would be Christians.

• 11:03Holly Frey?

  And as with all aspects of this story, this conversion to Christianity is characterized in multiple different ways in historical writings. By some accounts, he was more or less forced into transitioning the country's religion to Christianity after having been bested in battle by a Christian nation. But in other writings, he's described as coming to this decision through his own interest and eventual spiritual conversion.

• 11:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  His reign was one of relative peace within Denmark, although he did meet with a mix of success and failure in his efforts to expand Denmark's lands through conquest.

• 11:33Holly Frey?

  King Harold died in the autumn of 980. His son, Sven Forkbeard, may have been a rebellious upstart with eyes on the yelling throne, and one of Sven's supporters may have been the one to have shot and killed the king dead with an arrow. Harold's body was interred at a church that he had begun construction on.

• 11:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1820, excavators working in the burial mounds at Yelling discovered an empty tomb. The only things inside of it were a silver cup and some other small items. Dating the beams in the tomb indicated that they were cut right around the time that Gorm the Old had died. But if the tomb was meant to hold the king, where was his body?

• 12:15Holly Frey?

  And that question actually wasn't answered until the early 1970s. In 1970, Gorm's remains were found in the remains of a wooden church that had been built by Harold after he was christened. And as part of this shift to Christianity, it's believed that Harold had his father reburied in the church rather than the mound.

• 12:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  After Gorm's remains were discovered, they were studied at Copenhagen's University and National Museum for several decades. Based on the studies of the remains, it's estimated that he was approximately 50 years old when he died, and that would have put his birth around the year 908. He was 5'7" or 172 cm tall, and he had rheumatism in his lower vertebrae.

• 12:57Holly Frey?

  On August 30th of 2000, Gorm was re-interred at Yelling Church, and Denmark's royal family attended the ceremony.

• 13:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we alluded to earlier, the exact location of Queen Tira's burial has been lost, and we'll talk more about the significance of that in just a few moments.

• 13:13Holly Frey?

  And that is going to involve a lot of rune stone talk. But before we move on to those stones and the various interpretations around them, let's pause for a word from one of our sponsors.

• 13:30Speaker 03

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• 13:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:21Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:53Holly Frey?

  So there are two runestones usually mentioned at Yelling, and that's in the central part of the Jutland Peninsula. And those two stones have been analyzed and interpreted by historians for years. There is not settled consensus about them. Part of their mystery comes from the fact that the practice of erecting commemorative runestones appears to have been a fairly brief trend in the big picture. So unlike some other old cultural practices, we don't really have a particularly large sample set to inform interpretations. Plus, their age means that a lot of them, having been sitting outside this whole time, have had some degradation.

• 18:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the first, smaller stone reads, "King Gorm made this monument in memory of Tyra, his wife, Denmark's adornment."

• 18:38Holly Frey?

  And the larger stone reads, "Harald the King bade do these sepulchral monuments after Gorm, his father, and after Tyra, his mother. The Harald who won the whole of Denmark and all of Norway and made the Danes Christians."

• 18:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  These stones are located adjacent to one another between two nearly identical mounds. Each of the mounds is 70 meters or 76 yards in diameter and 11 meters or 12 yards high. The north mound covers a burial chamber, but the south mound doesn't. The stones sit just south of a nearby masonry church that's still in use. It's not the original church, though. This is a church that was built around the year 1100 to replace a wooden church on the site that had burned down. It was rebuilt several times over before it was switched to a masonry church.

• 19:28Holly Frey?

  And the smaller stone, which we'll call the King Gorm stone, the original position of that stone is not known. Its current placement is where it's been since approximately 1630. And just prior to that, we know that it was used as a seat outside the church for some period of time. And this stone features three vertical lines of runes on the front, and one vertical line of runes on the back, and two snakes that are also on the back.

• 19:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  A larger Harald stone has three sides, and on one of those, there's what's believed to be the first image of Christ in Scandinavia. For a while, the image was actually believed to have been a portrait of Harald himself, but early in the 19th century, it was established that it was indeed Christ. This stone, during a restoration project in the early 1980s, was determined to be in its original position.

