The Speech of Spindle Whorls: Words on Things and Things in Words

In the autumn of 1880, a spindle whorl made from a soft, green claystone was found in a vegetable garden at the farm of Hruni in southern Iceland. The priest at the farm, Jóhann Briem, donated it to the National Museum the following year (Þmjs. 1933/1881–69), remarking that it was the first such artefact to spring from this spot, even though the ground had been cultivated for 60 years. However, the remarkable thing about this object was what had been inscribed on one side of the spindle whorl: Thora owns me (ÞÓRA Á MIG) in runic letters. The archaeologist Kristján Eldjárn wrote about this object years later in one of his many essays, and he uses it as a device for reflecting generally on the anonymity of most archaeological finds. Despite acknowledging the value of artefacts as sources on culture history regardless of their connection to specific people, he could not resist tying this particular find to a historically known individual—in this case, Þóra Guðmundardóttir who lived at Hruni in the 13th century which fell within the known date range for this kind of object.