Kvinneby amulet
an 11th-century runic amulet
The Kvinneby amulet (Öl SAS1989;43) is an 11th-century runic amulet found in the mid-1950s buried in the village of Södra Kvinneby in Öland, Sweden. The amulet is believed to date from roughly 1050–1130 CE. The amulet is a square copper plate measuring approximately 5 cm on each side. Near one edge there is a small hole, presumably used for hanging it around the neck.
Inscription
The inscription consists of some 143 runes, written boustrophedon, supplemented by an engraving of a fish; the relevance of the fish to the text is unclear.
The inscription is one of the longest and best preserved for its time but it has proven hard to interpret. The “official” Rundata interpretation is:
Here I carve(d) protection for you, Bófi, with/… … … to you is certain. And may the lightning hold all evil away from Bófi. May Þórr protect him with that hammer which came from out of the sea. Flee from evilness! You/it get/gets nothing from Bófi.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6449763. Authority coordinates are 56.497, 16.581. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1050 and 1130.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kvinneby amulet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.