Gotlandic Picture Stones in European Contexts and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The Second Picture Stone Symposium, Visby, 22–26 August 2022

Image coming soon

Extent: 398 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Medieval Studies

Series: The Archaeology of Northern Europe

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2026)

ISBN: 9782503617824

Price: $207.00

The chapters of this volume are devoted to archaeological, art-historical and religious-historical aspects, with a focus on the wider Scandinavian and European contexts of these unique monuments.


The richly decorated memorial stones from the Migration Period to the Late Viking Age on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland are among the best-known and most iconic monuments of early Swedish history, and represent a unique source for the cultural and religious history of the ancient North. The countless figurative, and often narrative, depictions on these stone slabs offer valuable insights into the cult of the dead, beliefs in the afterlife, and the mythology of periods whose mental landscapes would otherwise remain largely inaccessible today due to the absence of contemporary literary sources. The monuments provide an excellent source for the study of Late Iron Age material culture, while their images and ornaments reflect extensive supraregional networks. This comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume, based on research first presented at the Second Picture Stone Symposium in Visby in August 2022, presents the most up-to-date scholarship on these remarkable monuments from across a range of disciplines, drawing not only on archaeology but also on art history, history of religion, Old Norse philology and runology, and digital archaeology and geology. Together, these chapters offer new insights into the role of the Gotland picture stones within broader European contexts.