Bornholm

I Det öppna och det fördolda undersöker runforskare användningen av runor på Öland, Gotland och Bornholm i olika sociala miljöer från senvikingatid till efterreformatorisk tid. Temat är hur runor i vissa sammanhang använts öppet och publikt, för alla att se och betrakta — såsom på kyrkväggar, runstenar och gravhällar — och under andra omständigheter mer dolt och diskret, som i hopvikta amuletter. Därtill publiceras för första gången Carl Säves anteckningar från en forskningsresa till Bornholm 1865 tillsammans med professor George Stephens och tecknaren Julius Magnus Petersen.

This text is not by me but by Samuel Edquist. It is a good read for those who want to study Gotland's history.

It's a chapter from the book 'Islands of identity' published by Södertörns högskola, 2015. 418 pages. Serie: Södertörn Academic Studies, 1650-433X ; 59. ISBN 978-91-86069-98-8.
"Gotland, Åland, Saaremaa, Hiiumaa and Bornholm are five island regions in the Baltic Sea which constitute, or have until recently constituted, provinces or counties of their own."
Read about it and download: here:https://bibl.sh.se/skriftserier/hogskolans_skriftserier/Islands_of_Identity/diva2_784146.aspx

Öland, Gotland och Bornholm har var och en sina egna seder och sitt eget runbruk. Öarna har tillsammans knappt 700 runfynd1, men de är mycket ojämnt fördelade över tid, rum och karaktär. Här presenteras en pågående studie om runbruk på Östersjöns öar, där runornas förekomst och användning på Öland, Gotland och Bornholm sätts i relation till varandra2. Syftet är att jämföra öarnas för-bindelser och särart ur ett runforskningsperspektiv, med hjälp av runologi, arkeologi och nya analys- och doku-mentationsmetoder.

On the Baltic islands of Öland, Gotland and Bornholm, people seem to have cherished differing views on what runes should be used for. Runes have been found used on different categories of objects and in different contexts.
It is clear that people on Öland, Gotland, and Bornholm had different notions regarding the proper use of runes during the Viking Age. While the tradition of runestone carving is common (though with evidence for local variation) to all of the islands, when it comes to their use on personal objects these traditions clearly differed. Runic writing was used on many kinds of objects on Gotland, whereas it is much more restricted on Öland and Bornholm. Runic competence may have been limited on Bornholm, where runic inscriptions are basically restricted to runestones and amulets, while the use of runes was an everyday custom on Gotland. Judging by the dearth of amulets in contrast to Bornholm, they may have been considered to lack a magic aura. Finally the uses of runes on Öland, where we find runic plates along with other objects, may have been more mixed and ambivalent.

In 2017, eight runestones on Bornholm were scanned in 3D and the microtopography of the grooves was analysed by multivariate statistical methods. One of the stones was previously not known to runo-logical research. The aim of this paper is to compare the carving technique of the Bornholm runestones with runestones from Swedish regions to shed light on old issues concerning Bornholm's links with other regions in and around the Baltic Sea. The rune carvers are important agents in this, as the runestones are often related to issues including landholding, Christianization, possible Swedish influences, and the inclusion of Bornholm into the Danish realm. In addition, rune carvers as native writers were intimately connected to the introduction of literacy. The results of this study indicate that the rune carvers did not cooperate much with carvers from the islands of Öland and Gotland, whereas Södermanland, among the Swedish mainland provinces, was their first choice.

During the spring of 1706 about 4000 prisoners of war had been taken by the Swedish army during the campaign in Lithuania. Among the prisoners there were Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and Ukrainian Cossacks. During the summer the prisoners followed the Swedish army westwards to Poland. While the Swedish army entered Saxony the prisoners were moved up to Swedish Pomerania. Many of the prisoners had fallen ill and died on the way and others had managed to escape. In early September 1706 about 800 prisoners had arrived to Stettin and preparations were made for the transport of the prisoners over to mainland Sweden. The first transport ship with 217 prisoners left Wolgast on October 4 and arrived five days later in Kalmar (according to the Gregorian calendar). On October 12 another transport ship with 258 prisoners left the harbour of Wolgast, also with Kalmar as its destination. Hower this ship never reached its final destination. The ship had sailed north from Wolgast with fairly strong winds and reached the Danish island of Bornholm already at four o'clock in the afternoon. Two hours later the ship had stranded outside the fishing village of Snogebæk. The crew tried to get the ship free but with no success. The next day they got help from the fishermen in Snogebæk to unload the ship. The crew, the military guards and prisoners were all saved. But what would now happen with them on the Danish island of Bornholm. Denmark was formally a neutral country in the ongoing Great Northern War, but at the same time they had close ties with both Saxony and Russia. And now Swedish militaries were standing on Danish soil and with them were prisoners from Poland, Lithuania, Russia and the Ukrainian Hetmanate. This article deals with what happened next in the diplomatic complications that followed and the fate of the prisoners.

(in Danish) Et knapt 2000 år gammelt dragtspænde udformet som en ugle, der stirrer på beskueren med enorme, orange øjne, blev fundet ved udgravning af bebyggelse fra Romersk jernalder ved Nexø på Bornholm. Der er tale om en s.k. dyreformet emaljefibel. Spændet er fremstillet i egnene langs den romerske
grænse, Limes, ved Donau og Rhinen, sandsynligvis i
oldtidens Köln, Mainz eller Trier. Spændet er helt usædvanligt og formentlig kommet til Bornholm med en bornholmer, som har tjent i den romerske hær. Denne antagelse understøttes af romerske møntfund fra pladsen, som er usædvanligt velbevaret med store fundmængder, metertykke kulturlag og bevarede lag af lerklining fra bygningernes vægge.

