Chapter 11

Theodoric carved in stone

In 2007, Bo Ralph presented a new interpretation of the stanza in the Rök stone inscription in which the Germanic hero king Theodoric (454–526 AD) had disappeared and an unspecific rikr hin þurmuþi ‘the bold warrior’ had taken his place. More recently, a team of four Swedish scholars (Holmberg et al. 2020) have taken Ralph’s interpretation to a new level, suggesting that the Rök inscription expresses a kind of ninth-century “climate anxiety”. A precondition of this radical re-interpretation is Ralph’s initial detachment of the inscription from the heroic context so central to the traditional interpretations, from Bugge (1878) via Wessén (1958) to Grønvik (2003). Ralph’s interpretation of the Rök stanza does, however, encounter serious problems, both linguistic and metrical. In this article, these problems are addressed, and the traditional interpretation of the Rök stanza, assuming a reference to Theodoric, is re-assessed and further substantiated. Moreover, drawing on evidence from runic inscriptions, Old Norse poetry and the linguistic form of rune-names in early continental sources, the understanding of the stanza’s syntactical structure and metrical form is refined and improved. The assessment of competing readings involves an unsolved problem connected to the verb raiþ, which has been interpreted as both ‘rode’ and ‘ruled’. Its relation to its object strąntu hraiþmarar ‘the shore of the Hræið-sea’ is further explored, and a new interpretation is presented.