Remember King Harald “Blåtand” Gormsson? No? The king of Denmark and later Norway in the late 10th century. The name still doesn’t ring a bell?  His rune mark is embedded in your phone and possibly your earbuds and speakers. His nickname, “Blåtand,” means “Bluetooth” in English.  

King Harald Bluetooth’s claim to fame is that he united Denmark and Norway. When Intel engineer, Jim Kardach, was working on a new wireless technology he was also reading a book about Viking history. He decided to name the new technology after the Danish king. Kardach was later quoted as saying, “Bluetooth was borrowed from the 10th-century, second king of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth; who was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link.”

The Bluetooth symbol adopted for short-range wireless communications is made of King Harold Bluetooth’s initials, B and T in Viking runes.

There is disagreement over what the king’s nickname meant. The obvious answer could be that the king had a rotten tooth which had turned dark, that he literally had a blue or black tooth. One other explanation was is that the the original nicknames was “Blue Thane” or “dark lord” and that teeth had nothing to do with it.

King Harald Bluetooth reigned for about twelve years before, according to some scholars, he was forcibly deposed by his son Sweyn Forkbeard.  Harald Bluetooth left his mark, nevertheless. He erected large burial mounds for his father and mother in Jelling, Denmark.  The mounds were over the site of an earlier bronze age burial mound and the largest stone ship known to have existed.  The Jelling Stone Ship is thought to extend for 354 metres (1,161 ft). 

A stone ship was an early burial custom in Scandinavia, Northern Germany and the Baltic states where the grave or burial mound was surrounded by slabs or stones in the shape of a ship.  Harald also had erected rune stones at the site in honor of Gorm, his father, and Thyra, his mother.