<bron66.htm>     [Bronze Age Text]

 

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          The king gives us the name of his ship after identifying himself.  The symbols for "spear" and "ship" are determinatives, telling us the category of objects to which each of the alphabetic names applies.  Thus GN-GN-N-R (Old Norse gungnir) is a spear, in this case the famous magic spear of the sky god Woden. The name is subsequently applied to a ship, shown hieroglyphically by a pictograph of a ship.  The inscription is read from bottom to top, each line reading from left to right, as follows:

 

1.  Skip niman (A ship he took)

2.  A-Gungnir war nefn (In-honor-of-Gungnir was its name).

 

          Thus, the Norwegian vessel Gungnir is the earliest ship known by name to have reached the Americas.  This ship sailed the St. Lawrence River, and was commanded

by Woden-lithi, High King of Ringerike, the ancient capital of Norway.

 

          The section of Woden-lithi's text shown above is located about 18 feet southwest of the main sun-god figure at Peterborough, Ontario (Fell 1982).

 

          Credits