cimorene

I've been thinking about the work of David Jones more and I started wondering about what medieval written Swedish looked like, because David Jones's painted inscriptions have a lot of Welsh and Latin in them, neither of which I understand, but Swedish has some Scandies whose forms have evolved over time (Å was originally aa, Ö was originally oe, and Ä was originally æ), plus old Norse obviously had ð and þ as well and I wasn't sure when those disappeared.

So today I started down the rabbit hole looking for these, first in medieval documents written in Swedish, and then because they were completely the wrong kinds of letter forms, in medieval Swedish gravestones. I should've looked there to begin with. I knew David Jones collected his own rubbings of medieval gravestones from around Wales. It took me some time to find search terms that would work, but eventually, with

waxjism's help, I was able to find some (the keyword is "gravhäll", when today they're called "gravsten". Or at least I think they are, maybe they're just usually called that).

The result of this was me ecstatically tugging Wax's sleeve and practically shouting "I've just found my favorite early modern Swedish gravestone!" To be fair, the letterforms of DIG031896, chamber 1, from Alsike church in Uppland are absolutely the cutest I saw today out of a bunch of Swedish and Finnish gravestones, WITH several exotic bonuses:

It contains multiple forms of E, that is, a straight-backed and a curve-backed uppercase E! A lot of the stones I saw have just straight back ones!

The first X I've seen so far!

A W, which isn't the first I've seen but is still quite rare!

The cutest G.

It contains a J. In this period a lot of stones just use I instead of J!

I can't read the top couple of lines at all, I mean, I can't even figure out what all the characters are. But the rest is in Latin, so I can't REALLY read it either anyway.