ABSTRACT
IT was a very ancient custom of the old Götar and Swedes to set upright stones, in the manner of Egyptian pyramids, wherever they had undertaken and successfully accomplished their fiercer fights, either on the plains or in the mountains. They thought that by carving some brief inscription of such famous deeds on the stones, they were perpetuating the memory of these men’s names and exploits; similarly, by the custom of those times songs composed in rhythmic stanzas and handed down uninterruptedly through the centuries till the present day have transmitted an account of those feats to posterity. In the regions of the North stand very hard mountains, grey in colour and far surpassing marble in their toughness. 1 Very often these are shaken so vigorously by an earthquake, lightning, or other natural shock, that rocks are broken away and, falling downhill, take on a particular shape, some with a pointed top, some of a squared pillar, and some of cubes and obelisks, as if they had been fashioned by the extraordinary craftmanship of Nature, so that it would seem idle and useless to add anything more to them. These pillars were first extracted from the earth and set up by giants on flat ground or in higher places, some marked with writings, others engraved. Virgil in the Aeneid bears witness to such giants 2 when he writes: Scarcely could the necks of twelve picked men support it, Men of such frame as the earth now engenders. 3
High mountains
Fragments become obelisks
Giants