Baunegaard - graves from Late Roman and Early Germanic Iron Age

A review of a burial site from c. late 2. Century to 4./5. Century AD on the island of Bornholm. The site was excavated in 1884 somewhat unprofessionally. The 20 graves were clustered in two groups close to an older mound. Of the 20 graves 9 were cremations with a sparse inventory. Of the inhumations especailly one was richly equipped with a leather belt, sword, shield, spear and lance, an awl, a gold finger ring and a ceramic pitcher.

[St. Salomon’s Chapel - Possible traces of Dominicans on medieval Bornholm]

On the northern-most tip of the Baltic island Bornholm stand the ruins of a medieval church building called “St. Salomon’s Chapel”. The architecture can be dated to the fourteenth century, which fits well with the only extant written record about it, dating from 3 February 1379, when Archbishop Niels Jonsen of Lund bequeathed a silver spoon to the “capelle sancti Salomonis” on Bornholm. The chapel is situated out by the coastline and does not seem to have ever been part of the parochial system of the island. It is therefore believed that it functioned as market chapel for one of the many seasonal herring markets scattered all around especially this part of the Baltic Sea in the late Middle Ages, perhaps in combination with a spring (‘Salomon’s Well’) situated just outside of the chapel.

One problem remains, however: Who is St. Salomon? The famous Jewish king Solomon (Salomon in Danish) was, despite all his ascribed virtues, hardly to be considered a saint in late medieval Christianity, and no other saintly dedications to him or any name-sakes are, to my knowledge, known from elsewhere in Scandinavia. The dedication has therefore traditionally been explained as “some unknown, local saint”, until the editors of “Danmarks Kirker” [Churches of Denmark] from the National Museum of Denmark apparently felt that they had to come up with some educated guess, when they published the volume on Bornholm in 1954. The most likely candidate of this name, to their finding, was an Italian Dominican, the blessed Giacomo Salomoni de Venezia (1231-1314); thus, he is also the suggested St. Salomon to be found on the sign put up by the National Heritage Agency next to the chapel ruins today.

It does, however, not seem all that likely to me that a blessed Dominican friar, whose medieval cult was otherwise only celebrated in the district of Venice, and not even officially recognized by his own order until 1622, should have got a chapel named after him shortly after his death, on a remote island in the other end of Europe? In this article I therefore suggest another Dominican Friar Salomon as a possible and to me more likely candidate: the Salomon of Århus, who according to a local Dominican chronicle was sent by St. Dominic himself as the first friar to introduce the Dominican Order in Denmark, where he brought about the first Dominican convent foundation in Scandinavia in Lund in 1221. Although we have no extant material suggesting that Salomon was ever venerated as a saint or even a blessed (apart from the existence of the chronicle itself), it is not unlikely that the Dominican convent in Lund, to whom Bornholm most likely belonged in terms of “terminario” districts, could have tried to promote their pioneer brother as one to be honoured. During Friar Salomon’s voyage to Scandinavia, the chronicle states, his ship was caught by a terrible storm and only survived due to Salomon’s prayers and the interception of the then recently deceased Dominic. Thus, Salomon could be considered an obvious blessed to call upon for the seafaring visitors of a Baltic herring-market chapel, not least if this was administered by Dominican friars from Lund. Still, this thesis only remains one more qualified(?) guess about the true identity of St. Salomon of Bornholm.

The article is written in Danish and published in‘Bornholmske Samlinger’ 2009, (Rønne: Bornholms Historiske Samfund, 2009), pp. 118-143.

Today, at least 300 cremation cemeteries from the Early Iron Age are known from Bornholm, but only a small part has been published. Bornholm has always - not least in Early Iron Age - been an obvious link between the Continent and Scandinavia. The newly established project "Bornholm - the island in the middle" aims to shed light on societies, contacts and alliance systems in the Baltic Sea region in the Early Iron Age, based on an analysis and presentation of Bornholm’s largest cremation cemetery, Store Frigård with 1256 graves. The article introduces the cemetery and two graves from the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age. One grave contains a T-fibula, a ball-fibula with wide spring and a belt hook of presumably Becker type F and is dated to the oldest part of Martens' IIB/Nørre Sandegård phase 2. The other grave is equipped with the bronze decoration for a fibula with wide true spring and is considered to be slightly older. The fibulas of both graves are types also found or closely related to types elsewhere in the Baltic Sea region, especially Gotland and Northern Poland.

The runestones on Bornholm have for a long time aroused discussion due to their singular character and dating as compared to most runestones in other parts of Denmark. In this paper, the relations between sponsors and rune carvers have been investigated through analysis of the carving technique by means of the first 3D-scanning and multivariate statistical analysis ever carried out on the Danish runestone material. The results indicate that the carvers were attached to the sponsor families and that the carvers were probably members of those families. During the fieldwork, a fragment of a previously unknown runestone was documented in the church of St. Knud.

På det sydvestlige Bornholm ligger fiskerlejet Arnager, der i litteraturen ikke har været skænket megen opmærksomhed, men som på original-1-kortet giver indtryk af at være et dyrkningsfællesskab. Dyrkningsfællesskaber er ellers ukendte på Bornholm, som derved skiller sig markant ud fra resten af Danmark i sin bebyggelsesstruktur. Denne artikel undersøger, hvorvidt fiskerlejet kan betragtes som et dyrkningsfællesskab med udgangspunkt i original-1-kortet og diverse skriftlige kilder. Undersøgelsen er således også et eksempel på, hvor meget information, der kan trækkes ud af original-1-kortet som kilde, når dette sammenholdes med både yngre og ældre kortkilder. I undersøgelsen inddrages områdets bonitet og stednavnestof, og der redegøres for den lokale anvendelse af betegnelsen ’stæl’, der er essentiel for forståelsen af jord-delingen i fiskerlejets vang.