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larly symmetrical organization of early viking Age fortresses of the
trelleborg type, though I have not been able to use this insight of Höfler’s
in any very exact way. I sought an oral literary milieu that, unlike
Lönnroth’s West nordic fornaldarsaga, looked south and west and found
some similarities worth mentioning in praise poetry, Heusler’s Preislied/
Zeitgedicht. This imagined West Germanic origin requires, I would argue,
no more unmoored belief than any other attempt to explain this puzzling
material. All are speculations into the void of an oral period, but the whole
nature of Rök presumes that this foreign material was not entirely new but
already existed as stories in the memory of the audience of the inscrip­
tion.
the West Germanic elements that appear in the Rök text can all be
attributed to ‘oral tradition,’ but oral tradition need not be a disembodied
(‘superorganic,’ in the idiom of folkloristics) force moving in mysterious
waves; one conceptualizes it so vaguely only when no actual tradition­
bearers are available as its vectors. With many other Rök scholars I believe
a more direct connection, ultimately an eye-witness, is implicit in the rela­
tionship of the theoderic verse and the Aachen statue. other features,
such as the Swedish monument’s apparent allusion to Theoderic’s compro­
mised fame or when he lived, could have been brought from the land of the
Franks and Frisians by the kind of individual Swedish traveler to Dorstad
whom we meet and hear quoted in Rimbert’s Life of St. Ansgar (1884, 58).
Is it possible that varinn’s unique decision to record his selection of
legends in writing – “eine revolutionierende Idee,” as Meulengracht
Sørensen calls it (2001, 133) – could have been one of the West Germanic,
specifically frankish, influences? Some later runic memorials quote bits of
appropriate verse, and myths and legends were rendered pictorially in the
north; but no other rune stone attempts to record a collection of such
minni in writing. Our hypothetical Swedish visitor, setting out from Birka,
will have traveled after 801 to Dorstad and further, up the Maas to Aachen.
He will have been curious enough about the great emperor to admire the
newly arrived statue of his famous and controversial predecessor,
theoderic. Perhaps among the things he learned there (theoderic’s bad
reputation, how long ago he lived?) one concerned the emperor’s activities
after 800 in improvement of native law, including having the oral laws
written down. Perhaps he heard that the emperor was even having ancient
PHILoLoGy, eLeGy, AnD CuLtuRAL CHAnGe