(Ancient Cultures) Eric Graf Oxenstierna - The World of The Norsemen-The World Publishing Company (1967)

Ancient Cultures
THE
WORLD OF
THE
NORSEMEN
THE
WORLD OF
THE
NORSEMEN
Eric Graf Oxenstierna
Translated by Janet Sondheimer
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY

CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK
Published by The World Publishing Company
2231 West noth Street, Cleveland Ohio 44102
1957 by J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachf. GmbH, Stuttgart
English translation 1967 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd.

All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-27324
Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION I
1 SCANDINAVIA IN THE STONE AND BRONZE AGES 5

2 EARLY VILLAGE COMMUNITIES II
3 THE GREAT ENCOUNTER 31

4 THE PEAT BOGS AND THEIR CONTENTS 53
5 THE VOICE OF THE EAST 67
6 CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS 77
7 AT THE COURT OF THE SVEA KING IOQ
8 THE VIKING RAIDS 127
PLATES (between pages 138 and 139)
NOTES ON THE PLATES 149
BIBLIOGRAPHY 157
INDEX l6l
THE WORLD OF THE
THE NORSEMEN
INTRODUCTION
The prehistorians of northern Europe were slow to begin to dig.

Systematic investigation of classical antiquity was begun in the
eighteenth century, when the first Egyptologists also entered Egypt in
the wake of Napoleon's armies; the secrets of Babylon, Persepolis and

other great cities of the Near East were already being probed while
Germanic prehistory still remained largely in the hands of anti-

quarians and amateurs. The crumbling potsherds, the rusty and
corroded metal objects which emerged from our cremation graves,
looked meagre and unimpressive to a public accustomed to the treasures
of the East. Even today, there are unsympathetic observers who assert
that the investigation of Germanic prehistory might just as well have
remained an amateur affair !
Yet the soil north of the Alps has produced magnificent artifacts of
gold and silver, above all in the lands bordering the Baltic. A number
of striking wood-carvings and large sea-going ships have been preserved
by a lucky accident; and the oldest garments in the world can be seen
in the museums of northern Europe. Since at every turn we are
reminded by barrows, rune-stones and the eloquent traces of early
settlements how intimate is the link between ourselves and the terrain
of our native culture, we cannot but be aware of our descent from a long
line of ancestors.
Our prehistorians have in fact accomplished a great deal since the
great Oscar Montelius of Sweden revolutionized the subject in the last
quarter of the nineteeth century, by the introduction of a new approach
and new techniques. Montelius, struck by Darwin's theory that animals
and plants take only one step at a time as they change and evolve
through the centuries, suggested that the same might be true of man-
made objects, that artists, engineers and builders never take a sudden
leap but develop a new form from its closest existing relative. Montelius
chose the railways as a contemporary example of this process; for us it
INTRODUCTION
may be illustrated by the motor-car, which was originally constructed

on the lines of a horse-drawn carriage and only gradually reached its
this principle Montelius could
present stream-lined shape. By applying
and other classes of pre-
arrange swords, shields, brooches, arm-rings,
historic objects in an order which demonstrated which type must be
the earliest and how the evolution over the centuries tended towards
forms progressively more refined, better adapted to their function, more
complicated, or even downright degenerate.
However unpromising it
appeared, everyprehistoricfindcouldbeincorporatedintoachronological
cultural scheme.
A followed as Scandinavian and German
period of intense activity
scholars set to work to classify all metal finds according to their types.
Indeed, Montelius described his way of working as the typological
method.
August Strindberg once caustically described prehistorians as button-
sorters who classified buttons first into the categories one-holed, two-
holed and three-holed and then into the categories minus one-hole,
minus two-holes and minus three-holes. The jibe was not wholly un-
warranted. In our delight at being able to classify and arrange prehis-
toric finds we sometimes get carried away by these routine matters,
forgetting that to the layman it is immaterial whether an ornamental
pin one- or two-spiralled, whether it has a scroll top, whether

is its eye is
shut or open, and even whether it has a turned-over base.

The lay public prefers to hear of high adventure, tales of the wars and
weddings of great kings, of the rise and fall of great nations, of captured
treasure and outstanding events in the life of different races and peoples.
The Egyptologists and Orientalists were soon able to satisfy such
demands, but we are only late-comers in the field, still in the throes of
grappling with our difficult and often scanty material, usually without
any help from written sources. We shall certainly be well into the
twenty-first century before the essential secrets of our taciturn relics
and monuments have been laid bare. Only then will it be possible to
give a well-rounded account, without any major lacunae, of the culture
of our Germanic forefathers.
In the decades before the first world war Montelius could still be a
scholar in the grand style. He was the guest of great landed proprietors,
sat drinking Swedish punch on their porches during the bright summer
nights, gave dazzling lectures in his capacity of privat docent (a title
which in his case meant what it says) and in return was allowed by day
to use estate labour for the excavation of important burial places and
INTRODUCTION
other sites which had attracted his attention. war field archae-
After the
ologists of all work fundamentally
nations found their conditions of
changed. Private patronage had almost dried up, which was particu-
larly hard on the Germanic prehistorians since work in their field was
only just beginning. During the thirties a number of government posts
were established for them. Although in Germany these openings had a
political connotation, in Scandinavia, where such motives were absent,
the prehistorian was given plenty of scope. This was the time when the
work of the prehistorian achieved recognition there for its contribution
to the general services performed by the comprehensive welfare state.
The years after the second world war brought straitened finances.
Prehistorians are in the unfortunate position of step-children overtaken
by their younger brothers, the technologists and atom-splitters whose

boundless demands for money are met with so much greater indulgence.
In Germany, moreover, the need was to detach prehistoric studies
first
from the political influences of the pre-war period. German archaeolo-

gists, like their Scandinavian colleagues though sometimes for different
reasons, have had to make do with very slender financial resources. The
growth of general interest in the subject, however, together with
recognition that the social sciences are indispensable to a nation's
political and intellectual life, encourages the hope that conditions will
now improve on both shores of the Baltic.
Yet even as things are now it is worth trying, as in this book, to give
a picture of the present state of our knowledge, since perceptible though
for the most part untrumpeted advances have been made during the
lasttwenty years. Here we are concerned exclusively with the Northern
Germanic peoples and must rely largely on the work of Scandinavian
scholars. In Montelius' day there was very close co-operation between
German and Scandinavian scholars. With increased specialization,
knowledge has unfortunately become more isolated and localized;
however, as will be seen, although German scholars have concentrated
their efforts on the more southerly Germanic tribes, they have on
occasion made a decisive intervention in the solution of Scandinavian
problems.
SCANDINAVIA IN THE STONE
AND BRONZE AGES
Elsewhere in Europe, the people of the Old Stone Age have left us
marvellous cave paintings, flint scrapers and chisels. In Scandinavia
no settlement site existed beyond the area covered by continental ice.
The Hamburg region only became free of ice about 10,000 BC and the
country around Stockholm about 7500 BC. After this it was not so long
before the only remnants of the huge ice-cap were a few glaciers in
northern Scandinavia. The a wilderness of rubble in its wake
ice left :
the southward passage of the melt-waters was marked by barren moraine

deposits and large boulders over the greater part of the Swedish and
Finnish mainland, while parts of central Sweden had sunk under the
weight of the ice so that the North Sea and the Baltic met.
The only vegetation this tundra could support at first were hardy
mosses and grasses. The first animals to enter Scandinavia were reindeer,
followed by the earliest men, who fed on reindeer fat and their gamey
meat, made clothing from the hide and used the bones and antlers to
make tools. These men were of course quite unaware of the significance
of their advance. They had no notion that they were settlers on virgin
soil nor that Scandinavia had become linked for the first time to the
heartlands of Europe.
Who were these primitive nomads and hunters of the Stone Age? A
few years back this question would have presented little difficulty since
there were so few candidates to choose from. But excavations in
Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and Schonen over the last decades have
revealed the existence of a surprisingly large number of early Stone Age
cultures in the Baltic area, so we must reckon with a wide variety of
immigrant groups and peoples.

The general picture is of a number of bands of hunters and fishermen
constantly on the move, competing fiercely for the best hunting grounds,
mussel-banks and fisheries but also tolerant of one another, prepared to
THE WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN
intermarry, and steadily north as fresh invaders came up from
moving
the south. can identify a number of different cultures, which are
We
classified by the materials used for implement-making flint,
: other stone,
reindeer antler, bone, wood. It is difficult to say which groups of finds

5
should be attributed to the 'northern races ; entire populations must

have entered Scandinavia from the south, principally from Germany by
Schleswig-Holstein,while only occasional bands of hunters can have
arrived along the arctic route through Finland. There were no 'racially
pure' peoples in prehistoric times, any more than there are today.
post-glacial period the landscape rapidly

lost its initial
During the
sterility. Warm winds encouraged an exuberant plant life, and the
extinct aurochs and Irish 'elk', as
majestic mixed forests attracted the
well as red deer, elk, bear, glutton, wild boar and smaller mammals to
these still virgin hunting grounds. Much later, man was able to take a
highly important step forward in beginning to cultivate his own food.

