Rökstenens visuella textstruktur

The overall purpose of this essay is to test whether an improved description can be offered of the reading order of the Rök stone (Ög 136) by the discernment in the text of multisequential structures in addition to monosequential ones (which follow a single reading path through the entire inscription). The study takes as its theoretical basis the emphasis on textual multimodality found in social semiotics. The study focuses on the visual text structure of the Rök stone, although the reading path indicated by the linguistic content is in some contexts used as support. The results from Åkerström 2020 are used to determine which reading orders are found in the text of the Rök stone, employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s model (2006) of the grammar of visual design to investigate visual principles for the signalling of reading order in early Viking Age runic texts. The reading orders discerned in the text of the Rök stone are tested against the model of diverse textual structures formulated by Gunder (2001, 118–29) on the basis of hypertext theory. The text of the Rök stone contains primarily monosequences as well as elements of multisequential structures such as lateral structures and a network structure. The former consists of boundaries between textual elements while the latter entails that several alternative forward reading paths are available from certain elements in the text. If one assumes a correlation between the visual and linguistic structures then it is to be hoped that this description of the textual structure of the Rök stone will provide new possibilities for better understanding its linguistic content. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-438135