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The inner band carries the verse: they fared like men far after gold, and in the east gave food to the eagle.

Sometime around the year 1041, a Swedish woman named Tóla had a granite slab cut with a coiled serpent and a verse, because her son Haraldr had gone east with Ingvar and had not come back. The stone stands at Gripsholm in Södermanland, and its inscription ends in four lines of skaldic verse that are as good as anything the Vikings left in stone: they fared like men far after gold, and in the east gave food to the eagle; they died southward in Serkland. Every phrase in that is precise. Far after 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 lands of the Saracens, the Caliphate and the Caspian, 4,000 miles from a Swedish farm by river and portage. And died southward 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, and around 25 surviving runestones in Sweden commemorate 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 two centuries later says the force was destroyed by disease in the east; the stones themselves say only that people left and did not return, 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 repainted red the way they originally were, 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.