In the whole history of mankind there have been two really revolution-
ary advances. One was the technological revolution of the last century
which has so dominated our own epoch, the other was the cultivation
of cereals. Agriculture and stock-keeping were associated with the
establishment of the earliest permanent settlements in the Middle East;
during the next four thousand years news of the discovery spread into
Europe and travelled north of the Alps. The size and character of the
immigrant groups who brought the mysterious grain and had such
magical control over nature are still a matter of conjecture. For example,
prehistorians have not yet been able to decide whether they moved
as self-contained fighting bands or simply in small family groups,
finding a ready welcome among enterprising hunting peoples.
To grow enough to eat meant the conquest of hunger even if the
supply of game gave out, and this opened up noble prospects. At first
the only form of husbandry was to burn down the virgin forest and sow
seed among the ashes. We can tell this from analysis of the compressed
deposit of centuries of plant debris and plant and tree pollen found in
the peat beds. The pollen of the mixed forest suddenly disappears, to be
succeeded by a layer of almost pure birch. Now birch was the tree which
grew again most quickly after forest clearances, and as the Danish
archaeologists have so brilliantly shown it is
precisely in this layer that
traces of ash frequently occur. There can be no doubt that these are
the ashes of forest
fires started by the
very first farmers.
Agriculture must have begun in regions where the soil was rich in
SCANDINAVIA IN THE STONE AND BRONZE AGES
lime and humus, easily worked by the hoe. These areas were surrounded
by extensive forests which were still the home of more primitive hunters
and fishermen. Farming implied possession of the land and the soil,
attachment to a particular place, fertility worship, inheritance of land
from father to son, and communal cultivation of the fields in spring and
autumn.
The first farmers to settle in Scandinavia belonged to the Funnel-
Necked Beaker culture of the Continent. But it is possible that agricul-
ture was also developed by the indigenous Mesolithic hunter - fishers
known as the Enteb011e folk, for grain impressions have been found on
beakers associated with typical Enteb011e artifacts.
The new way of life has its most striking expression in the Neolithic
andBronzeAge barrows, the most imposingmonumentsleftbyprehistoric
man (see plate i). Since the farmer depended for his prosperity on what
he received from his father, it was fitting that the generations should be
reunited in death, to sleep together in a house of indestructible stone.
Megalithic monuments have their counterparts in the pyramids of
Egypt and were probably religious in origin; they spread from the
Mediterranean lands up the Atlantic coast and are met with in various
forms in Spain, Brittany, England, northern Germany and Scandinavia.
In Denmark, southern Norway and western Sweden there are both
dolmens and the later passage graves; in eastern Sweden there are
neither, with the exception of four which lie very close together on
a
Oland, long narrow island in the Baltic.
Dolmens are monuments comprising five or six heavy standing stones,
with a single gigantic stone on top. The space left for burials was thus
relatively small. Passage graves are larger and of more elaborate con-
chamber roofed by several large stones and
struction, with a rectangular
approached by a long low passage leading from the middle of one of the
sides.King Gustav vi of Sweden, a life-long archaeological enthusiast
and acknowledged expert in the subject, excavated the chamber of a
passage grave near his summer residence at Schonen very early in the
- after it had become generally recognized that
present century. Later
the mounds above such graves often contain finds - the king arranged
for the excavation to be extended. Surprisingly, more than 20,000
potsherds from at least 1,500 separate vessels, together with innumerable

flint implements and human bones, were unearthed by persevering
digging in the area round the barrow.
Above Goteborg in the centre of Vastergotland there are 225
passage graves in a very small space, precisely within the limits of the
very fertile strip whose geological formation goes back to the Cambrian-
Silurian period. Here in Neolithic times every farming family had its
own grave, and the community as a whole was quite cut off from the
outside world. Although agriculture may not have been confined to
this favoured region, the peoples on either side of the geological boun-
dary must have confronted one another if not as enemies at least as

strangers, as we can tell from numerous examples
of pots and stone
implements of totally divergent types.
However, the history of Stone Age migration and settlement does not
end here. At some period now thought to have been about 2000 BC, the
peace of northern Germany and Scandinavia was disturbed by the
advanceofanewpeoplewho used a distinctive type of boat-shaped stone
battle-axe (see plate 2), decorated their pots with cord impressions and
buried their dead singly in earth graves - characteristics which have
led archaeologists to label their culture the 'boat-axe culture' or
'single-grave* culture. Most scholars think these people came from the
south-east by way of Saxony and Thuringia, across the Schleswig-
Holstein ridge, through Jutland, and thence by way of the Danish
islands across the Baltic to central Sweden and Finland.
The question of where they came from is not without importance,
since these boat-axe people, a branch of the great battle-axe group, may
have been responsible for bringing Indo-European languages to central
and northern Europe, while ethnically related tribes who started out
from their common point of origin in Caucasian Russia carried the
elements of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin to India and the Mediterranean
lands, and also played their part in bringing Hittite to Asia Minor and
Tocharian to eastern Asia.
Where much is still obscure one
thing is definite. The task of tracing
allthe branches of the great Indo-European tree of languages which
extends from India to Scandinavia is
essentially complete. We
can
expect no new revolutionary discoveries from the philologists. But with-
in the next fifty years the infant science of
prehistory should have
advanced far enough in its understanding and
interpretation of these
Neolithic cultures to permit a decision as to whether or not the boat-axe
people were Lido-Europeans. This in turn may make it possible to draw

conclusions about these very important
migrations which at present
must remain pure conjecture. It must be stressed,
however, that there
was no single racial characteristic peculiar to those who
spoke languages
of the Indo-European family, and certain other
although the long skull
8
SCANDINAVIA IN THE STONE AND BRONZE AGE
features may have been predominant. Events affecting the destinies of
cultures and peoples turn out to be much more complicated than was
once realized, but this makes them all the more interesting.
The great advance of the boat-axe people marked the end of prehistoric-
migrations in Scandinavia. There followed a tranquil period during
which the contrasts between the different cultures become less promin-
ent. Admittedly, the discovery of metals (copper, bronze and gold)
signified the dawn of a new era, but the techniques of working them
took a long time to develop. The earliest metal artifacts consist of a few
small ornaments and imported copper axes found in passage graves ;
their influence can be seen in the changing forms of stone implements.
Two magnificent swords from Hungary have been discovered which
can be set beside flint imitations, the work of a wonderfully skilled and
audacious craftsman whose efforts at emulation for all their mastery,
were doomed to fail.
It is possible to trace the course of Bronze Age culture from its first
beginnings about 1500 BC through the thousand years of its duration.

There are these impressive Bronze Age barrows, the burial places of
chieftains in coffins of hollowed oak trees; there are metal artifacts
with a wonderful sense ofform, once-glitteringswords, daggers, brooches,
armrings, vessels, shields, helmets and cult objects now green with
verdigris (see plate 3) At the same time, the poorer folk were still living
.
in the Stone Age, as was convincingly demonstrated a few years ago by

the excavation of a Danish Bronze Age barrow which was discovered to
lie beneath a Stone Age settlement. By this date the division of the popu-
lation into rich and poor, masters and slaves, warriors, farmers and
hunters was no longer a matter of tribal or racial origin; as always in
more advanced cultures, class had become a social phenomenon.
Other Bronze Age curiosities are the famous Hdllristninger. These
are strange pictures (of ships, manikins, animals) and symbols (for
example the saucer-like impressions known as cup marks) carved in the
hard rock of cliffs which rise immediately out of prehistoric fields (see
plate 4). The carvings were no doubt intended to increase the fertility
of the soil and to incline the gods to grant good fortune and good
weather. Although it has long since been realized that these figures all
have some general relation to primitive beliefs and cult ceremonies,
their detailed interpretation still poses an inexhaustible variety of
problems for further research.

All Bronze Age finds testify to the existence of continuous connections
with the mainland, and to an uninterrupted traffic in metals, since all
copper and tin must have been imported.

The fusion of the main Stone Age cultures resulted in the emergence
during the Bronze Age of a distinctive settlement area on the shores of
the Baltic which fanned out east, south and west from Schleswig-
Holstein and the German coast. This region became the home, not only
of a surprisingly homogenous culture, but also of a unified people whom
we must recognize as the original 'Germans'. Scandinavia and northern
Germany were thus bound closely together - the Baltic was not a
frontier but a connecting link. Even after the lapse of three thousand
years the legacy of this union still has its effects, despite the very dif-
ferent destinies reserved for the peoples of the Baltic's northern and
southern shores.
During the late Bronze Age the 'Germans' who occupied north
Germany between Stettin and Cuxhaven extended their boundaries
westward, crossing the Vistula and the Harz mountains to reach the
lower Rhine. Later on, at the time of the transition to the Iron Age,
these Germans advanced a considerable distance south and so came
into conflict with Celts and Illyrians. What is now Germany thus
became the object of contention among three important groups. This
was to be the fkte of Central Europe, always to be the arena of conflict
between different peoples and cultures, an area charged with powerful
political, nationalist and ideological impulses. The inhabitants of
Scandinavia, on the other hand, have been left free since the end of the
Stone Age to shape their lives without the perpetual challenge of con-
fronting fresh invaders.
Once the 'Germans' started moving south they lost some of their
uniformity and several different cultures can be distinguished. Properly
speaking the history of the northern Germanic peoples only starts with
the beginning of the Iron Age, about 500 BG.
10
EARLY VILLAGE COMMUNITIES
We are accustomed to speak of the 'Iron Age', often forgetting that the
real Iron Age is our own, since without iron and high grade steel modern
technology would be inconceivable. Yet there was a long road to be
travelled before the marvellous metal could be fully exploited. The pro-
cesses of extraction, purification, forging and tempering had all to be
c
mastered, and so we commonly describe as the lron Age' that period

from the time iron was first coming into general use up to about the
beginning of the Christian era.
In the Ancient East iron was already in use for ornamental and
practical purposes during the second millenium BC. From about 700 BG
itwas the dominant feature of the Alpine cultures and slowly started to
penetrate the Baltic region. Northern Europe was at first chiefly depend-
dent on bog-iron, the only raw form of the metal available. One
wonders what thoughts passed through the minds of the northern
bronze-founders and peasants when they took their first, still very im-
pure, lumps of the new metal from the furnace pits and tried to fashion
some small ornament. How tedious it must have seemed to forage for
the raw material in the treacherous marshes, how forlorn and uninspir-
ing the finished products must have looked beside splendid bronze
weapons which had been handed down from time immemorial! As
always, however, novelty gave the new metal an advantage. The new
age already clearly manifest in the culture of northern Germany
is
named after the settlement site of about 500 BG discovered at Jastorf. In

only a very few of the numerous graves at this site is there any bronze;
ornaments and tools alike are made almost exclusively of iron, and very
clumsy and inartistic they are. The iron-smith has retained hardly any-
thing of the bronze-founder's delight in ornament and beauty
of line.
Artistically the introduction of the new

medium was catastrophe - but
a
it had come to stay.
Knowledge of how to work the new metal spread north from
B II
Schleswig-Holstein and we find unpretentious
iron objects in many
small graves in Jutland, along the Norwegian coasts, at Schonen and

on the Baltic island of Gotland : pins for fastening garments, of the type
known as Kropfnadeln, which have a bend just below the head (see plate
4) ; belt-hooks of the simplest
kind and such-like. There is nowhere any
trace of spears or axes.
As it happens, the hesitant efforts of the earliest iron-smiths are not the
main feature in our archaeological picture of the early Iron Age, which
is determined by a quite different set of factors. There is an almost com-
islands and the entire Scandina-

