Uppland Runic Inscription 53

Look at the corner of the building where Prastgatan meets Kakbrinken. About halfway up the wall, embedded in the stone like it has always been there, is a slab of rock covered in looping, intertwined carvings. That is a Viking runestone, and it is roughly a thousand years old. Let that sink in. It is two hundred years older than Stockholm itself. The inscription reads Torsten and Frogunn had the stone erected after their son. That is it. A memorial for a dead child, carved around the year one thousand, probably somewhere out in the Swedish countryside. The female name Frogunn is a pagan name, which helps date the stone to the pre-Christian era, before Sweden converted. So how did a Viking memorial end up in the wall of a building in central Stockholm? Nobody knows for sure. At some point, someone needed a flat piece of stone for construction and grabbed the nearest one. Runestones were repurposed as building material all across Scandinavia. It is the Viking equivalent of using a Roman column as a doorstep. A two thousand and two laser scan revealed that two different carvers worked on the stone, likely a master and an apprentice, based on variations in the depth and angle of the strokes. The first historical record of this stone comes from the seventeenth century, when a man called Johannes Bureus documented it. It is one of three runestones found in Gamla Stan. Most people walk past it every day without looking up. You are standing in front of a thousand-year-old Viking gravestone that someone just used as a brick.