Further thoughts on the tune memorial

The inscription on the Tune stone has been subject to a diverse and often uneven historiography. Usually held to include legal vocabulary, it has generally not been assessed in terms of collocations found in Old Germanic law codes. Yet the main arguments over the meaning of the memorial can be resolved through reference to early Germanic inheritance law and a closer examination of the semantic collocations that the terms in the inscription are found in more generally. The main points of semantic and etymological difficulty that have been the focus of recent scholarship can each be resolved by adopting a more empirical approach to the terminology found on the stone.