Image stone in the context of "Tjängvide image stone"

Symbel (OE) and sumbl (ON) are Germanic terms for "feast, banquet".

Accounts of the symbel are preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (lines 489–675 and 1491–1500), Dream of the Rood (line 141) and Judith (line 15), Old Saxon Heliand (line 3339), and the Old Norse Lokasenna (stanza 8) as well as other Eddic and Saga texts, such as in the Heimskringla account of the funeral ale held by King Sweyn, or in the Fagrskinna.

The Hunnestad Monument (Swedish: Hunnestadsmonumentet), listed as DR 282 through 286 in the Rundata catalog, was once located at Hunnestad at Marsvinsholm north-west of Ystad, Sweden. It was the largest and most famous of the Viking Age monuments in Scania, and in Denmark, only comparable to the Jelling stones. The monument was destroyed during the end of the 18th century by Eric Ruuth of Marsvinsholm, probably between 1782 and 1786 when the estate was undergoing sweeping modernization, though the monument survived long enough to be documented and depicted.

When the antiquary Ole Worm (1588–1654) explored the monument, it consisted of eight stones. Five of them were image stones, and two of those image stones also had runic inscriptions. In the eighteenth century, all the stones were relocated or destroyed. Only three of the stones of the monument were recovered during the 19th century, and are today on display at the Kulturen museum in Lund. For a long time they were considered the only stones remaining, but on December 16, 2020 a fourth stone, DR 285 (number 6, in the picture), was discovered during excavations for a sewage line in Ystad municipality. Lying with its image facing up, it had been used in a bridge construction over the Hunnestad stream.