Well done, Dan and Lazarus both!

It was I who made up that inscription. The author contacted Óskar and me,
presumably after hitting 'Old Norse' into a search engine, and asked for the
phrases "Two brothers built this house. Somerled carved these runes." translated
into Old Norse and written with runes.

I would have brought the problem to the list - but the time was too short;
the author's deadline was only a few days away.

I inquired back what time and place the runes should be from and got
"Norway, mid-8th century". Unfortunately there are very few inscriptions
preserved from that time. The closest long inscriptions are probably
the Norwegian Eggjum slab, around 700, and the Swedish Rök and Sparlösa
stones from around 800. Both Eggjum and Sparlösa use the shape that later
was used for 'hagall' to represent 'a'. All three inscriptions use some
runes from the older futhark.

Doing some more research it seems that the last runes from the older futhark
to go out of use were 'm', 'h' and 'a'. I decided to use those but make do
with younger runes for the rest.

Óskar has a better hand for writing and drawing than I do so I asked him to
write down the inscription I came up with. I suggested to him that he imitated
the style of the Eggjum slab.

As for individual words.

tuaiR - Form from the Rök stone.

bruþr - A known form. I wrestled a bit about whether the 'r' at the
end shouldn't rather be a 'R'. In the end I decided against it. I am still
not quite sure. Originally the family words (brother, father, sister, mother)
have an 'r' and not a 'z'. This can be seen from, for example, their Latin
or English forms. By analogy, however, this 'r' frequently went over to 'R'
in Norse. On the other hand 'R' had a tendency to become 'r' after a dental.
I am also not quite sure if the plural shouldn't have an 'R' even if the
singular doesn't.

karþu - A common form. Found, for example, on the Glavendrup stone. I wrestled
a bit over the vowel - but decided that 'a' was probably better than 'u'.

hus - Can hardly be any other way. Found in some Swedish inscriptions (likhus).

þat - I decided to use this pronoun for 'this' and having it come after the
noun. This is what I think is most appropriate for this time period. Of course
I may be mistaken.

sumarliþi - The ON/Icelandic form of the name 'Somerled' is 'Sumarliði'.
(My brother is sometimes called that, as he was born on the first day of summer.)
I was not certain whether I should use 'r' or 'R' in 'sumar' but decided on 'r'
on the basis of some precedent I have forgotten now. I don't think any Sumarliðar
are known from such an early time - but that doesn't make it impossible that the
name was used back then.

raist - A common well known form.

runaR - A common well known form.

I asked the author how competent the carver of the inscription should be and
she insisted that he should be very competent and get everything right (authors
tend to like their characters). If she hadn't said that I would have made it less
phonologically accurate; perhaps deleted a vowel or two. That would, in my opinion,
have made the inscription more authentic looking.

Would this inscription be considered authentic if it were found on a piece of wood
(preserved for some miracle of circumstance) from the 8th century? I can't be sure
and I don't know everything there is to know but I think so, yes. It's certainly much
more convincing than the Kensington stone and people are still debating that one. :-)

- - -

Lazarus - the practice of separating words with dots or other markings was not
employed at this early time.

> Heilir öll!

Dan - you're mixing your genders here. The form 'heilir' is masculine whereas
'öll' is neuter.

Kveðjur,
Haukur