The rune-stones of Jelling, and a new realisation.

One of the most important historical monuments of Denmark is the large rune-stones standing by the church in the small town of Jelling - once the capital of Denmark. I have known about the place since I was a child: the rune-stones, the large barrows on each side of the church, dwarfing it in size, and the fact that Harald the king had the stones made in memory of Gorm and Thyra, his parents (the ones buried in the burial mounds, and the first historic king and queen of Denmark), but also in memory of himself christening the Danes.

But today I just read something interesting about a thing that has kind of puzzled me since I was a child. On one side of the larger stone there is an image of Christ - the first one in Denmark. Below you can see a colourized version (the stones was probably coloured). Early portraits of Jesus in Denmark are often in this style, called the victorious Christ. Because the Vikings did not really appreciate the more tender aspects of the Jesus-character, he was depicted as a victorious warlord. But, and that is what I learned today, if you look at the image Christ is not hanging from a cross. He is more like entangled in ornaments. And this is actually something I noticed already as a child. Today I read on Wikipedia that this is probably Christ suspended in the branches of a tree instead of on a cross, which lead one to think of the Havamal stanzas were Odin is hanging from the Ask Yggdrasil. The object of my previous post.

So on the stone Jesus is not really hanging on a cross, but hanging like Odin on a tree. The old Danes had a hard time grasping this gentle new God, so the incredibly skilled craftsmen that created the stone, depicted Jesus as Odin.

Suddenly the ornaments makes much more sense.

The images used are from DR - the Danish National television website, the A.P.Møller foundation that has paid to put the stones in boxes to protect them, (I remember letting my hand touching the runes, the dragon and the ornaments, not something my Children will get to do.) and from the the Viking ship museum at Roskilde.

Also... for the whole strange concept of validating your identity that is so important here on Steemit. I wrote this post originally for the other of my two Diaspora-accounts. You can see the original post here, with some typos and stuff (Diaspora does not support post-editing.)