The Offer Stone
The offer stone (offersten), a boulder with cup-shaped hollows where offerings were made. Hundreds of such stones survive across Sweden, often beside churches, springs, or old cult sites, and in places they are the only trace of a vanished place of worship. Small gifts of coins, food, butter, or tar were placed in the cups, sometimes on fixed holy days, and the stones were consulted for healing of people and livestock; in later Christian times they were avoided, or 'baptised' with a name to break their power. In some districts the cup-marks were called älvkvarnar, 'elf mills', from the belief