I live in the Swedish area called Roslagen which carries a good amount of viking history. A local runestone says: "Inga had a runestone raised for Ragnfast, her husband, who inherited the village after Sigfast, his dad. May God help their spirits."
Why did they write runestones for what appears to be trivial matters? I have understood that there only were a few specialists who could create runestones, what were gained from their spending?
This requires some generalizations of course, some runes tells about journeys overseas, which I suppose can tell prosperity about the heroic deeds of the person the stone was raised for. And others, like the Hillersjö Stone, could serves as a legal document.
But I can't get my head around the reasons for writing down what appears to be trivial happenings, is there some academic theory which could explain this?
Despite their seemingly mundane and formulaic inscriptions, the raising of runestones in Late Viking-Age Sweden, particularly around Uppland, was a fashionable and calculated effort by (mostly) affluent locals to display their wealth, status and allegiance. The primarily Christian iconography and inscriptions of the stones reveal a changing society, in which it may have been beneficial for an individual or clan to publicly advertise their new-found conversion and have others follow their example.
A few good sources on all things to do with these inscriptions are Michael Barnes' Runes: A Handbook, and Judith Jesch' Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse