Runestones were by and large erected as commemorations of the dead, or as personal boasts, and to a lesser extent to mark claims. Claim markings --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_mark -- were most likely rather carved into anything (a house, a tree or, I'm sure, even smaller stones) and everything scattered about the claim in question that was deemed suitable for the purpose. Permanent enough to last a life time, but not permanent enough to become a burden for future owners of the estate. The Indo-Europeans were certainly well aware of their own mortality, and of the fact that they would not possess any piece of land forever. The memory of a dead person was conversely, however, thought to be more or less immortal.
Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
deyr sjálfr et sama;
ek veit einn,
at aldri deyr:
dómr of dauðan hvern.
- Hávamál
A hint of the importance a person's memory was thought to hold can be derived from observing that the harshest punishment that could be meted out by the Roman senate was the Damnatio Memoriae, Damnation of Memory, which meant the systematic eradication of a person's memory from Roman history. A person thus struck from the rolls of collective remembrance was most likely thought to have suffered a fate far worse than death, and the punishment was also reserved for people who were considered to have brought grave dishonor either to themselves or to the Roman state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_MemoriaeIn the wider Indo-European mythos we also find that the concept of the boundary is often thought to be sacred, with the Roman God Terminus providing a case in point. --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_%28god%29 -- And there is little reason not to assume that the Germanic tribes had similar concepts concerning the sacrality of property. The Westrogothic law devotes a fair amount of time to the subject of property, but, then again, that is both well into Christian times and also a natural preoccupation for any codex of laws, and not necessarily something uniquely Indo-European, nor proof of any special sacrality accorded to the subject.
I notice that both the Swedish and English Wikis stress the importance of the Runestones as claim markers, but I believe that they both misstate the case somewhat. The inscriptions on the stones do not carry functional messages intended to be useful, for example, in the event of a legal dispute -- "So and so owns this from here to there" -- but, rather "So and so lived here or there and did this or that". Both variants would of course overlap and serve the common purpose of marking a
presence, and while that was obviously an important function of the runestone (and of any monument, for that matter) I do not believe that the messages on them were primarily intended to be read by contemporaries, but that they were, rather, intended for posterity.
The principal means of confirming ownership (of land) in traditional Norse society was the oral Odal right. According to the principles of the Odal, a person is entitled to a piece of land if he can cite between three (Frostatingslagen) and six (Gulatingslagen) continuous generations of his own ancestors having lived on the property in question. The Wikis are right insofar as that several runestones confirm this right by making explicit mention of it, most notably perhaps the Nora stone --
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah%C3%A4llen We can thus observe that the functions of remembrance and property overlap, with right to the latter being almost exclusively derived from a very concrete practicing of the former, but I maintain that runestones, unlike boundary stones or a house mark, were not intended as practical or functional markers of ownership. When we flesh out the ancestral worship system I think I can guarantee that the runestones will have their functionalities vastly extended.
So, with all that said, what, then, is the historical basis for the H&H claim pole? None whatsoever, of course.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)