Kuli-steinen og landsnamnet Noreg

Jan Ragnar Hagland argued in volume 32 of this journal that the runic inscription on the Kuli stone, which provides the ear-liest Norwegian attestation of the toponym Norway, extends the late medieval duality of the second element as -vegr or -ríki (as discussed by Helge Sandøy in 1997) back to the late Viking Age. Hagland’s new readings of the inscription in 1998 have, how-ever, not been generally accepted. They were based on laser contour measurements of the stone surface which were topo-graphically coarse and resulted in microcartographic documen-tation that no longer satisfies modern requirements. A mistake made in connection with the deletion of overlapping between the data files containing the laser measurements led to a mis-reading by Hagland of nuriki as nu:riki. The punctuation which supposedly divided this toponym is not a subtle indication that the final element was -ríki, as Hagland suspected; it is rather a fallacious double reading of the branch on the u-rune due to the overlapping of data files. The inscription does not appear to contain any e-rune either, so Hagland’s other possible support for the interpretation -ríki is probably likewise nonexistent