Westeremden yew-stick


The Westeremden yew-stick is a yew-wood stick found in Westeremden in the Groningen province of the Netherlands in 1917.
It bears an Old Frisian runic inscription, dated to the second half of the 8th century.
With a total of 41 letters, this is the longest of the extant Frisian runic inscriptions.

Transliteration

The inscription is divided into three lines, as follows:
Runes with unfamiliar shapes or uncertain values are:
with these decisions, the transliteration may be:

Interpretations

Seebold reads :
Looijenga reads:
This reading gives rise to an interpretation along the lines of
or paraphrased more loosely, "At the homestead stays good fortune, may it also grow near the yew on the terp; Wimœd owns this."
In a controversial suggestion going back to 1937,
the sequence æmluþ has often been interpreted as a reference to Amleth.
The inscription is here interpreted as
and given the translation
The association has led to speculative proposals to the point that Quak called for a re-examination for the inscription with the ironic caveat "maybe disregarding associations with Hamlet or Amluth".