look closer

A horse with eight legs, and a small rider up on its back. The woman on the left holds out a drinking horn to meet him.

Almost everything the modern world knows about Norse mythology comes from a Christian Icelander named Snorri Sturluson, who wrote it down around 1220, roughly two centuries after Iceland had voted to convert. He was a politician and a poet, and he was preserving the old stories mainly so that poets would still understand the metaphors. That leaves one question Snorri cannot answer: what people actually believed while they still believed it. Gotland is where that question gets a partial answer, because the island is covered in picture stones. More than 400 survive, limestone slabs cut between roughly the fifth century and the eleventh and set up as memorials. The Viking-age ones are shaped like an axe head and covered edge to edge with scenes. The most famous of them turned up in 1844 at Tjängvide farm, in Alskog parish, built into the wall of a cellar. It is contemporary evidence, cut by people who were not being translated by anybody. The top panel shows a rider arriving on a horse with eight legs, met by a figure holding out a drinking horn. Read against Snorri, that is Odin's horse Sleipnir and a welcome into Valhalla, and it lines up so neatly that the stone is usually captioned that way. Read on its own terms it is a dead man arriving somewhere and being handed a drink, which may be the same thing said without a footnote. The panel below is almost all ship. The sail is carved as a field of diamonds and is nearly as wide as the hull is long, and a row of men stands under it. A burial, a voyage, or both. Two lines of runes are cut on the stone, and both are damaged. Enough of one survives to read that someone raised it in memory of Hjorulf, his brother. The name of the man who raised it is gone. What is left is that eighth leg, cut by someone who had no reason to explain himself, 400 years before anyone wrote the myth down.