<bron66.htm>
[Bronze Age Text]
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The king gives us the name of his ship after identifying himself. The symbols for "spear" and "ship" are
determinatives, telling us the category of objects to which each of the
alphabetic names applies. Thus
GN-GN-N-R (Old Norse gungnir) is a
spear, in this case the famous magic spear of the sky god Woden. The name is
subsequently applied to a ship, shown hieroglyphically by a pictograph of a ship. The inscription is read from bottom to
top, each line reading from left to right, as follows: 1. Skip niman (A ship he took) 2. A-Gungnir war nefn (In-honor-of-Gungnir was its name).
Thus, the Norwegian vessel Gungnir
is the earliest ship known by name to have reached the Americas. This ship sailed the St. Lawrence River,
and was commanded by Woden-lithi, High King of Ringerike, the
ancient capital of Norway. The section of Woden-lithi's text shown above is located about 18 feet southwest of the main sun-god figure at Peterborough, Ontario (Fell 1982). |
