Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Kvinneby amulet is an 11th-century copper plate inscribed with roughly 143 runes, found buried in the mid-1950s in the village of Södra Kvinneby on the island of Öland in Sweden. It measures approximately 5 centimeters on each side and has a small hole near one edge suggesting it was worn around the neck. Its catalog reference is Öl SAS1989;43.
The Kvinneby amulet is dated to roughly 1050-1130 CE, placing it in the 11th to early 12th century. It is considered one of the longest and best-preserved runic inscriptions from that period.
The inscription invokes protection for a person named Bófi, asks Thor to protect him with his hammer which came from the sea, calls for lightning to drive away evil, and closes with the declaration that the gods are under Bófi and over him. There are six competing scholarly translations, and the opening runes remain disputed.
The name Bófi appears consistently across all interpretations of the amulet. Thor is also named as a protective figure. Some translations introduce a sickness demon named Ámr, and scholar Ivar Lindquist identified an Earth Goddess referenced by the names Erka, Fold, and Undirgoð.
The relevance of the fish engraving to the text remains unclear. Bruce E. Nilsson, writing in 1976, proposed it supported a reading of the amulet as protection for seafaring, and speculated that the fish fins might encode runes representing the Norse words for hail and need. No interpretation has fully resolved the fish's role.
Six serious decipherment attempts have been made beyond the official Rundata interpretation. They were made by Bruce E. Nilsson in 1976, Ivar Lindquist in a 1987 posthumous publication, Börje Westlund in 1989, Ottar Grønvik in 1992, Jonna Louis-Jensen in 2001, and Sofia Pereswetoff-Morath in her 2019 dissertation.