Emily Chan
There is a huge 9th-century stone monument in Sweden that is believed to have been erected by Vikings with fears of a previous cold climate crisis repeating.
The Rok runestone weighs five tons and stands over eight feet tall. It is located near Lake Vattern in south-central Sweden.
It also contains the world’s longest runic inscription in stone, with more than 700 runes covering its five sides. It has 28 lines of riddle-like messages, and one of them is damaged.
The runestone may have been created as a memorial to a dead son. The exact meaning of the inscriptions was unclear due to the different writing forms, and some parts were missing as well.
The stone mentions the heroic acts of Theodoric, which may refer to Theodoric the Great, a 6th-century ruler of the Ostrogoths in what is now Italy.
A 2020 study by researchers from three Swedish universities determined that the inscriptions alluded to a period of extreme winter weather.
“The inscription deals with an anxiety triggered by a son’s death and the fear of a new climate crisis similar to the catastrophic one after 536 C.E.,” wrote the study authors.
The previous climate crisis occurred from the years 536 to 550. It was caused by a series of volcanic eruptions, which led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger, and mass extinctions. As a result, the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula dropped by an estimated 50 percent or more.
The memory of those events was passed down through the generations, influencing Norse mythology.
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