look closer

Bands of runes run across the face of the stone, one line under the next. Together they name Gorm and Thyra, Harald's parents, and the country he says he won.

Around 965 a Danish king put up a block of granite at Jelling, beside his father's mound, and had it carved on three faces. One side carries the runes. One carries a lion with a serpent coiled around it. The third carries Christ with his arms spread, held up by the same knotwork instead of a cross. It was all painted once. Most of the colour has flaked off, but enough specks survived to work out the original scheme, and the modern copies are painted from it. The inscription is short enough to quote whole. King Harald ordered this monument made in memory of Gorm his father and Thyra his mother; that Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes Christian. Every clause is doing work. It names Denmark, which is why the stone gets called the country's birth certificate. Harald's father had already cut the same word into the smaller stone standing beside it. It claims Norway, which was a stretch. And it reports the conversion of a whole country as a thing the king did, in the same breath as a land claim. Harald was reading the map: the Christian empire to the south had been sending missionaries and armies in roughly equal proportion, and a Christian Denmark was harder to invade on religious grounds. Whether it worked as advertised is another question. The digging at Jelling shows Harald building on a scale nobody in Denmark had tried before. A huge palisade enclosure, two mounds, a setting of stones in the shape of a ship, a wooden church. It reads like a man converting a country by building work. He was eventually deposed by his own son and died about 986. His nickname was Blåtand, Bluetooth, and nobody knows why. A dead dark tooth is the usual guess. In 1997 an engineer at Intel needed a codename for a short-range radio standard, one meant to make incompatible devices talk to each other. He had been reading about a Danish king who pulled warring tribes together, and he suggested Bluetooth. It was supposed to be temporary. The logo now on several billion devices is a bind rune, the runes for H and B laid over each other: Harald Blåtand, his initials, still advertising.