• 20:18Holly Frey?

  And there was actually a third stone found at Yelling in 1964, but it appears to be unrelated to the Gorm-Herold Tyra stones.

• 20:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are a couple of pretty interesting areas of discussion around these two stones. Did King Gorm raise a rune stone to honor his queen? Or did Harold do it as part of sort of a historical revision?

• 20:41Holly Frey?

  So this is where things get, to me, really fascinating and where they are very hotly debated. So the stones honoring Tyra are notable because it was not really customary for rune stones to be raised for women. Denmark has 277 known Viking-era rune stones. Remember how we mentioned a little bit ago that they don't really have a huge dataset to go on? 277 is really not that many. But of that number, only 12 of those stones commemorate women, and two of those reference Tyra. So that's a significant situation. Although, there has also been a case made that the reference to Denmark's adornment could actually be referencing Gorm, but that's not a particularly popular interpretation.

• 21:25Holly Frey?

  The stones to Tyra are even more unusual when you consider that these two are part of a group of only three known rune stones that were created at the command of kings. Other rune stones were raised by other people.

• 21:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's possible that more than two of those 12 stones dedicated to women are actually in honor of Gorm's wife, Tyra. At least two other rune stones from the same time period also reference a woman named Tyra. So is it very likely that there was another woman with the same name who was also inspiring the commissioning of multiple rune stones, who just happened to be in the same area of Denmark at the same time?

• 22:00Holly Frey?

  That seems a little bit coincidental. And it seems perhaps simply too coincidental for it to not all be the same woman. But on the flip side, even men weren't normally honored or commemorated in this way multiple times over either. There's actually only one man that we know of with multiple rune stones. So it's just weird in a variety of ways. And one explanation for the multiple, but allegedly unrelated, mentions of a woman named Tyra is that it was a common name in Jutland at the time.

• 22:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Historian Brigitte Sawyer makes the case, though, that the assumption of the name's commonplace nature is based on only seven or eight possible instances of its having been used. Four or five of those are on rune stones. So the logic of claiming the rune stones are honoring multiple women of the same name, it's pretty circular.

• 22:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, they're using data to support that assertion that is the direct, the, the direct thing that they're trying to prove out. So it gets really, really, uh, a little bit squirrely at that point. And the smaller of those two yelling stones, thought to be erected by Gorm, also has some linguistic characteristics which might give it away as being younger than we are intended to believe. The stone credited to Harold, the larger of the two, has words that run together. Whereas the rune stones that Gorm, or the rune stone that Gorm is supposed to have erected, has dividing marks between the words. And that's a newer linguistic practice, indicating that the Gorm stone may actually

• 23:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  have come second.

• 23:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  We'll talk about why that may have been the case in just a moment. But first, we are going to pause for a brief word from a sponsor.

• 23:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 24:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:47Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 25:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Indeed to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

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• 26:54Holly Frey?

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• 27:29Holly Frey?

  So, why would Harold have possibly erected a stone that seemed to be the work of his father and that it appeared he may be trying to pass off as that? And again, I'm referencing the work of Brigitte Sawyer, but according to her, it may have been a way in which people asserted claims of inheritance. So we mentioned early on in the episode that Denmark was new to unification. Lord's under Gorm likely competed with Gorm for control of the lands that he eventually made his.

• 27:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tyra would have been a very appealing marriage partner because she may have held significant power or prominence even before becoming Gorm's queen, most likely as the daughter of someone who had additional land holdings that would then become part of her husband's kingdom. It's entirely possible that she outlived her husband and remarried. And then that would have created some question marks about who should inherit her holdings after her death. The additional rune stones that reference a woman named Tyra may have been placed by the family she married into after Gorm died.

• 28:28Holly Frey?

  Sawyer suggests that it's possible that Harold not only reconstructed the past by placing a rune stone from his father to Tyra, but that the unknown resting place of the queen is due to the fact that she may have been buried by another family in another place entirely after having been remarried.

• 28:46Holly Frey?

