Yggdrasil · Humankind

Inga and Gerlög: A Family’s Losses Written in Stone

Eleventh-century Uppland stones that record one family’s deaths and inheritances, from Hillersjö to Snottsta.

Myth and literature

The story

Direct evidence: named people in surviving rune inscriptions tell how one family in eleventh-century Uppland lost its men and children and passed its property from woman to woman.

The long text on the Hillersjö stone (U 29) was raised by Gerlög. It tells that her first husband Germund drowned and that their son died. Her daughter Inga was the only child of her second marriage, to Guðríkr, to survive. Inga married Ragnfast of Snottsta. After he and their young son died, Inga inherited the farm. She married again, to Eiríkr, and when she died without living children, her property passed to her mother Gerlög. Four stones at Snottsta and Vreta, which Inga herself had raised, remember Ragnfast and speak of what he owned and what she inherited. Mourning is the thread through all of them: the stones record a family’s grief and its property together. They say nothing about what happens after death.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: that Gerlög and then Inga held the property after the men of the family died, and that the stones say so in public. The inheritance pattern the stones describe, through children and then to a mother, matches what the later Uppland Law of 1296 sets out, according to the Hillersjö article.

What is not recorded: the name or age of Inga’s son, who is unnamed on every stone; why the stones name Ragnfast’s sisters or his housecarl Assur; and how the family felt. Readings that the sisters’ mention points to a dispute are suggestions only. U 332 speaks of inheriting from children, while U 29 speaks of one son, and the stones do not reconcile this. These stones show one family, and they do not show what women could own elsewhere or in any other period. They are also not evidence about an afterlife.

Historical evidence

The evidence

Hillersjö stone, U 29, stands at Hillersjö on Färingsö in Uppland. It is dated to the eleventh century (Stockholm County Museum gives about 1060 to 1100), is in the Urnes style and is signed by the runemaster Þorbjörn skald. Raised by Gerlög, it carries the family history. The text is completed by U 20 and U 21 at Färentuna, which state that Guðríkr and Eiríkr had died; the Färentuna text is partly damaged.

The Snottsta and Vreta stones are U 329, U 330, U 331 and U 332, dated by style to about 1050 to 1080. Inga raised all four. U 329 remembers Ragnfast and names his sisters Gyríðr and Ástríðr. U 330 names his housecarl Assur and mentions a bridge. U 331, cut on a flat rock, says Ragnfast was the only heir of his father Sigfast. U 332, now lost and known from an eighteenth-century drawing, says Ragnfast and their children had died, that she inherited, and that a staff was raised for him. The Hillersjö stone was carved last of the sequence. Signum numbers and readings follow Rundata as the Wikipedia pages cite it.