The only story that I could find of someone actually trying to do just that is vague enough to sound like legend but nonetheless is worth telling. At some point in the stone’s history a farmer was trying to clear the surrounding land so that he could do his farmer thing. He piled wood around the runestone so that he could light the wood, heat the runestone, and then pour cold water on the stone, thinking that the abrupt change in temperature would crack it into pieces for easier removal. The farmer lit the fire, but then a strange wind blew through the burial ground, simultaneously dousing the blaze around the runestone and fanning the flames in the farmer’s direction, burning him alive and/or dead. Insidious death and maleficence, indeed.
A handful of theories attempt to explain what this stone actually is, besides a prompt for imaginative stories of burning death and anti-agriculturism. The first is that it’s a gravestone and that some proto-Viking is buried beneath it. Makes sense. It’s in a burial ground, after all. However, in 1914, the area around the stone was excavated, and no remains were found, which seems to rule out this theory.
The second theory is that it’s a cenotaph — a grave marker memorializing a dead person whose remains are elsewhere, maybe lost at sea or rotting on a foreign battlefield or buried far from home. Makes sense. It’s in a burial ground with no bodies under it.
The third theory is that it’s a shrine dedicated to the All-father Odin. Also makes sense. Vikings, you know?
The final theory is that it’s a mere border marker between the ancient Swedes and their neighbors the ancient Danes. I hope that one’s not true — it’s boring.
All of these theories put the stone’s curse in different contexts. Depending on which is true, the runestone could be protecting the earthly remains or memory of a dead person, protecting against blasphemy against the gods, or protecting the sanctity of borders.
Or the inscription could have been a common phrase. A proto-meme, perhaps. I say this because, about thirty-five miles west of the Björketorp Runestone, another stone was found with almost the exact same curse in the exact same ancient runic language engraved on its surface: the Stentoften Runestone. The Stentoften Runestone doesn’t break any records in height, and is more oblong in shape, but its connection to the Björketorp Runestone is clear. It was discovered by a priest in 1823. He found it facedown and surrounded by five other stones in the shape of a pentagram, an arrangement which might have been intended to ward off evil beings like trolls. These days, the Stentoften Runestone can also be found in Blekinge county, at a church in Sölvesborg — a holy house surrounding a hellish curse.
There are a lot of runestones around the world in a lot of different languages. But few are as surly as the Björketorp Runestone, which is a giant middle finger of a cursed object jutting out of the ground in a forest. That’s Vikings for you.
The Tomb of Timur
CURRENT LOCATION:
SAMARKAND, UZBEKISTAN
Significance:
BURIAL SITE OF TIMUR, THE LEGENDARY CONQUEROR
AGE:
∼650 YEARS
ALSO KNOWN AS:
GUR-E-AMIR (TOMB OF THE KING)
Timur was the scourge of central Asia during the late fourteenth century. In three and a half decades, he conquered the region, massacring entire populations, destroying cities, and constructing towers from the skulls of his victims.
He also might have sicced Adolf Hitler on Russia six hundred years later by cursing his own tomb. We’ll get to that.
Timur was born around 1336 in Transoxiana, now modern-day Uzbekistan. He was the son of Taragay, the leader of one of central Asia’s many tribes, and lived in a tumultuous time, with those tribes fighting and jockeying for power. Timur was particularly ambitious and bloodthirsty, and after starting his career as a mercenary solider, he began forming alliances, finding a following, and eventually became the ultimate military force in the land.
He positioned himself as a descendant of Genghis Khan and then tried to outdo the Mongol leader in sheer ruthlessness and ambition. He conquered much of the Asian continent during his time in power, starting with Transoxiana. His empire eventually extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Himalayas and from the Caucasus to the Arabian Sea. In many instances he did more than defeat. He decimated. Some estimates put his death toll at nineteen million. That’s a lot of skull towers.
But he was also a patron of the arts and sciences. He filled Samarkand, the capital of his empire, with scholars and artists and physicians and scientists from all the lands he conquered. He also commissioned amazing feats of architecture, such as Registan Square. He didn’t spend too much time in his capital among his beautiful buildings, though. He preferred the tent city of his army and was too busy conquering other places to dally long in palaces.
His fame spread into Europe, where he was called Tamerlane, which means Timur the Lame, due to injuries to his right hand and leg that he sustained during his days as a soldier.
In the winter of 1405 he was on his way to add China to his empire when he died en route in Kazakhstan, at the age of sixty-eight. His body was brought to Samarkand and interred. The Timurid empire would last for less than a hundred years after Timur’s death, but the man’s notoriety as a vicious vanquisher was permanent-markered in the history books.
Except in Uzbekistan. They love him in Uzbekistan. His homeland erected multiple statues of the conqueror, some of them in god-sized dimensions, positioning him as a cultural unifier in a multifarious culture that had to remake itself after the dissolution of the USSR.
They also still have his body. Timur’s tomb in Samarkand is called Gur-e-Amir — Tomb of the King. The most prominent feature of the mausoleum is its large, ribbed, sky-blue dome. On either side of that dome are massive freestanding pillars jutting into the sky like tusks. The terra-cotta building is covered in blue and white tiles arranged in intricate patterns and mosaics. It’s both simple and extravagant.
The first clue that Timur left behind a curse was revealed three and a half centuries later. In 1740 a warlord named Nadir Shah stole the slab of black jade that Timur had been buried under and took it back to his home in Persia. Somehow the slab broke in two, and it is said that Nadir Shah suffered bad luck from that point on, until he was convinced to return the slab to Samarkand.
Almost two hundred years later, in 1924, Uzbekistan became part of the domain of the USSR. Then, on June 19, 1941, the curse story got more interesting. Soviet archeologists became curious about the conqueror’s tomb, so they exhumed Timur’s body under orders from Joseph Stalin, despite protests by the citizens of Samarkand.
The team was led by anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov. They discovered was a body that was 5 feet 6 inches tall, with wounds in its right hip and two fingers missing from the right hand, validating Timur’s nickname, Tamerlane. Later they would ship his remains to Moscow to reconstruct his facial features based on his skull, a technique that Gerasimov pioneered.