  Harold basically had to prove his place as son and heir, and thus constructed the burial mounds at Yelling to establish himself as part of Tyra's true or primary family and obscure the existence of another burial spot. Moreover, if the Gorm rune stone was erected by Harold, it also serves as a precedent setter that Gorm was king, which literally carves in stone something that up to that point may have still been a matter of some dispute.

• 29:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  And remember, back to you at the top of the show, we talked about the mourning gift from Gorm to Tyra. If she did inherit Denmark upon his death as the culmination of this gift, it would very, very much be in Harold's interest not to let another family then inherit, literally, the entire country after his mother's death.

• 29:33Holly Frey?

  But, and I know I keep saying this, it is important to note that these interpretations of the history of Gorm, Harold, and Tyra and the rune stones are just that. They're interpretations, although they're definitely based in existing evidence, it's just viewed through different lenses. Historians continue to argue the various possibilities and details of this part of Denmark's history. But in any case, if the rune stones and mounds were part of a carefully orchestrated edit of history on Harold's part, the plan worked because he is recognized as an early king of Denmark.

• 30:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's entirely possible that new excavations at Yelling will reveal additional information about Gorm and his family. The Yelling mounds, runic stones, and church are all the UNESCO World Heritage Site. And since 2007, excavations have unearthed evidence of massive, of a massive stone ship at the site, as well as a number of buildings that could indicate a fortress that was built by Harold.

• 30:29Holly Frey?

  And I believe that those excavations went on until late 2014, so a lot of those findings are still being analyzed and there could be big changes based on that analysis. We'll just have to keep an eye on it. But we mentioned that we would talk about how Harold's name ended up connected to technology. And in 1996, when a wireless technology being worked on by Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, and eventually IBM needed a name, that project borrowed the name of Bluetooth. And that was because just as Harold had united Denmark, in many histories, Bluetooth was intended to unite technologies with this wireless short-range link. And while it was intended initially only as a code name for the technology,

• 31:12Holly Frey?

  like a development name, Bluetooth, of course, stuck. And that was more due to legal issues than anything else.

• 31:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  The original name for this technology was PAN for Personal Area Networking. And it was too similar to many other trademark names. And the second choice, radio wire, was already trademarked by someone else. So the project's code name eventually became its official moniker.

• 31:34Holly Frey?

  And now, when your mobile device has Bluetooth activated, you can see a small rune on your screen. And you can thank Harold Bluetooth for that, too. That logo for Bluetooth technology is actually a combination of the runes for King Harold's initials. So in a fun way that history comes alive, you are carrying a reference to Denmark's Viking history in your pocket with you all the time if you have a smartphone with Bluetooth.

• 31:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's pretty cool. Now, it's really like, now that you mention it, that does look like a rune.

• 32:04Holly Frey?

  Yeah. I almost felt foolish for never having had that thought. Once I read about it, I was like, well, of course, that's what it is.

• 32:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, I feel foolish because I've been working at HowStuffWorks.com for more than a decade, talking about Bluetooth sometimes. And I knew, like, I knew at a very basic level who it was named for, but the whole part where the logo little icon thing is basically a rune, did not know that.

• 32:29Holly Frey?

  Yeah. It's cool stuff. So that is our discussion of the Yelling Stones, which I really can't wait to see sort of what additional analysis comes out. We will link in our show notes to Denmark's National Museum has kind of an ongoing site that updates with the archaeological stuff. There hasn't been a lot of, there haven't been a lot of updates lately. I think, like I said, they're still doing analysis, but you can see all of the stages of the digs that they've done and how they've been very carefully preserving the area. Because it is in a place where, I mean, there's also neighborhoods around it. It's not like just a place out in the middle of nowhere. There's been development in that area. So it's really pretty fascinating to look at all those pictures

• 33:13Holly Frey?

  and see what they're doing and how they're handling it. The stones are actually now encased in like these glass, I don't want to say cabinetry, but that's the only word coming to mind. But they're outside still, but they're encased to protect them. So you can see them. They're basically on display because they're just sitting out there in between the mounds and in front of the church. It's quite cool.

• 33:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 34:02Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 36:08Tracy V. Wilson?

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