plete absence of finds from the Danish
vian mainland for a period which in most places covers 350 years and
more; even Gotland must be included for part of the time. There is no
longer any likelihood that substantial finds from this period will turn up
in the future; we know all too well what finds and groups of finds we
can still expect. Such an extensive gap in time and space is naturally
very tantalizing and during the past fifty years no effort has been spared
to explain it.
The Swedish Rutger Sernander had already realized the

naturalist
value of the Scandinavian peat-bogs as an historical museum. When he
examined a vertical section several feet deep, he saw at the very bottom
evidence of the incursion of trees into the post-glacial tundra, followed
in the upper layers by signs of the change to the first warm periods and
other climatic fluctuations. He noticed that the sub-BoreaP warm
fi
period, which began about 3000 BG was followed by a marked swing to

a sub-Atlantic climate of moist chilly weather which must have coin-
cided with the early Iron Age. As a result of this last change, the peat-
bogs became heavily saturated and as the less perishable plant debris
started to pileup the bogs swelled and grew rapidly.
Sernander was sure he had found an explanation for the absence of
finds from the early Iron Age the population of Scandinavia had been
:
forced out by the great deterioration in the climate which Sernander

in his usual dramatic vein described as the Fimbulwinter, the name
given in the Eddas to the cruel snow-filled years which must precede the
Gotterdammerung. He thought it conceivable that the Fimbulwinter of the
sagas enshrined a legendary recollection of the climatic deterioration
of the early Iron Age.
Prehistorians were very willing to consider this theory, since the
scanty material found had added nothing of significance. The discussion

continued with undiminished fervour for the next few decades,
during
12
which we have come to distinguish the various factors in this change of
climate.
As
the peat-bogs expanded, the delicate Cladium mariscus, a type of
grass, is seen to retreat; in the Norwegian highlands the tree-line is

lowered by between 700 and 1,000 feet and the drop in temperature
can be estimated at about 2.5 degrees Centigrade,, a significant fall
when applied to the temperature all the year round. The most striking
change in vegetation can be deduced from pollen analysis, which reveals
the appearance in Scandinavia of the fir tree, encouraged by the
first
rain and cold; the fir and Scots pine together now got the better of the
mixed forest of Bronze Age times. It comes as something of a surprise
to discover that the pine forest, so typical of the Scandinavian scene, has
only been indigenous there for the past 2,500 years* There is only one
place in Sweden, a narrow strip of the west coast to the north and south
of Goteborg, where the granite cliffs crowned with mixed oak forests
can give us some idea of the warmth and light of the long-vanished
Bronze Age landscape. Denmark we can imagine as having been a lush
and fertile countryside much as we know it today, where no pine woods
had encroached and the beech was kept at bay.
The alteration in the climate affected not only Scandinavia but also
the lake-dwelling culture of the Bodensee and the mine-workings of the
Salzkammergut, that is to say precisely those areas oil the borders
of fertile zones which would be particularly susceptible to climatic

fluctuations ; the agrarian life of Central Europe was much less affected.
Wenow realize that the change to a sub-Atlantic climate was no
temporary disturbance lasting for a few centuries but a long-term alter-
ation of the weather to the type which has prevailed in Scandinavia
ever since, with cool damp summers and raw frosty winters, a late
spring and a short period of growth.
The sudden change must have seemed catastrophic to
the Bronze Age
people, accustomed to sunny dry summers and long mild autumns. But
to say this is not to agree with Sernander and the prehistorians who
consider that these people left Scandinavia altogether and migrated
to Central -
Europe a conclusion for which there is no evidence what-
ever. However, it is likely that they did in fact leave their former
dwelling sites and that they had to alter their type of economy.
The valleys of
Norway offer uniquely favourable opportunities for
studying the relations between climate and economic life, and in 1947
they became a centre of archaeological interest. Bronze Age finds were
Waldres and
made deep in the valleys of Glomma, Gudbrand,
at places
must have been of the Alpine
Hailing. The only practicable farming
type,which would mean that men and cattle returned every autumn to
the North Sea coast where the climate was mild enough for cattle to
spend the winter in the open. There are nineteenth-century records of

of up to seventy-six miles, and
Alpine cattle being moved over distances
the Norwegians themselves tell tales ofjourneys to and from the moun-
tains along routes so rigidly prescribed that a cow who wandered off on
her own would arrive a few days later at the right destination. In the
Bronze Age the yearly migrations must have taken just as long, if not
longer. We must realize that there
were no true farms at this early
The characteristic feature
period.
of this Alpine farming was the
meadow rather than the farmyard.
Although natural processes take time to mature, the effects of the
changing climate on fanning would have become noticeable in about
i oo or 150 years. Men were made aware of the unkindly nature of the
elements as soon as the cattle could no longer survive an outdoor

winter. Wet autumns, grass which rotted too soon, snow storms, frosty
nights and late springs were all fatal to cattle and taxing for men whose
only home was a crude circular hut. The obvious solution was to build
stronger weather-tight dwellings which included proper stabling for
the beasts and to lay up fodder for them. Since everyone was needed for
this work, no-one had time for the long journeys up the valleys to the
high pastures, which were in any case pointless now that the mountain
summers had become so cool.
We can trace this sequence of events in the archaeological record : in
some places along the coast between Oslo and Bergen (Oslo fjord, Ytre
Grenland, Lista, Jaeren and Sunnhordland) early Iron Age finds are
unusually profuse (see plate 4), but up the valleys they completely
disappear. The valleys were now to be deserted for centuries, while
along the coast the homestead with its surrounding arable and pasture
was emerging as the basic economic and social unit of community
life.
This meant the destruction of the Bronze Age social order. The ruling
class, whose bodies were buried with their bronze weapons in those
impressive barrows no longer had any superiority. What counted now

was neither prowess in war and trade nor any kind of feudal superiority
but readiness to toil on the land without ceasing, to cultivate the soil
with steady industry. The situation is not unfamiliar to us, since we
have ourselves witnessed the collapse of an hierarchial social order.
14
The revolution of our own age has been industrial, that of the Iron
Age was agricultural ; in both cases the passage of only a few generations
was enough to obliterate the barriers which kept men apart. The
picture we Age society, to all appearances a
construct of Bronze
can at best be only a blurred one ; the peasant
closely knit structure,
communities of the Early Iron Age, on the other hand, seem strangely
familiar, because climatic conditions forced them to adopt the way of
which has characterized rural Scandinavia ever since. Reports now
life
being received from archaeologists up and down the region all tell the
same tale, apart from some purely local variations.
On the Jutland peninsula the huge barrows of the Bronze Age lie
along the hill-tops in their hundreds, occupying a prominent position

on the highway so that they could be easily seen and the mighty dead
duly honoured: they stand out as the symbolic landmarks of a culture
of 2,500 years ago. The dwelling sites of the period lie a mile or two
away, on lower ground close to the rivers, where the conditions for
pastoral and arable farming must have been at their best in the dry
sub-Boreal climate. Early Iron Age finds come from places far removed
from the areas of Bronze Age settlement, from light sandy soils which
earlier had been avoided. With the advent of the sub-Atlantic climate
the rivers overflowed their banks and the water-table rose, while the
light sand of west Jutland absorbed so much rain that clearance and
cultivation eventually became possible.
It was a case of all hands to work. No-one could henceforth play the
role of ruler, merchant or prince. Everyone was needed for the work of
clearing the mixed oak forest, building stout new homesteads and
collecting winter fodder for the animals. But now that the filter of tree
foliage was removed, rain poured all the year round directly onto the
thin layer of top-soil. Nor was there any longer leaf mould to act as a
fertilizer. As has happened so often and in so many other parts of the
world, fine wooded country was being degraded into impoverished

heathland, and the occupants were forced to move. But this ill wind
has at least blown us some good, since the unique Jutland heathlands
have remained unaltered for nearly two-thousand years and still look
much as they did when the people of the early Iron Age departed,
leaving behind them a collection of strips which can just be seen among
the heather. The informed eye can trace the pattern they make, one
rectangle after another. Such large and apparently haphazard patch-

works of rectangles at 1 19 places in Jutland were carefully mapped and
excavated during the 19303 by the Danish scholar Gudmund Hatt.
15
They are the remains of fields made by people who settled there early
in the Iron Age, only to move elsewhere a few centuries later.
Laborious scratching and scraping with the small knife of the archaeo-
logist has achieved
some remarkable triumphs in the excavation of the
low banks surrounding such fields, an endlessly tedious but richly
rewarding task.
It seems that whatever their size and relative proportions, whether
broad or narrow, short or long, these prehistoric fields were always

rectangular. A left free between the fields in the course of time
strip
became heaped up with stones carried there during ploughing and
the more ancient the field
hoeing and with earth blown by the wind;
the higher are its banks, or baulks as they are called. The men who
worked the fields must have sat on the baulks for their midday break,
and when their clay pots broke they were left to lie among the stones and
so that we can tell exactly
provide us with first-class dating evidence,
when the fields were being cultivated. It has been shown by very
digging in the boundary strips that these fields were
careful first
established in the days ofthe mixed forests, usually in places where there
was already a clearing among the heathlands, the vegetation most
amenable to attack with primitive implements.
The most delicate of all the tasks undertaken by the archaeologists
has been to uncover the evanescent scratchings drawn through the
soft earth by prehistoric ploughs, as was actually done during the
19405. It is only possible in places where the upper stratum of humus is

so thin that the light prehistoric plough drove through it, introducing
streaks of the darker top-soil into the paler sand below. If this dark
earth is carefully scraped away, the pattern of the ancient plough marks
emerges as short or long stripes in the light-coloured sand (see plate 5).
And from this we can tell that the plough was driven in two directions,
criss-cross.
Criss-cross ploughing presupposes large square fields and a hook-

plough which made light scratches in the soil. And since providence
has seen to it that we are informed of Iron Age agriculture in nearly all
its aspects, we are even familiar with the plough itself. For it was
customary to a part or even the whole of a plough to the gods,

sacrifice
and to deposit the offering in a swamp.

