The great memorial runestones are not a pagan monument type. The overwhelming majority were raised in the eleventh century, after conversion, and they carry crosses, prayers for the soul of the person commemorated, and formulas asking God and the mother of God to help. The standard text names who raised the stone, who it commemorates and how they were related, and often adds where the person died. That makes the corpus a source for social history above all: inheritance, kinship, the position of women who raised stones in their own name, the range of travel recorded in the memorials of men who died in the east or in England, and the conversion itself in progress.
A stone naming a Christian death in a landscape of older burial practice records the change more directly than any chronicle. The script continued to develop after the Viking Age rather than stopping with it. Additional marks were introduced to distinguish the sounds the reduced row had merged, restoring something close to a one to one relationship between sign and sound, and runes remained in use in Scandinavia for inscriptions, ownership marks, business notes and everyday messages well into the medieval period. They were used alongside the Latin alphabet for centuries rather than being replaced by it at a stroke, and the wooden message sticks recovered from medieval Norwegian towns show the script doing ordinary work long after the stones stopped being raised.