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good father, good son or good brother as if people were never good in their capacity
as thanes, youngsters, men or masters.
Östergötland fits into the shift of usage from Västergötland to Uppland (Fig. 28),
linked as it is to a specific use of appellative nouns (Figs 29a and b), and stylistically
the stones in Östergötland represent early as well as later parts of the rune-stone
period, but when it comes to brothers, people in Östergötland seem to have found it
difficult to connect brotherhood in itself with goodness. This leads to the conclusion
that the texts fulfil part of a South Scandinavian tradition while at the same time
recognising a different one belonging to Middle Scandinavia. Among several possible
explanations for this fact it seems fair to suggest that the equality between brothers
was so great that the prevailing meaning of the word good did not apply to
brotherhood in itself in a transititory period when good was remembered originally to
have been connected with some sort of social behaviour by means of which people
of at least somewhat different social status, and not otherwise attached to each other,
were mutually connected. This in its turn signifies a prevailing non-Christian ideology
and ideal of goodness, since if we have once fully understood the Christian ideal of
goodness as a disposition in man, a concept often linked to love, then brothers as
well as anybody else may be good in the sense ‘my good (i.e., peaceful, meek,
loving) brother’.
A quotation from Finnur Jónsson’s article in Politiken (1926) casts light on the
peculiar problem that fathers, but not brothers, may be good in Östergötland. Observing
that stones erected by a brother after a brother were common in the Danish
material Jónsson wrote:
70
Figure 27. The rune stone
distribution in and around
Århus (based on Jacobsen
and Moltke 1941–42;
Randsborg 1980; Stoklund
1991). In a way similar to
the Sigtuna situation the
town attracts rune stones
and creates an empty space
around itself and a rural
satelite centre in the
Mammen area.