in gratitude or supplication,
When an count and collection of these objects was made in
official
1951 they proved astonishingly numerous. Some of the complete

specimens from Denmark actually belong to the early Iron Age period
with which we are concerned at present.
16
Very curious ploughs they are too. A few are so worn that they can
hardly have held together, others which have been hastily made in
soft lime wood can never have been fit for use, others again have been
assembled into a kind of makeshift whole from a random selection of
old and new parts. Was this a deliberate hood-winking of the gods?
Such sophisticationhardly to be expected. All the same, a really
is
serviceable plough made from hard wood was a very valuable object
and the gods would surely be content with a symbolic plough - a
useless plough.
Another plough of a completely different type has been found in a
Danish bog - a heavy wheeled plough with coulter and mould board.
This was undoubtedly an innovation to cope with the rainy climate.
The Roman writer Pliny says it was invented by the Rhaetians of Gaul.
However this may be, it was certainly unknown in the dry and sunny
Mediterranean lands. Instead of merely scratching the soil this plough
really turned it over and could only be used for lengthways ploughing.
It worked best in narrow fields up to about 250 yards long, hump-
backed and therefore self-draining. As time went on this plough was
probably used increasingly on the loamy soils, although it would
have been unsuitable for the light sandy soil of the heathlands where the
surviving Iron Age fields are to be found.
In Denmark during the Middle Ages the ploughing of the long fields
with heavy ploughs drawn by four to six oxen was a communal task.
This was the age of a collective form of economy, in which even the
fields passed every year into different hands as determined on certain
principles.
The field arrangements of the early Iron Age present us with a totally
different picture. The varying size of the separate fields and their clear
demarcation indicates individual ownership and right of use. This
indicates permanently settled peasants who acknowledged no superior
other than their village community. Here and there we find a large
fieldwith quite high banks, which has been divided into perhaps three
smaller fields of equal size by two boundary ridges which are lower and
therefore more recent. An arrangement of this kind suggests that three
sons had inherited from their father on an equal footing. So we even
have some insight into the legal habits of these villagers of two thousand
years ago
- not their entire civil code, but at least an essential
perhaps
part of it. For a period without written records this is saying a great
deal. The very nature of their work plunges prehistorians into centuries
and millennia closed for ever to historians and philologists. This
17
challenge is all the more exciting as the resources of archaeology
improve.
From the village community we pass on to the villages themselves,

which have survived in the form of house foundations (see plate 6).
During the last twenty-five years more than a hundred sites have been
authenticated and excavated step by step, all of them in Denmark and

often directly adjacent to the ancient fields. This is a wearisome and
time-consuming task for which small knives have to be used. The
objects discovered are mainly potsherds,
animal bones and all kinds of
rubbish - nothing much to look at but an inexhaustible source of
information. A careful watch must be kept for differences in the colour
of thesoil and above all for holes of every kind. Post-holes of different
houses which have stood on the same site must be distinguished from
each other and every carbonized or decomposed beam from the roof
structure carefully inspected.
Nowhere does a picture of the peasant's daily round emerge so
clearly as from the surprisingly spacious houses of a prosperous village
(see plate 6). The most usual type of house is about fifty feet long and
i6J feet wide, with low walls of peat, earth and stones. Wood and
wattle and daub are also quite common materials. The large sturdy
roof rested on two rows of posts inside the house. The roof was covered
with grass-peat, heath-peat or reeds and straw. There were no windows
but there was a flue in the ceiling and two doors, one in the middle of
each of the long sides.
The houses stand in orderly rows, sometimes on only one side of the
street,sometimes on both, the direct ancestors of the intimate Danish
villages of today. All the houses are exactly orientated east- west,
with a
very small displacement SE - NW. Anyone familiar with Jutland's
prevailing west wind will at once appreciate why these peasants sought
protection against it; even so the front of the house would catch the
midday sun at its best, between one and two in the afternoon.
On their west side the houses had a stamped clay floor and fireplace,
but on the where the cattle lived and came in and out by the north
east,
door, there was a simple earth floor. This was a proper farm-house in
which men and beasts lived together under one roof,
ready to defy the
winter. In this refuge from cold and rain dwelt all the members of the
agricultural household.
There is evidence that a house might be burned down as
many as
five times and always be rebuilt. We
can imagine the horror and panic
18
when the dry timbers of the roof caught fire at night from the open
hearth, and we can actually see for ourselves what havoc was wrought
-
for example, the remains of three cows and a horse which perished in the
flames. In another house there are only the remains of animal harnesses,
cut through and semi-carbonized: the animals must have escaped.
Among the objects salvaged are broken wooden doors, enormous
corn bins, fragments of weaving stools, a set of weights from suspended
fishing nets which had fallen together as the nets burned, sacrificial
vessels, and a buried iron axe whose cutting edge has been turned
upwards, probably as a protection against lightning and fire. Again and

again grains and cereal, the substance of daily life and nourishment
are found. All the main types of cereal are represented, but as usual
barley predominates. Wheat and millet, very common in the Bronze
Age, have by now almost disappeared. In their place we find oats, a
new and important item of diet, and rye which at first is only sparsely
represented but later overtakes the rest. Roasted grains of wheat were
probably eaten before meals as an appetizer, for the application of heat
converted the starch into dextrin and made the wheat sweet to the taste.
Grain was often mixed with egg-yolk and hempseed to make a kind of
porridge. Woad was much cultivated for its blue colouring, and in one
house there was a quantity of hops. The occupants must have been
brewing mead when the conflagration overtook them.
It is curious that themention of the northern countries in classical

first
writings should occur in this very period of their extreme isolation, and
that the author should be a Greek, Pythias of Marseilles. Whilst on a
visit to the tin islands of Britain about 350 BG, Pythias was taken across
the sea to Thule, a six days' journey from Britain. It was Pythias who
gave us the expression ultima Thule. The place where he landed could
have been on the west coast of Jutland, Sweden or Norway; despite
many conjectures, we still cannot be sure of the exact spot. Pythias
speaks of the bright summer nights, the sun which never sets, and a
frozen sea. His contemporaries took all this for a sailor's yarn and refused
to believe him, so his own account has not survived. But a summary by
his compatriot Strabo gives us a glimpse of native life:
Pythias plausibly relates that in the countries of the cold zone there are no
soft fruits, few animals exist, the natives live on oats, millet, vegetables, wild
fruit and roots. Those who have honey and barley make a drink from them.
Since the sun never shines in its full strength, they bring their grain into
where it is threshed for if left to be threshed in the fields it
large buildings
19
would rot from lack of sun and from the rain. Indeed these fairy-tales will
be reckoned not far behind those of Eumerus and Antiphones. But those may
be excused, since they do not pretend to be anything but what they are,
tales of wonder.
Strabo not prepared to extenuate Pythias, despite the fact that his
is
words have such a disconcertingly authentic ring.
Although the finds speak so eloquently of the life of nearly two thousand
years ago, and bring the men of this long vanished age so close to us,
one ardent wish seemed likely to remain unfulfilled. If only one could
meet and speak with a man of that time, or at least see his face as it was
in life; if only we could for once bridge the gulf between the living and
the dead It was thus quite a shock when in 1950 the Danes discovered
!
in a bog at Tollund a man so wonderfully preserved that he seemed to

lie there asleep, liable at any moment to open his eyes and look at
his discoverers (see plates 7 and 8). His face in repose impresses by its
fineness. We can see the determined set of his lips, his powerful nose ;
we can trace every wrinkle round and in his forehead. He has

his eyes
a distinguished and intelligent air, a Hans Christian Anderson face.
The body was so astonishingly well preserved that the Danes were
able to analyse the contents of his intestines. This showed that his last
meal was a porridge made of the usual cereals, egg-yolk and hempseed,
and also seeds of various kinds of weeds. In other words, this was a
really horrible and bitter concoction, containing knotweed, white
goosefoot, spurry, field violet, hemp-nettle and occasional examples of
many other kinds of seed.
This surprising discovery is
supported by the excavation of a house
which produced a clay pot containing a litre of grain made up of 65
c.cm barley, 8 c.cm. knotweed, 18 c.cm. goosefoot and 2 c.cm.
spurry ;
There were also 86 distinct grains of 1 7 different types scattered around.
In another house was a vessel
containing 1.5 litres of goosefoot seed,
and in a third a heap of spurry amounting to litres. It is inconceiv-
5.6
able that menadvanced as these were incapable of separating wheat
as
from weeds. Although not
perhaps actually planted, the grain of these
weeds must have been systematically collected. One to one and a half
litres of grain would be
just the right amount for a peasant family's
midday mash. The cereal crops yielded by the impoverished soil must
often have been
insufficient, making it necessary to supplement it
with the seeds of more
unpalatable plants.
White goosefoot is known to act as a
purge, so its presence in such
20
quantity (as much as a litre and a half in one instance) suggests that
these people had become immune As is often the case,
to its effects.
famine and the fear of famine at the end of winter must have been
man's constant dread ; we have not yet escaped this recurrent scourge.
All finds of this type bring us close to the routine of daily life in field
and village, and the picture they convey is at once many-sided and
consistent. The makeshift circular hovels and nomadic habits of the
Bronze Age have now
given way to solid homesteads standing in
cultivated fields ; thisthe great contribution of the early Iron Age
is
and the nucleus of a system of intensive farming which in essentials is

unaltered even today, although the tools employed have improved.
A word on dating is called for here. The erosion of the sandy soil
which led to population displacement took place during the first three
centuries of the Christian era. The
houses therefore belong both to this
chapter and the next. It has been thought better to describe the finds
here, since they form a distinct unit of economic history.
The deterioration in climate postulated by Sernander in 1910 has been

brilliantly confirmed; its far-reaching economic consequences have
been demonstrated; but we have not explained the original
still
mystery, the absence of any graves from Zealand and the whole
Scandinavian mainland between 500 and 150 BG. What has been
accounted for is the desertion of the Norwegian valleys, which remained
unoccupied until the Viking period. Yet the soil of the Danish islands,
and of the west coast of Sweden and the better inland regions, is fertile,
and the climate no worse than that ofJutland and the Norwegian coasts.
In all these areas, therefore, the climate cannot be blamed for the
absence of graves. It became clear that in addition to the causes already
suggested (the new metal, the worsening climate and its economic
effects) we had to look for some other still undetected factor. This must
have appeared simultaneously with the other factors and have some
intrinsic connection with them, for coincidence can surely be ruled out.
The unknown was at last revealed in 1948. The explanation
factor
proved very simple and must almost certainly be correct the absence :
of graves between 500 and 150 BG is due to an alteration in the form of

burial. What explanation could be more welcome to an archaeologist?
Yet it is one to be approached with considerable caution, since men have
nearly always left some kind of graves behind them.
In many regions the end of the Bronze Age was a graveless period
and is known to us only from substantial bronze hoards. At the
21
Iron Age, when bronze was becoming scarce, perhaps
beginning of the
because of changes in the trading pattern of Central Europe, finds
vanish altogether. The graves of Jutland become steadily smaller. The
charred bones of a are pushed anyhow into the side of an older
corpse
barrow. This kind of burial involved only a small inconspicuous mound
about six and a half feet in diameter, a barely perceptible hump in fact,
so flat and vulnerable that the rains and frosts of two thousand years
completely destroyed them.

