ABSTRACT
It may seem anachronistic, to say the least, to consider a Swedish rune stone from ca. 800 AD as a specimen of a nation-building children's text. Histories of children's literature tend to begin in the eighteenth century, or at least with print culture. And the ability to imagine the nation as a community is according to Benedict Anderson (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm (1992) a consequence of paradigmatic social, political, and technical changes in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, neither children's literature, as a print genre written to please a child audience, nor nations in the modern sense existed before this. However, older cultural manifestations can be (and often are) recuperated and find a place within a more recent ideological framework (in this case nationalist and child-oriented). Rune stones served nation-building purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the Viking age has continued to inspire a great deal of children's literature. In passing I will say something about how archaic texts were used in the construction of a national literature, and as children's literature. Yet, my main concern in this chapter is something else. I want to address the more precarious question of how one particular rune inscription, the Rök stone, can be seen as constructing a child reader and a nation already when the runes were cut into the rock 1,200 years ago. The risk of misinterpretation is certainly great—there is so much we do not know about the context, or about the cryptic inscription itself—but even so, I believe that the endeavour itself is useful and can shed light on the ways in which childhood and nation may be written.
