Sweden

Sweden's contribution to the Norse end is the runic record, earlier than the manuscripts by two centuries or more. The Rök stone, raised in Östergötland around 800, is the longest known runic inscription, and a central passage turns on a prophecy of a great conflict and "twelve war-gods," language that later readers have tied to the end-times vocabulary of the North. Henrik Williams and others treat the stone as evidence that the imagery of a final battle was current in the Swedish mainland long before Snorri wrote it down in Iceland.

The Ledberg stone carries a bound-animal motif that several scholars connect to the chaining of Fenrir, the wolf whose breaking of his bonds begins Ragnarök. Whether or not the identification is exact, the stones show the end-times figures circulating as carved public statements on the Swedish landscape, which is the same point made by the Danish and Norwegian evidence from the other side of the Kattegat.

The comparative weight is chronology. The poems that describe the end were composed in an oral culture and fixed on vellum only in the thirteenth century; the Swedish stones put the expectation into permanent form around 800 and 1000, so the belief demonstrably predates its written narrative by centuries. The sequence is set out in Ragnarök and Norse Eschatology, the central inscription in Rök Runestone (Ög 136), and the wolf in Fenrir. The worth of the Swedish stones is chronological: they are the earliest hard evidence that the North already knew how its world would end while the story was still being sung.