"The runic inscription is written in a vertical direction on a stone
monument. The inscription on the Kuli stone from Smöla in Norðmoeri
was written the death of King Saint Olav." (see Norwegian Runic In-
scriptions, Arild Hauge's rune pages).

I discovered this inscription yesterday while looking for evidence
about vowels. You can read it on one Arild Hauge's fine pages about
runic inscriptions. My transliteration is as follows:

tualf uintr hafþi kristintumr uirit i nurigi
þurir auk haluarþr raistu stain þinsi aft ulfliut

tólf vetr hafði kristindómr verið í Noregi
Þórir ok Hallvarðr reistu stein þenna/þensa eft(ir) úlfljót

twelve winters had Christiandom been in Norway
Þórir and Hallvarðr raised stone this after Úlfliótr

This inscription offers, in my opinion, very valuable information
about the quality of the last spoken West Norse of the pre-Christian
period. Like others inscriptions, it shows that the language of the
earliest Latin-character writing in old West Norse is substantially
unchanged from that of a century earlier. The few differences that
can be seen, however, are very important - understanding them will
enable us to effectively show what Old Norse actually looked like
during the last pre-Judeo-Roman period. This inscription dates to 12
years after the death of Ólafr Helgi Haraldsson, which is too early
for the language to have undergone much of a change from pre-Judeo-
Roman times. By combining inscriptions like this one with the evid-
ence provided by Old Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese (which are
almost identical in their earliest documented stages), we can arrive
at the earliest pre-Judeo-Roman speech which is both comprehensible
to us and reproducable without having to resort to recreating forms
not otherwise preserved in writing. In reality, this language shows
very few differences from the language seen in the earliest extant
records in Latin-characters. About the inscription above, notice the
following: 1) tólf (12) is spelled 'tualf' (=tuálf/tválf - v/u is a
bi-labial fricative, voiced in this position) 2) vetr (winter) is
spelled 'uintr' (=uintr/vintr) - this tells us something about N in
similar positions 3) noregi (here dative) is spelled 'nurigi' - but
this last form can be shown to be either misspelled or a late form
(Ari Fróði writes 'Norvegr' (the E is 'natural') in the early 12th
century and Old English borrowed it with medial þ/ð early on during
the Viking Age). Combining the evidence, we get the following forms
for the most conservative fully-attested West Norse:

vintr (uintr) winter
tválf (tualf) twelve
norðvegr (nurþuigr) norway

In other words, the same language in a slightly older form. Knowing
these things does not only tell us what Ólafr 1 & 2 sounded like, it
also tells us what the farmers they martyred sounded like - this is
the part that I find most precious.

More about this inscription later.
What are your thoughts?

Kveðja,
Konráð.