Kulisteinen

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Kulisteinen (The Kuli stone) a stone with runic inscriptions at Kuløy in Smøla municipality, Norway.

For over 900 years the stone had been at Kuløy, but then 1913 it was moved to Vitenskapsmuseet i Trondheim. It had a cross on the broad side, indicating that it was a Christian marker. Then in 1956 curator Aslak Liestøl noticed in that the stone had a runic inscription along the narrow edge. It reads "Tore and Hallvard erected this stone ..." — Tore og Hallvard reiste denne steinen ..., and "(for) twelve winters/years Christianity had been in Norway" — tolv vintre hadde kristendommen vært i Norge.

In the mid-1990s the inscription was subjected to laser scanning and microcartography in an attempt to arrive at a more sure reading. It was then suggested that the word translated "been" (vært) above should be read Old Norse um rétt, and that this could mean that Christianity had "supplied law and order" for twelve years. The runic stone would then have been propaganda for the new religion, Christianity. There are, however, serious paleographic and philological/linguistic problems with the new reading and interpretation.

The Kuli stone is dated to 1034 since it was originally found adjacent to a Viking Age boardwalk dated dendrochronologically to that year, and the two are assumed to be contemporaneous.

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