The connection between this phenomenon and others observed at the
beginning of the Iron Age can now be explained. Funerary customs

always reflect the social relations between men still living. Into the
tombs of the powerful chieftains and prosperous merchants of the
Bronze Age went glittering weapons, ornamental vessels, collars and
arm-rings of bronze; great mounds
were built in their honour on the
hill-tops, visible from a long way off. The impressive barrows and
splendid grave goods played
an important part in emphasizing the
superior social status of the dead man
and his clan. But once the
peasants were settled in homesteads which
were the nucleus of their
own family life, this concentration on burial rites ceased. The humble
indiscriminate distribution of bones beneath the sod, the uniformity of
lay-out among the graves, faithfully reflect the social uniformity of the
villagecommunity, whose houses provide no evidence of any barrier
separating masters from servants, or indeed men from the cattle which
inhabited the eastern half of the dwelling.
So the social order once again appears as the influence determining the
new community life and its burial customs. However^ this hypothesis
can only be confirmed if, after the long period without them, graves
start to reappear. And reappear they do, not gradually, not singly, but
suddenly and simultaneously all over a large part of Sweden. These are
the graves known as cremation pits, and their appearance can be dated
about 150 BC. Most of them are covered by completely level soil and are
virtually invisible. They remain unexcavated unless a labourer stumbles
on a graveyard by chance; but once seen they are unmistakable. These
black pits, nearly two feet in diameter and set close together at a depth
of between one and two feet, contain bones and sometimes metal
The burial rites must have started with a funeral pyre.
objects as well.
The higher the flames, the greater the honour paid to the dead and the
more complete the incineration. Small fragments of bone were hastily
collected from among the still
glowing embers into an urn, which was
22
deposited in a carefully dug pit and then packed round with a few
pailfuls of the carbonaceous residue from the fire. The spot might be
marked by a boulder or a flat stone or a raised stone several feet high.
When we look closely at Ostergotland and Vastergotland, the most
fertile regions of mainland Sweden, the
pattern of settlement during
the findless period suddenly becomes plain. The two
landscapes are
similar: a fertile central region surrounded by large forests, which
offered suitable protection to the semi-nomadic pastoral
people of the
Age, who cleared patches of ground by burning. Most of these areas
were deserted when the climate deteriorated, but the very fertile areas of
chalky boulder clay in the centre of each region continued under
intensive cultivation. The new development is to be seen in the
numerous early Iron Age cremation pits found in the clay, which must
once have afforded lush pasturage for cattle, although the ground is now
completely waterlogged. Patches of rubble embedded in the heavy clay
or lying at the edges would have offered dry land suitable for settlement
and would even have permitted cultivation on a modest scale. We
cannot say exactly when the new settlers came to the heavy clay region,
only that it must have been before 150 BG, when their presence becomes
evident from the cremation pits.
It even more striking to find cremation pit cemeteries containing
is
perhaps hundreds of closely spaced graves in which men, women and

children lie side by side without
any evident distinction either in the
type of burial or in the grave goods. In one excavation I took part in
we came across a cover-stone so large that all our combined strength
was needed to shift it. One of the workmen felt it must conceal the
burial place of a king, but it turned out to be the grave of a child. This
unusually large stone had simply happened to be close at hand when the
grave was made. At only three periods in human history do we find
cemeteries serving entire populations without reference to social dis-
tinctions : the barrows of the Stone Age, the cremation pits of the early
Iron Age and the cemeteries of our own day. At other times it is only
the select few, the rich and the powerful, whose graves are left for
posterity to examine ; the masses of the population, the ordinary men
and women, the slaves and the waifs, are absent from the archaeological
record. These cremation pit cemeteries are a striking reflection of the
culture which produced them and confirm the existence of village
communities similar in structure to those revealed by the houses on
Jutland.
One of the most satisfying experiences in research is to find that after
of patient work various types of evidence come
perhaps half a century
other's testimony. I have been careful in this
together to confirm each
account to mention the date at which various discoveries have been
made, must by now be aware that the composite picture of
so the reader
the beginnings of northern Germanic culture attempted here would
have been impossible thirty or even twenty years ago, and that some
of the most spectacular discoveries have been made during the last ten
to twelve years.
As late as1925 charred human bones were reinterred after the
completion of an excavation on the unthinking assumption that these
scientific value. In 1 948, however,
tiny chips and splinters could have no
the newly appointed official osteologist to the Historical Museum at
Stockholm was able to derive important information from the museum's
three litres of cremated bones and started work on a Bone Index. There
are three bones significantly thicker in men than in women - the
articulating head of the upper arm, the brow-ridges and the walls of
the skull - where these are present an osteologist can usually
so that
determine the sex of his subject. He will also try to establish age at the
time of death, which is naturally simplest in the case of children. If a
section is cut through a child's teeth and examined under the micro-
scope an odontologist can even say at which season of the year death
took place. It is a pity this knowledge seems to have no useful scientific
application Since we know that epiphysial fusion is only complete at
!
the age of 18, the long bones which can show whether this has taken
place are also very useful. Some general notion of a subject's age can be
derived from the skull, since the sutures grow together very slowly in
childhood and in old people the walls become very brittle.
The osteologist must also decide whether there are one or more
corpses in any given grave, and for this the unique odontoid process of
the second cervical vertebra and the two temporal bones of the inner
ear are useful. In one cremation pit, known to contain the bones of a
woman, the osteologist found three of the bones called meatus auditorius
extenws, the pair of bones from the petrous region facing the brain
cavity. One was very soft and the pair to it must have decayed, so we
should probably deduce that this women died shortly before the birth
of a child. Discoveries such as these
bring the lives and sufferings of
prehistoric people almost painfully close. One is no longer the detached
scientist analysing his material, but a man confronted by other men
who knew sickness, death, birth and love.
24
Child mortality was at its lowest between the ages of six and eighteen,
but even so between a third and a half of all the cremation pits were
made for children. To judge from
the very soft bones found in some of
them, even the newly born had their own pits.
Excluding children's graves, a cemetery of 200 cremation pits can
be reckoned to contain the ashes of about 120 adults, deposited over
two centuries. Allowing four generations to a century instead of our
modern three, an average village would have had a population of
adults. These are bare figures, but they tell us
fifteen
something about
the vanished prehistoric villages behind every surviving burial place.
In modern crematoria a temperature of 1000 Centigrade and
a generous supplement of air are needed to reduce a body com-
pletely to ashes, which in the case of a grown man amount to about
three This remainder would be the same even if the heat were
litres.
twice or even four times as great, which nowadays could be achieved

without difficulty. The men of the early Iron Age could produce this
degree of incineration using only an exposed funeral pyre which was at

the mercy of the wind and arbitrary in its distribution of heat. This must
mean that the art of pyre building had been perfected during the find-
less period, since otherwise we should find traces of an experimental
stage. It follows that although these people must have bumed their
corpses, they had not yet adopted the custom of burying their dead in
large village cemeteries. Armed with this knowledge we can now go
back to some deductions about the findless period itself.
It is quite common to find a heap of charred bones with a ring of
pitch around the lower edge. From impressions in the pitch it was
realized that such bones must originally have been deposited in a box
made of bark, whose base and were sewn together with large
sides
stitches and caulked with pitch. So if we now find a bone-heap without
a ring of pitch we can say that the bones must have been deposited in an
uncaulked bark box. This sounds like an archaeological joke, but it can
be taken as a fact provided the circle formed by the bone heap is well
defined and about six to eight inches in diameter. In many cases the
bones seem to have been deposited in a sack or scattered loose among
the embers.
It might be appropriate to describe this early Iron Age as the age of

peasant communities, but the underlying economic and social structure
has only been recognized during the last ten or twenty years. Long ago
the period was labelled the Celtic Iron Age on the strength of a few
25
outstanding show-pieces found in our
northern graves and ascribed to
the Celts, at that time masters of Central Europe. The Celts had
started to expand beyond their original habitat, which was probably
in France, around the year 500 BG. They proceeded to establish a tribal
federation which stretched from the Atlantic in the west to Asia Minor
in the east, so that the older populations of France, southern Germany
and the Balkans became subjected to a ruling stratum of Celts. The
Celts have been credited with great vigour, artistic talent, sensuality
and red hair. Their magnificent works of art are known from the rich
funerary deposits of their chieftains; and isolated objects found their
way north along the trade routes, so that a Celtic bronze cauldron,
Celtic swords, neck-rings and other richly decorated pieces have been
found among northern grave goods. In antiquity the Celts were famous
as vehicle builders, a reputation fully confirmed by the discovery in the
north of two splendid four-wheeled wagons (see plate 9).
The Germans of Germany had a long common boundary with the
Celts. East of the Vistula they had Baltic tribes for neighbours, but in
Bohemia there were Celts again, known as Bojer (Bohemians =
Bojahaemum). At this period the boundary between Celts and Germans
ran along the Fichtelgebirge and then north-west through Hesse. We
can trace the slow infiltration of Germans into the valleys of the
Rhineland and the Ruhr. The wedge of Celtic territory divided the
Germanic lands east and west into two regions, settled by two distinct
peoples. Western Germanic graves are relatively barren, while those of
the east are rich in weapons, ornaments and pottery. Whilst the
Germans were expanding towards the south, ornaments with Celtic
animal decoration and other merchandise were moving northwards.
In other words the Scandinavian Iron Age has justifiably acquired its
Celtic labelon artistic and commercial grounds alone. We
can see that
the forms of Celtic ornament and
craftsmanship were adopted in the
north, although at the hands of the village smiths they soon became
almost unrecognizable and, it must be admitted, much cruder. The
northern smiths must have found the new metal very difficult to work.
As we have noticed, their earliest were directed to such small
efforts
and trivial objects as Kropfnadeln,
belt hooks, rings with a loop, and
spiral brooches. These must often have been made from very inferior
metal. It may seem surprising that
any of them survived, for in their
miniature barrows, protected only by a thin
layer of turf, they must
have been very vulnerable to rust. In fact the handful of artifacts so
far removed from the Swedish mainland, scarcely above half a dozen in
26
all, were not chance discoveries but the reward of systematic excavation
by professional archaeologists. Until recently the only surviving
Kropfnadeln from Gotland were all made of bronze.
We are better off with the cremation pits, since the carbonaceous
residue has acted as a preservative and likely find-spots are easier to
pick out. They have yielded, for example, bronze neck rings whose
ends are bent at an angle and terminate in large round globes (see
plate 10). Their decoration recalls the running interlace of Celtic art,
transformed in the north into a series of simple strokes interwoven round
three small protuberances. It has only recently been shown that while
in western Sweden the terminal globes are two hollow spherical pieces
of metal riveted together, in eastern Sweden they are solid. It seems
therefore that bronze workers of the findless period had already
started evolving local styles, since these neck rings are among the
earliest artifacts found in the cremation pits.
A made
in 1957 provided further evidence
study of belt fastenings
on this point. Nowadays we
use a buckle with a movable thong, but
even so simple a device had to be invented, and we know that this
happened somewhere near the beginning of the Christian era. The
preceding period had been a time of much experiment in belt fastenings.
For example, someone devised a leather ring-belt: the free end was
pushed through the ring from below, bent back on itself and secured to
a stud on the part of the belt encircling the body. Since the free end had
several holes, this belt had the advantage of being adjustable, for
example during a hearty meal. The buckles recovered from western
Sweden are still very simple in form, their fastening consisting merely of
a large thong. In contrast, the buckles from eastern Sweden have quite
elaborate fastening plates and are attractive ornaments in their own
right, decorated in the local style with

