Elisabeth Svärdström (1909–2007)

Elisabeth Svärdström was born in Stockholm, Sweden and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1930. She studied Nordic languages as well as ancient history and worked at the National Museum of History and the National Heritage Board to complete her doctoral degree. She participated in the preparatory work for the publication of Uppland's runic inscriptions. The work gave her the opportunity to study Johannes Bureus's writings, which in 1936 became the basis for her dissertation on runic inscriptions. Many of these inscriptions were medieval and found on grave monuments, baptismal fonts, and church bells. Through the excavations of Gamla Lödöse and other medieval towns during the 1960s, a new category of runic inscriptions was added that had not previously been known, namely loose objects with inscriptions added. She researched the archeological, social, and historical contexts of the inscriptions, and often worked closely with specialists in related subjects such as medieval archeology, art history, ethnology, cultural geography, calendar science and medieval liturgy.
She wrote scholarly articles and published new finds in the magazine Fornvännen. These included the Halfdan Inscription, the Norse runic inscription discovered in 1964 on a parapet in Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, described and interpreted by Svärdström in 1970.