The stone catalogued as DR 94, or Ålum 1, is granite, 133 centimetres tall, carved with several lines of text in the younger futhark. Its style is RAK — the oldest of the runestone classifications, the one where the bands holding the text end straight, with no serpent or beast heads coiled around them. Tóli raised it for his son Ingialdr and called him a very good drengr. The word carried weight. Along with thegn, drengr seems to have started as a title for men from Denmark and Sweden in the service of Danish kings, and the way inscriptions use it suggests the meaning loosened over time until merchants and ships' crews could claim it too. Tóli's text continues, "This memorial will..." — and then stops. Whatever he wanted remembered about his son, that part is gone.

For centuries the church ate them. Nobody in medieval Ålum saw memorials; they saw good dressed stone, and good dressed stone went into roads, bridges and foundations. In 1843 Ålum 1 turned up broken into three pieces in the southeast corner of the church porch, and Ålum 2 — DR 95, a modest 69 centimetres — was found in the northeast foundation of the nave. Both were pulled out in 1879. Ålum 1 was reassembled and now stands in the porch it was once part of. Ålum 2 was less fortunate. It is so damaged and fragmentary that no one has ever managed a proper transcription of it. Somebody's name is on that stone, and it will not be read again.

Ålum 3, DR 96, is the tall one: 205 centimetres of gneiss, with runic text running around the outline of the stone rather than in ruled bands across it. Turn it around and there is a picture. A rider sits a horse, carrying a shield and a pole, and he may be wearing a helmet, though the top of his head has worn away and nobody can be certain. It was found in 1890 at the foot of the church hill and now stands in the cemetery. Végautr raised it for his son Ásgeirr, and the inscription ends: "May God well help his soul."

That closing prayer is the most quietly revealing thing at Ålum. The Norse word used for soul, salu, was not native. It was imported from English and first appears in the tenth century — which tells you how new the idea was in this valley, new enough that saying it required borrowing vocabulary from across the North Sea. The Christian formula, together with stylistic analysis, dates the carving to after the Jelling stones, where Harald Bluetooth had announced the conversion of the Danes in monumental terms. Ålum is the same shift at family scale: not a king proclaiming a policy, but a father in central Jutland reaching for a phrase to put over his dead son and having to use a loanword to find it.

Ålum 4, DR 97, is 150 centimetres tall and came out of the cemetery dike in 1902, after which it was moved and raised near Ålum 3. This is Þyrvé's stone. She was Végautr's wife, and the same runemaster cut both her inscription and her husband's — the two stones are the work of one hand, commissioned by one household, standing now within sight of each other in a Danish churchyard. Between them they mark two deaths. Végautr lost a son. Þyrvé lost the boy who was not her son, and made sure the stone said so plainly. Viking Age memorials are usually terse to the point of bureaucracy: name, relationship, done. Hers spends its final clause on nothing but the strength of an attachment. It is the least practical thing on any of the four stones, and the only one that still speaks directly.