meanders and cross-hatchings.
Two hundred and seventy three buckles of a distinctive form have
been recovered from Gotland, which is very rich in finds for this period.
The island of Bornholm remained faithful to the old-fashioned belt-
hook. So we have definite evidence of a markedly local tradition in
metal-working.
This was the heyday of the village smith. The evidence of one cemetery
may be taken as an example. The a high narrow ridge on gravel,
site is
the neatly-spaced cremation pits are in orderly ranks from north to

in them
south, some two hundred in all. The first iron sickles contained
are plain and simple, becoming progressively bigger, broader and
stronger until the latest examples are really large objects
and even have
c 27
some This village obviously had a competent and
light decoration.
enterprising smith, while
other villages were poorly served and have
little to show apart from a few misshapen metal objects.
The smiths were the only specialists of the village community, with
which they were completely integrated. Their graves are at first
It is not until the first centuries AD that the presence
indistinguishable.
of hammers, tongs and anvils among the grave goods singles out the
smiths from the rest of the population.
It is true that there are a very few graves, usually not more than one
or two to a cemetery, which must be set in a class apart. These are the
'weapon graves', furnished with a strong single-edged sword, a hefty
spear-head and sometimes an iron shield-boss,
which protected the
hand holding the shield (see plate n). It is still too early for us to say
precisely what were the functions of
these weapon-bearers in the
peasant community; this is a subject requiring further investigation.

We have seen that the semi-nomads of the Bronze Age with their
scratch tillageand pastoral economy were replaced during the early
Iron Age by genuine peasant-farmers who settled on the land, living in
little communities separated from each other by great forests. It was
here that the northern Germanic peoples were unconsciously formed.

And was here too that conditions existed which could give rise to
it
enmity and warfare between different groups. As yet there were no

chronicles to tell of wars and victories and political disturbances. But one
unusual ray of light has come down to us from this prehistoric period.
This is a ship, found in a bog at Hjortspring on the Danish island of Als.

It has a double stem at each end, a wooden shell lashed together and
caulked with resin and with places for oars, but no mast (see plate 12).
In addition there are eight swords, the earliest we have from the
Scandinavian Iron Age, 169 spear-heads made of iron and antler, 150
wooden bossed shields, a few lathe-turned wooden boxes, keys, fragments
of mail and so forth. This find falls quite outside all the other known
categories. Although it is the earliest example in Europe of a timbered
ship, it still has the unusual double stem which we recognize from
the Hdllristningen of the Bronze Age; yet the
presence of an iron
Kropfnadel places the ship definitely in the early Iron Age. However the
discovery is certainly not to be dismissed as unimportant ; weighing53okg.
(lojcwts.) and 58 feet long, theshiphad room for twenty armed oarsmen
and one or two overseers. All this was found in one tiny
bog !
Faced with such conundrums even prehistorians must be content to
28
record what they see and not try to construct a plausible explanation.
All we can say is that an unknown army, on the move from no-one
knows where to a destination none can guess at, was defeated at
Hjortspring on the island of Als by unknown defenders, who sacrificed
their booty to a war god. Apparently this era of peasant communities
was not all peace and industrious toil.
It cannot have been long after this that the first northern Germanic
tribes, known to history as the Cimbri and the Teutons, left their homes
to invade the European mainland (.120 BG). They moved rapidly
across Germany and perhaps Bohemia as well; although at first they
threw the Roman legions into confusion, they were themselves decisively
beaten in 101 BG. They had come and gone like a bolt from the blue.
If the original habitat of the Cimbri was, as has been suggested, the
northern part of Jutland known as Himmerland, then they came from
one of the regions of impoverished sandy soil, which would account for
their migration and would be quite consistent with the find material;
but we still lack definite proof.
The Cimbri and Teutons were followed by other tribes, for example
the Vandals. But although the Vandals may have come originally from
Vendyssel in the extreme north of Jutland, it seems that they spent a
long time settled near the mouth of the Oder before descending on
Europe in the invasion which added the word vandalism to our
vocabularies. Finally there were the Goths, whose original habitat is
described by Jordanes :
The people whose origins you seek rose like a swarm of bees from their
hive on the island of Scandza and descended on Europe . . . From the
island of Scandza, which is the cradle of peoples, nay more, in a sense the
womb of nations, must they have come, these Goths, led by Berig their
king ... to arrive on our shores, that is at Gotiscandza, with but three ships.
. There nothing inherently improbable in this narrative apart from

is
the alleged smallness of the fleet, which may well be a rhetorical

convention. The Goths' tribal name is echoed in Goteborg, Gotaland
and Gotland. From the archaeological evidence we can say that the
cemeteries on the forest fringes, on the infertile moraine soils bordering
the wet clayfields of Vastergotland, die out about the beginning of the
Christian era, but that this is not so with the corresponding cemeteries
of Ostergotland. So there might well have been a Gothic migration
from an original homeland in western Sweden. Unfortunately, although
it has long been recognized that there is evidence of Gothic occupation
29
in the region round the mouth of the Vistula where they would have
disembarked, the finds here have not been subjected to the newest and
most sophisticated techniques. This priceless material has been inacces-
second world war and may now even be irrecoverably lost,
sible since the
a source of prehistory silenced for ever. All the same, Berig must have
been the first man and king from the northern Germanic peoples whose
name was known to the outside world, a contemporary of Marobodus,
king of the Marcomanni and of Arminius, king of the Cherusci.
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
The and Varus in the Teutoburgerwald in

confrontation of Arminius
the year 9 AD
was a turning point in world history. This was a truly
decisive battle which halted the forward sweep of the legions and
ensured that for centuries to come the frontier between the Roman and
Germanic worlds would lie along the Rhine and the Danube rather
than the Elbe. This frontier was immediately fortified, as the Romans
started to dig themselves in behind the defensive fortification of the
limes,
Haifa century earlier Germans and Romans had been separated by a

third force, the Celts, whose tribal federation sprawled loosely right
across Europe. The conquest of this ramshackle power looked a feasible
proposition and the

Celts finally suffered decisive defeat at the hands of
Julius Caesar in his Gallic campaigns. However, no sooner was the

victory (if it was a victory) won, than the Romans had to meet a new
adversary, the Germans, who were now their immediate neighbours
and would one day be their conquerors and their heirs. But this
triumph was still far in the future.

Various derivations have been offered for the word 'Germans'.
The simplest explanation, which may well be correct, is that it comes
from the Latin word germani, meaning brothers. It is quite plausible
to suppose that the Romans were especially impressed by the discipline
and fanaticism of the brotherhoods-in-arms which were a special
characteristic of some of the tribes they first encountered. What
particularly strikes us is the fact that the Germanic tribes made virtually
no attempt at a wider union and had thus no occasion to apply a
collective name to themselves, achieving cohesion only in their smaller
units. On theory the word would be a purely Latin formation
this
without any nordic equivalent the Germans, in fact, knew nothing of
:
'Germans'.
At first even what the Romans knew of them was very vague. They
were reluctant to believe Pythias' tale of men living in far-off regions
beyond Gibraltar and Britain,
which must have seemed wild and
unlikelynonsense. The earliest Roman accounts of Germanic tribes,
written in the reign of Augustus, still breathe incredulity and horror.
Four years before the battle in the Teutoburgerwald a Roman fleet

c
had reached the mouth a sea hitherto
of the Rhine, sailed across
3
unknown and unheard of , in other words the North Sea, and from
thence ventured up the Elbe. After a naval expedition to Heligoland it
was said 'Everyone who returned from far-off places had marvels to
:
relate of violent whirlwinds, strange birds, sea monsters and hybrid

men and and may have seen such things or believed in them
beasts,
from At
fear.' Rome there was still apparently some scepticism over
these travellers* tales and a factual account of the Germanic peoples
and lands was urgently needed. This want was met by Strabo, Pliny,
Ptolemy and Tacitus, whose Germania (which includes observations
on Scandinavian tribes and was written in AD 98) stands out as a source
of the first rank.
Measured by the yardstick of Rome's highly developed culture the

