Stone the Crow...

 Apologies for the terrible title of today's post, but it made me smile.

With the new chisel arriving this morning, I decided to get on straight away with the plan of making a first, tentative, small piece of inscription. I chose the schematic portrait of my storm-god Hrefni in his raven form:

and sketched it onto a suitable sized piece of stone. Things began a bit heavy-handed as I've never handled a proper chisel in this way before, but it soon became clear that the relative softness of the stone (sandstone, I'm assuming, as it seems to be of a similar appearance to the local ancient monumental stones) allowed me to scratch quite heavily, using the edge of the chisel and no hammer, guidelines deep enough to allow the deeper hammered work to follow the correct path and not meander off on a journey of its own - which is what accounted for the very rough, jagged initial outlines:

 

I gave up on the double outline idea as there wasn't enough space (with a bigger stone and thicker chiselled lines it would work) but was able to work up reasonable embellishments around the eye. The space remaining on the stone allowed me to add a lightning bolt through the beak, and in the bottom right I improvised the very first Rune in the mythical alphabet - like those in the real world, these have magical and mystic associations and this one is simply 'Hrefni', a pictographic schematic of the god himself (verical standing figure with prominent beak, which could also be read as a lightning strike):

Having defined one Rune, I believe I can now go on and sketch more - the most important elements in these people's lives being the gods, I feel they should be the first to be represented, meaning the sun-goddess Gydena would be the equivalent of 'A', followed by Hrefni above, and then the rest of the gods. 

What purpose might such an object as this stone serve? As I was scratching away at it, it made me think of the kind of votive offerings made by people throughout known history. An unskilled craftsman (such as I am), seeking Hrefni's favour for something or other ("less storms please for the harvest", "grant me victory in my coming battle", etc.), would definitely be inclined to make such a thing, spending several hours of time (probably muttering prayers to the deity as he did so) before setting the finished item in its rightful place, either a public space of worship or in a prominent part of the household or hall reserved for such purposes. So, we have our first relic from Gyldland: 'Hrefni votive stone #1'.