期刊名称：Futhark : International Journal of Runic Studies
电子版ISSN：1892-0950
出版年度：2010
期号：1
页码：225-248
出版社：University of Oslo & Uppsala University
摘要：Some 20 % of documented Scandinavian runestones are now considered to be lost. Several of these are known to have been reused as building material in bridges or churches, or simply as rubble. Others have been destroyed due to ignorance, negligence, misunderstanding and the like. Thus, many runic scholars have had to deal with information from lost inscriptions in their research. Some scholars, in fact, seem to find unverifiable inscriptions more suitable for elucidating their speculations than surviving runic texts, but that is another story. In this paper I shall take a closer look at the unusually high number of lost runestones that were reported by antiquarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The list includes a variety of inscriptions ranging from stones that were reported only once before they disappeared to highly valued runic monuments which have vanished since they were investigated and debated by our predecessors 300–400 years ago. After working with several of these inscriptions, I have become convinced that quite a few of them represent interpretations of various kinds and have no real existence. In this paper I term such inscriptions “phantom”. It is my hope to persuade fellow scholars to look more closely into the find history of runic inscriptions in general. Although I shall be warning here against misleading information from phantom inscriptions which may accumulate in dictionaries and surveys of runic material, it must also