northern Germanic peoples must still be described as primitive.
True, their economic achievement in face of the climatic deterioration
had been remarkable, while their sense of human obligations and
social arrangements was perhaps equally impressive, but the primitive
features of their way of life are none the less obvious. The occupants
of Scandinavia lived in purely agrarian communities. They had some
competence in the useful arts but practised them only on a modest
There is no evidence of any real artistic style, just as there was
scale.
a complete absence of aristocratic patrons or potential purchasers.
Headmen and chieftains must have existed, but only as integrated
members of the farming community. There would have been story-
telling round the fire of an evening, when tales were repeated which
have been told the world over from time immemorial and are known
to us still, in the versions of the brothers Grimm; and there would be
other tales, equally timeless, of horrible dragons and forest monsters
and benign natural spirits. But there is no evidence of any sustained
literary effort, of an oral tradition of poetry for example, or of
chronicles; indeed, there is no evidence of writing of any kind. In
their religion the Germans
appear to have combined deep-felt and
honourable with some grossly primitive practices.
beliefs
Such was the economic, social and spiritual
equipment the Germans
32
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
brought to their encounter with the cultural wealth of Rome. This
was the great confrontation, one of the grandest in human history,
which led to the assumption of the Graeco-Roman inheritance by a
people north of the Alps. The refined and highly civilized Romans
would have considered it ridiculous to think that Western civilization
could be upheld and even advanced by these bearded savages from
the world's outer rim ; the Germans would have shared their incredulity.
Yet while the great Mediterranean cultures were declining, the
Germans were starting on the road to maturity, though at first progress
was slow. Their vigour was as yet untapped, they retained an innocence
which made them fully dependent on external stimuli for the fertiliza-
tion of latent powers, powers which were to blossom into crowning
achievements of the human mind, in contributions to civilization
and technology.
Archaeology enables us to trace the effects of the earliest and
formative contacts between the Romans and the Germans and to
distinguish the alien from the indigenous. Although still far from
complete, work in this field has already yielded some unusually
precise results.
We are accustomed to speak of a Roman Iron Age succeeding the
Celtic Iron Age north of the Alps. The transition can be said to have
occurred at the beginning of the Christian era, when Maroboduus
and the Marcomanni took possession of Bohemia and the north
became accessible to the flood of Roman merchandise, while the
consolidation of the limes made peaceful trading possible in the west.
By reason of their geographical position, the first northern Germanic

peoples to make contact with the Romans were the inhabitants of
Denmark. A magnificent hoard, unsurpassed by any discovery from
a later period and rich in just those innovations which concern us here,
provides evidence about the practical effect of this early encounter
(see plate 13).
The hoard was discovered in 1920 at Hoby on the Danish island of
Laaland. There is no indication that cremation preceded burial. The
skeleton is that of a middle-aged man of slender build. By his side were
no fewer than seven fibulae, two gold finger rings, a buckle, a knife,
various other small objects, and most striking of all, a superb set of
Roman tableware : a pair of figured cups made of silver, and in bronze
a beautiful situla or bucket, a patera or saucepan, with the maker's name
GN TREBELLIUS ROMANUs on the handle, a very elegant wine jug and
33
an equally attractive two-handled dish There is a naked figure on this
last object, probably Aphrodite, surrounded by Cupids, two flying
aloft and decking her hair with ribbons, two standing and proffering
a looking-glass and a dove, the emblem of love. There was also a bronze
tablet and a small cup, whose metal handle is of native manufacture,
as are the metal terminals on two drinking horns ; the three earthen-
ware pots are also native work.
The silver cups attract most attention, because of their graceful
form and finely composed reliefs. One illustrates a moving passage
from the Iliad, the scene in the Greek camp following the escape of
Priam from beleaguered Troy to beg Achilles for the body of his son,
the fallen Hector. On one side are the Greek soldiers in the enchanted
sleep imposed on them by Hermes, while Idaios, Priam's charioteer,

sits deep in thought and keeps watch beside the tall two-wheeled chariot.
On the other side the scene has shifted to the main action. Achilles
sits naked on a stool, a light cloth thrown across his lap Priam fully ;
dressed in a suit with long sleeves, cloak, hose, boots, and a Phrygian
cap, kneels at Achilles' feet, kissing his hand, while his own left hand
points towards the ground, the outward sign of submission. Servants
stand on either side, amazed at what is happening.
Priam leapt from the car to the earth and left Idaios in his place he stayed ;
to mind the horses and mules ; but the old man made straight for the house
where Achilles dear to Zeus was wont to sit. And there he found the man
himself, and his comrades set apart They were unaware of great Priam
. . .
as he came in and so stood he anigh and clasped in his hands the knees of
Achilles and kissed his hands, terrible, man-skying, that slew many of
Priam's sons. And as when a grievous curse cometh upon a man who in his
own country hath slain another and escapeth to the land of strangers, to the
house of some rich man, and wonder possesseth them that look upon him -
so Achilles wondered when he looked on god-like Priam and the rest
wondered likewise and looked on one another. (Iliad xxiv)
The second cup, which is by the same hand, illustrates the sufferings
of Philoctetes in two scenes taken from Sophocles' tragedy of that
name, the snake bite and Ulysses* visit to him on Lemnos.
The cups
are obviously a pair, designed for use at
banquets. The
left us his name, on one
has
artist
cup in Greek lettering, on the other
in Roman: CHEIRISOPHOS EPOI. Here we have a Greek artist illumina-
tinga Greek theme in masterly style on behalf of a Roman patron, and

thisabout the time when Rome itself, under
Augustus, was helping
Greek art to a new flowering. As we see here,
immigrant artists had
34
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
freed themselves from the Hellenistic style and were concentrating on
the more meditative and harmonious aspects of human behaviour,
portraying men fully conscious of their human dignity.

By a lucky chance the original owner of these pieces can be identified,
for on the base has been scratched the name SILIUS, and a C. Silius
A. Cacina Largus was legatus exercitus Germaniae superioris between AD
14 and 21 or, in other \vords, held the highest civil and military
command in upper Germany under Drusus Germanicus, with his
headquarters at Mainz, the gateway from the Empire into free
Germany. It would surely be perverse not to identify him as the one-
time owner of the silver cups. There remains the question of how they
came to Laaland.
The Romans were in the habit of making diplomatic presents to
friendly neighbours. According to a first century inventory from
Arabia Felix, 'Kings and princes are given objects made of gold,
5
silver cups with decorative reliefs and . bronze household articles.
. .
And it is said of Barygaza in western India 'One gives the king of

:
these parts expensive silver vessels/ Tacitus, in his account of the

Germans, mentions that they are often found to possess silver objects,
giftsmade to their envoys and important people. In these early years,
when contacts with the Romans were still peaceful and something of
a novelty, it was only natural for the Romans to make presents to
German chieftains; for example, it is recorded that in AD 14:
Augustus' fleet sailed across the ocean from the mouth of the Rhine as
far as the land of the Gimbri, where no Roman of these days had ever been
before, whether by land or water. The Gimbri, the Charydes, the Semnones
and other Germanic of that region sent embassies seeking the
tribes
friendship of Augustus and the Roman people.
With cups this single individual living on Laaland

his pair of silver
acquired nothing than a piece of world and cultural history; they

less
must have come into his possession just at the time when Jesus of
Nazareth was alive. One can hardly conceive of any objects richer in
historical and Assuming that the recipient was
cultural associations.
quite a young man was made, we can suppose

at the time the gift
that his burial took place some time towards the middle of the first
century, or a little later, which fits in with the other archaeological
evidence.
It was mentioned in passing that the corpse was buried without
35
this was unusual. Archaeologists seize upon
having been cremated;
as an important piece of evidence.
any change in burial habits
In earlier days, corpses were always buried. The first evidence of
cremation comes from the middle of the Bronze Age, but even then it
was some time before men realized that a much smaller receptacle
than a coffin would suffice for the charred bones. Cremation is the
mark of a change to a more abstract, a more spiritual outlook; it asserts
that the immortal spirit now in another world has no further need of
its corporeal shell. Gradually men fell into the habit of burning the
grave goods as well as the corpse,

and finally grave goods disappear
altogether, just as burial places become unmarked and are no longer
cared for. Many scholars see the complete absence of graves during
the early Iron Age as the logical consequence of cremation, which
signified the complete renunciation of all earthly possessions and

bodily state. It was during the following period that cremation pits
came into use these at least provided a modest receptacle for the bones
;
and a demonstration that the life of the community continued.

Inhumation suddenly makes its reappearance at the beginning of
the Roman Iron Age, after being absent from the Scandinavian
mainland for a thousand years. The Romans, who cremated their
dead, cannot have been responsible for the change of custom. Inhuma-
tion without cremation was practised by the Vandals in Silesia and
by many of the southern Celts, but attempts at tracing a direct line of
influence from them have failed. Perhaps all that was needed to
spread the new religion was the missionary zeal of a few fanatics.
As so often happens, the soil seems to have been remarkably receptive :
the new religion was in the one might say. The practice of inhuma-
air,
tion spread out in all directions from some centre unknown to us,
acquiring new features as it passed from one region to the next. Its
adoption is striking evidence of a return to a primitive and materialistic
conception of the after-life.
The new doctrine found adherents along the east coast of Jutland. It
is clear that the dead were expected to remain in these graves. For
example, there the naive provision of food and drink (see plate 14).
is
There is childish logic in the determination of the orientation of the
graves,which can be explained roughly thus: a sleeping man rests

most comfortably on his right side, the side away from his heart,
and he naturally lies with his face turned towards the sun as it rises
to its zenith. It follows that his grave must be orientated east-west,
36
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
with the head of the corpse in the west, facing south. In front of the
corpse are earthenware pots for his food, in fact his own complete
set of table-ware, which includes at the very least a large storage jar,
a smaller vessel with a handle and a footed beaker containing a handled
cup; one of the smaller vessels may even be placed close to the corpse's
mouth, thrust into the rigid hands. A large dish and a small shallow
bowl are very frequently found in the south-east corner of a grave,
and there are often in addition three other vessels, so that the set
may amount to nine pieces all told. Bones of three meat animals,
beef, pork and mutton, lie together with an iron carving knife on a
large wooden platter placed at the centre of the long southern side.
A grave will also contain a dead man's personal possessions in metal,
although weapons are found in only a few cemeteries; their general
absence from male burials is quite striking. Potsherds are often found
just below the surface of the earth, probably the relics either of meals
consumed there by the living in solemn communion with the dead or
offerings left at regular intervals for their further sustenance.
In northern Jutland the new custom took a different form. Here
there was apparently a sudden change-over to burial in chambers
built of heavy stone, so well caulked with pebbles and clay that many
have remained soil-free to this day (see plate 14). These tombs also
contain complete sets of table-ware, but their arrangement is less

