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The band of runes winds in on itself and ends in a tight curl. That curl is the serpent's tail. The runes stop a little short of the centre, where the band gets too narrow to hold them.

Sometime around the year 1041, a Swedish woman named Tóla had a granite slab cut with a coiled serpent and a verse. Her son Haraldr had gone east with Ingvar, his brother, and had not come back. The stone stands at Gripsholm in Södermanland. Its inscription ends in four lines of verse, as good as anything the Vikings left in stone. They travelled far for gold, and in the east gave food to the eagle. They died in the south, in Serkland. Every phrase in that is precise. Far for gold is what the expedition was for. Giving food to the eagle is a kenning, the standard poetic way to say they killed men in battle, since carrion birds eat what battles leave. Serkland is the Norse name for the Muslim lands south and east of the Caspian, reached from a Swedish farm by river, with the boats carried overland between one river and the next. Died in the south is the part Tóla was paying for. There was no grave, no return, and no body, so the stone had to stand in for all three. Ingvar the Far-Travelled's expedition set out around 1036 down the Russian rivers toward the Caspian. About 26 surviving runestones in Sweden name men who went on it. It is the largest group of memorials to any single event in the country, and every one of them is an obituary. A saga written long afterwards says the force was destroyed by disease in the east. The stones say only that people left and did not come back. Over and over, in different parishes, in different hands. The Gripsholm stone spent part of its later life as building material, turning up in the castle cellar in the 1820s where it had been reused as a step. It stands outside now with the carved lines filled in with red paint, which is how anybody can read them from the path. The name of the man it is for appears once. His mother's appears once. The eagle gets a whole line.