Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
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Title:
Rune Stick with a Charm for the Protection of Kristina
Creator:
Description:
This small lead stick bears runes that spell out a charm of protection for a woman named Kristina. Surviving Scandinavian rune-sticks bear inscriptions revealing diverse uses ranging from receipts of business transactions to curses to personal amulets. The rune-stick with a charm for Kristina belongs to a small corpus of lead rune-stick amulets unearthed in Roskilde, Denmark since 2000. Corrosion has rendered much of the text illegible, but the rune-stick’s inscription reveals that the woman who fashioned the stick for her protection invoked the powers of Christ and the evangelists John and Luke. The rune-stick amulet exemplifies pre-modern extra-liturgical practices of invoking religious figures for protection, firmly rooted in pre-Christian magical traditions. Although written in runes the inscription spells out the Latin words Christi and crux phonetically and indicates at least some multilingual dimensions to magical practice in twelfth-century Denmark. Furthermore, repetition of the word crux or “cross” that punctuates the names of holy persons may indicate ritual gestures made at the time of the charm’s activation, such as making the sign of the cross in the air or over the body (Søndergaard, 2011).
Source:
Wikimedia Commons
Rights:
Public Domain
Subject
(See Also)
:
Amulets
Charms
Magic
Protection
Geographic Area:
Scandinavia
Century:
12
Date:
c. 1100
Related Work:
Current Location:
Denmark, Roskilde Town Museum, ROM 2103
Original Location:
Denmark, E., Found in Roskilde
Artistic Type (Category):
Digital Images; Amulets
Artistic Type (Material/Technique):
Lead; Wood
Donor:
Laywoman; Kristina
Height/Width/Length(cm):
0.05 cm/5.5 cm/
Inscription:
(k)ruks kristi kruks (i)(s)/u (s) kruks iohan(u)s k(r)(u)(k)s/k(r)(k)s luk(u)s kr(u)ks (m)a/(f)u(f)(i)us kristina (translation: cross Christ cross (Jesus?)/cross John cross/cross Luke cross (ma)/(fufius) Kristina)
Related Resources:
MacLeod, Mindy and Bernard Mees. Runic Amulets and Magic Objects. The Boydell Press, 2006. pp. 207-10; Olesen, Rikke Steenholt. "Runic Amulets from Medieval Denmark" Futhark: International Journal of Runic Studies 1 (2010): 161-76; Søndergaard, Leif. "Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Magic in Scandinavia" European Medieval Drama 15 (2011), 135-51; Stoklund, Marie. "En lille blypind med runer fra Hedegade" Årskrift fra Roskilde Museum (2004): 7-14. i Roskilde"