Work Songs and Whetstones: From Sutton Hoo to Straum

Abstract

The late Elmer Antonsen (1929-2008) was one of the few runic scholars ever to attempt to explain his interpretational method formally, and is most important (and influential) for the overtly neo-Bloomfieldian approach that he brought to his analyses of the older runic corpus. An expert in historical Germanic phonology, Antonsen had a manner of assessing early Nordic texts that may be epitomized in his treatment of the inscription on a whetstone from Straum i Hitra, Sor-Trondelag, Norway, which is usually referred to in the runological literature by the Bokmal spelling Strom. The Straum inscription can be dated only broadly to between the second and seventh centuries AD, and is one of the few early runic finds to which Antonsen devoted an entire paper (i.e., Antonsen 1975b; cf. Antonsen 1975a, no. 45; 1986, 335-6; 2002, 155-61). Antonsen interpreted the early runic text on the Straum whetstone, however, without considering the broader archaeological and epigraphic typology of the piece or the metaphorical association of whetstones with authority (later delineated by Stephen Mitchell in Scandinavian Studies in 1985). These suggest that the Straum inscription represents a martial expression, not the record of an agricultural work song that it has long been taken to be.