The Knife Wrestlers

The sculpture known as The Knife Wrestlers (Bältespännarna in Swedish) is a romantic nationalist work created by Johan Peter Molin. It depicts two men engaged in a fight with knives, a dramatic reference to a mythological style of duel called spänna bälte ('to bind the belt'). The origins of this myth are unclear. The sculpture further contains elements of Nordic history, including the use of runes and verses from the Poetic Edda.

Copies of the sculpture are located in Gothenburg in Bältespännarparken, in front of the National museum in Stockholm, in Vänersborg and in Mästarnas park in Hällefors. The sculpture consists of a rectangular socket with relief images on four sides. The relief images tell the dramatic story of the fight. On three of the four sides of the socket, there are snake ornaments which contain runic inscriptions.

Some copies of the sculpture also contain a horizontal runic inscription at the top of the socket. The earliest version displayed in Gothenburg lacked that runic inscription, but later versions, including the one displayed in Gothenburg today, has a horizontal runic inscriptions which is located at the top of the socket and leads around all four sides. Molin asked multiple scholars for help in transcribing the text in runes. The first copy known to contain the horizontal runic inscription is the version from Stockholm made in 1867.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons