<bron66.htm> [Bronze Age Text]
|
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). |
