The Asferg stone belongs to a rest group of Danish Viking Age runic stones, consisting as so often of a standard appraisal of the virtues of some late chieftain, but falling short with re-spect to one or two wordings that seem to make no sense. This has been ascribed to mal-practice by the author or by the carver, casting doubt on the validity of the whole text as a witness of linguistic facts. I suggest a reading of the until now incomprehensible sequence kuþru : þin : that makes sense both runologically, linguistically and textually, namely as góðrǿðinn ’eloquent’. Thus, the outcast Asferg stone is promoted to the status of a reliable linguistic witness of Early Old Danish, including the disputed accusative word form bruþr ’brother’. I draw some consequences concerning the synchronic and diachronic shapes of kinship terms in Early Scandinavian, including the Malt stone form fauþr, read by me as fǫðr, but taken by several runologists to be a carving error for a two-syllable accusative form, e.g., faþur ’father’.