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Four bands of runes naming Gorm, Thyra, Denmark and Norway. The first appearance of the word Denmark inside Denmark.

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 great beast tangled with a serpent; one carries Christ with his arms spread, held not by a cross but by the same interlace that binds the beast, the earliest image of Christ in Scandinavia. 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 is the first time the word Denmark appears on Danish soil, which is why the stone gets called the country's birth certificate. It claims Norway, which was aspirational. And it announces a national conversion as a royal decision rather than a spiritual event, a matter of policy, in the same sentence as a territorial 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 archaeology at Jelling shows Harald built on a scale nobody in Denmark had attempted, a huge palisade enclosure, two mounds, a stone ship setting, and a wooden church, and the whole complex looks like a man converting a country by construction project. He was eventually deposed by his own son and died about 986. His nickname was Blátǫnn, Bluetooth, and its origin is uncertain; a dead dark tooth is the usual guess. In 1997 an engineer at Intel working on a short-range radio standard needed a codename for a technology meant to unite incompatible protocols, had been reading about a Danish king who united warring tribes, and 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 Blátǫnn, initials, still advertising.