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The Rök runestone from central middle Sweden, dated to around 800 CE, is famous, among other things, for a supposed reference to the emperor Theodo­ric the Great. This study proposes instead that the inscription deals with an anxiety triggered by a son’s death and the fear of a new climate crisis similar to the catastrophic one after 536 CE. Combining perspectives and findings from semiotics, philology, archaeology, and history of religion, the study presents a completely new interpretation which follows a unified theme, showing how the monument can be understood in the socio-cultural and religious context of early Viking Age Scandinavia. The inscription consists, according to the pro­posed interpretation, of nine enigmatic questions. Five of the questions con­cern the sun, and four of them, it is argued, ask about issues related to the god Odin. A central finding is that there are relevant parallels to the inscription in early Scandinavian poetry, especially in the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál.

The popular notion of social collapse consequent on natural catastrophe is here elegantly disentangled in a study of the dark summer of AD 536 Leaving aside the question of its cause, the authors show there is good scientific evidence for a climatic downturn, contemporary with good archaeological evidence for widespread disruption of settlement and population displacement in the northern latitudes. They then navigate through the shifting shadows of myth, and emerge with a welcome prize: strong circumstantial reasons for recognising that this widespread horror, like so many others, did leave its imprint on Scandinavian poetry and sculpture.

The paper deals with Grahame Clark´s heavy commitments in Scandinavian archaeology all through his career. The rich Danish Mesolithic bog sítes opened his eyes for the possibility of finding Stone Age wetland sites also in Britain and of the archaeological potential of botany and other palaeo-environmental methods developed earlier in Scandinavia. Within short Clark blossomed out as the leading environmentalist of Stone Age research in north-western Europe. He did so thanks to his talent for both inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary work and by means of well planned fieldwork and publishing and through a stream of well-argued articles and books about almost eveery aspect of Stone age life in the area. The author also tries to characterize Clark as an archaeologist both against the background of his time and as a scholar in general.