Identification of the Sörla þáttr in one of the stories of the Rök runestone Ög 136 (Brate)

Abstract

This article will analyse the runic text of the Rök runestone, a funerary monument dating from the ninth century, and the story contained in the Sörla þáttr, an Icelandic medieval fourteenth-century text. The mythemes or constitutive elements of both stories will be enumerated in order to observe the parallelism between the passages in the þáttr and certain elements in the text of the Rök runestone, revealing that the fourteenth-century story is the prose version of the runic text.