look closer

Eight legs, a rider, and a figure holding out a horn. Carved four centuries before anyone wrote the myth down.

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. Which leaves a question no amount of reading Snorri can answer: what did people actually believe while they still believed it? Gotland is where that question gets a partial answer, because the island is covered in picture stones. Around 400 survive, slabs of limestone carved between roughly the fifth century and the eleventh and set up as memorials, and the ones from the Viking centuries are shaped like a keyhole or an axe head and covered edge to edge with scenes. The stone from Tjängvide farm, in Alskog parish, was found in 1844 and is the most famous of them. 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. Below it a ship crosses under a sail carved in a lozenge pattern, thought to show the rope net that held a wool sail together, and a crew stands along the hull with a steersman at the tiller: a burial, a voyage, or both. The stones were painted once, in red, black and white, and traces survive; museums now light them at a low angle so the carving reads at all. Nobody knows who commissioned this one or which of the men on the ship he was. The single most useful thing on it is that eighth leg, drawn by someone who had no reason to explain himself, 400 years before anyone wrote the myth down.