The smaller of the two Jelling stones is the older, raised by King Gorm the Old in memory of his wife Thyra, and it is unremarkable in what it says: a fairly ordinary Viking-age memorial inscription of the kind raised across Scandinavia by families commemorating their dead. The larger stone, raised a generation later by Gorm's son Harald Bluetooth, is a different order of object entirely, both physically, standing considerably taller and carved on three faces, and in what it claims. Harald's inscription states that he raised the stone in memory of his father Gorm and his mother Thyra, and then continues into a political and religious declaration rare for the period: that Harald himself won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian, one of the earliest surviving written records anywhere of Denmark's conversion, carved in stone by the king who oversaw it rather than reported secondhand by a chronicler.
The larger stone also carries one of the earliest surviving depictions of Christ in Scandinavian art, shown bound in a pose recalling crucifixion imagery but rendered in the same interlace decorative style Norse carvers had long used for pagan subjects, a visual choice scholars read as a deliberate bridge between the old artistic vocabulary and the new religion it was now being used to proclaim. Read together, the two stones do more than commemorate two individual deaths: the smaller one belongs entirely to the pagan memorial tradition it was raised within, while the larger one uses that same tradition's physical form, a raised runestone, to announce the tradition's own eclipse, making the Jelling stones a rare case of a monument type being used to record its own supersession.