orderly than in the more southerly graves. It is also not uncommon
to find several corpses in one grave. The chambers are strongly
reminiscent of the Stone Age barrows, and like them were obviously
looked on as a kind of family vault.
contents of one of these stone chambers was surprising. The
The
excavator discovered the bodies of a man and a woman lying before
the entrance, their twenty-five vessels carefully set out beside them,
while inside there was a single body, that of a man, unaccompanied
by any grave goods. It seems that this corpse was deposited in a
ready-made mortuary house which was deliberately emptied to make
way for him. We have no idea why this should have happened.
Although cremations still continued, it is clear from the fragments
of pottery that may be recovered from a large cremation pit (enough

to make a of eight pieces, jars, bowls and cups) that the new idea
set
had taken hold and that even the cremated dead were now thought
to live on in their graves and require food and drink. The reappearance
of this crude belief in the continuing needs of the body after death is
all the more surprising in view of the unfurnished cremation pits of the
37
earlier period and the complete absence of graves earlier still, suggesting
that the idea of disembodiment had at one time been grasped.
This new rite, which came into fashion just as Roman influence
firstbecame important although it was not of Roman origin, was
responsible for the preservation of bronze and silver vessels of Roman
provenance in Scandinavian soil. If a dead man had owned a best
table-service in one of the noble metals, he would not take his every-day
earthenware set with him to his grave.
Traders soon discovered there was an excellent market for such

articles in the north,where the Germans were eager customers and
had and amber to offer in exchange; in peaceful times the
rare skins
trade routes along the northward flowing rivers were relatively safe.
Although the Hoby bronzeware is in a class of its own (it was probably
a present to a chieftain), most of the commercially-imported metal-
ware was manufactured at Capua, the chief centre of the Empire's
bronze industry. The high quality of these pieces is evident in a number
of ways they are of strong metal, they have proved durable even when
:
they appear delicate, they are finely decorated in the classical style
and they frequently carry a manufacturer's mark.
The manufacturer whose stamp occurs most frequently on saucepans
and dippers (so far his work has been found at six different sites in
Denmark) was CIPIUS POLYBIUS, who came of a well-known family
of craftsmen their work has also been found in Central Europe and
:
in Britain. Another master whose name is found at more than one

site (in three Danish burials and in one in northern
Sweden) is
ANSIUS EPAPHRODITUS. Both names have been found on
dippers in a
grave near Annasholm on Fiinen island, and on saucepans at Pompeii
and Herculaneum. Here then we can discern a direct connection
between the two cities destroyed by volcanic action and the Danish
graves, which helps to establish that both manufacturers were active
before the eruption of AD 79 and that their
products were despatched
to the north together.
Naturally not everyone was able to afford a complete set of table-

ware, but there was always a good market for individual items, buckets
and smaller receptacles. Dippers with long handles were also
popular
and are found lying in the graves singly, or in twos or threes
just as
they must have been used in everyday life. The is a
largest piece really
kind of saucepan, identified by a
normally flat base and broad handle
with a hole in the end. The
dipper proper and its accompanying
38
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
strainer is thinner, with a more rounded base and a flat or narrow
handle (see plate 15). The dipper was used for decanting wine from a
large storage jar into the saucepan ; the strainer kept the liquid free
of any granular residue. When water was added, following a southern
custom of great antiquity, the drink was usually mulled.
One wonders whether wine was imported along with the drinking
accessories. Although there is no definite evidence on this point,
prosperous chieftains and farmers may quite possibly have served
wine on special occasions in any case it is pleasant to think that they
;
did. The everyday drink, however, must have been a native brew.
Microscopic examination of the residue remaining in one bronze vessel

showed it to be composed of fermented barley, bilberries, cranberries
and myrtle (Myrica gale). Tacitus seems to have heard rumours of
such a drink; he says of the Germans: 'for drink they extract a juice
from barley or grain which is fermented to make something not unlike
wine.* (Germania xxiii). The effects of this concoction would certainly
have not been unlike those of wine And it would also be a drink
!
much improved by straining.

Anyone who could afford it would acquire a complete Roman
service made of bronze for use on festive occasions. We find the same
combination over and over again: a large pot-bellied cauldron or a
tall bucket, a saucepan with dipper and strainer, a large basin qr
shallow bowl, used in the south for handwashing and in the north
more probably for food. The normal
drinking vessels which would
be made of ox-horn have left no traces, apart from their metal terminals,
but the chieftain of Hoby drank from his handsome silver cups and
other important people would also have a glass or two in addition to
their bronzeware.
It seems quite incredible that such breath-takingly fragile glass
should have survived two thousand years of interment almost or
completely unscathed (see plate 15). There have of course been
accidents occasioned by an unsuspecting farm labourer and his spade,
or cases of spontaneous dissolution into a dust so fine it would pass
unnoticed but for the watchful archaeologist and his knife.
The Empire were not in Italy at all;
chief glassworks of the early
glassware was originally imported from Egypt and Syria and was as
highly prized as precious stones. As glass became less rare in Italy
the fashion was to combine it with Capuan bronzeware, and this was
how the glass found its way north, to prove equally acceptable among
the Germanic peoples.
39
There is no difficulty in recognizing the costliness of the glass found in
a small group of wealthy graves at Juellinge on the island of Laaland,
scarcely ten miles from Hoby, where four women lie buried side by
Each was wearing three or four fibulae and fine
side (see plate 16).
gold neck ornaments and had long gold and silver pins in their carefully
dressed hair. Other personal possessions include a comb, knives,
scissors,spinning-whorls and the key to a wooden box also found in
the grave. The pots and dishes include cauldrons, dippers and strainers,
drinking horns and a few earthenware pieces. There are bones of pork,
beef and mutton. And finally there are these superb glasses, four in all.
Two of the glasses are ribbed bowls, made of white-marbled blue
glass. Similar glass fragments have been found at the site of the Roman
fort of Hofheim, evacuated in AD 79, but none at any later sites. In the
same grave is marked ANSI DIODO on the handle, that is
a saucepan
Ansius Diodorus whose stamp is found on saucepans at Pompeii,
which must also have been made before seems likely then that
79. It
the lady acquired her table-ware at some time within ten or at most
twenty years of this date. It would be useful to know how long after-
wards she lived to enjoy it, since this could help in dating the hairpins,
pendants and brooches found in her grave, which might just as easily
be several decades earlier or later. But this is one of the finer points of
scholarship.
One of the other pair of glasses found has crumbled to dust, but its
fellow has survived, a remarkable conical footed beaker, cut to close-set
hexagonal facets* An exactly similar glass has been found in Gotland,

and fragments of others are reported from a number of widely separated
places, Pompeii, Cyprus, Vindonissa, Trier, England and Afghanistan.
With these as a guide, we can say that the Juellinge glass may perhaps
have been on the market about AD 100. Its purchaser was a woman of
about thirty, just over five feet tall. For her burial she wore a plain
gold ring similar to a modern wedding ring on the third finger of her
right hand ; at her right side was placed the handle of a bronze strainer,
whose bowl lies close to her fingers and is gripped round the edge by
the thumb, and she seems to be in the act of
conveying this object to
her teeth, which are stained (see plate
16). This tableau is not meant
to suggest the impossible feat of
drinking from a sieve. Probably the
mourners set the strainer in the curve of her right arm to show her as
active even in the grave. We
know from chemical analysis that the
cauldron above her head contained the fermented drink
already
mentioned. So we see the lady
straining the mead ready for drinking.
40
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
The cut glass beakers were found with other small objects in the wooden
box, which from the position of the metal fastenings must have been
buried open. Here by a unique stroke of luck, we have a moving and
detailed commentary on the new religion whose main features we have
already learned to recognize from the evidence of the cemeteries the :
dead live on in their graves, continue their normal activities and even
need nourishment.
The third woman in this group was over sixty, completely toothless
and almost as tall as the younger woman. Although she possessed
bronze table-ware, her two drinking horns were of native manufacture
and she had no glass. The fourth was a girl of about thirteen, whose
skeleton, apart from the teeth (which are evidence of her age), has
completely perished. In contrast with the wealthy women on either
side, this girl had only three brooches and no gold necklace, her hair-
pins are simpler and, most striking of all, her pots are all earthenware.
She must have been equal in rank with the others since she is buried
alongside them, but too young to have acquired a dinner service of her
own to take to the grave. The exact relationship between these four
members of the same family eludes us, but we are probably justified
in assuming that they represent three generations of a prosperous
farming family. The husbands of these independent women with their

own drinking sets are nowhere to be found.
The work of tracing and recording these various Roman artefacts

entails research of quite a different kind from that needed for the study
of the Celtic economy. In the last analysis, the Roman imports com-
prise a finite number of well-established types issuing from a handful
of manufacturing centres ; they turn up as small fragments in provincial
and frontier rubbish heaps, in Germany in a surprisingly good state of
preservation and on the Danish islands in unusually large numbers.
It is useless to carry out research of this kind in isolation hoping to
fillin the gaps by chance. We must build up our information from a
whole host of meticulous monographs, each deploying its own fantastic-
ally detailed knowledge of some particular form. German scholars
have produced magnificent distribution maps for all the pots ever
found in West Germany. In Sweden there is a scholar, to mention
only one among many, who has been at work on his particular problem
for decades. News of the first big find in Finland naturally aroused
much interest and the Norwegians are also making important contribu-
tions, in so far as they have material for this period. Needless to say,
41
all the threads come together in the hands of Danish scholars, or
rather in the hands of the one scholar who can join the various pieces
of evidence together. We have reason to hope that in twenty years' time
we shall have learned to recognize all the different types, to assess their
relative age and to assign them their place in absolute chronology.
Magnificent recent finds in Denmark, at Stenlille and Dollerup,
arouse hopes that the Danish seam is by no means worked out. Both
sites date from the second century. At Dollerup there is a double
burial which included two of the rare silver cups, quite different in
shape from those of Hoby and decorated only with a fine geometrical
design (see plate 17). They may be Pannonian work and perhaps
had a special attraction because of their handles, which end in stylized
dragons' heads.
Its and cultures made Germany an area of

great variety of peoples
conflict and Thanks to the abundance of Roman literary
tension.
sources, many of the Western Germanic tribes are known to us by

name. For example, the Frisians, Chauci and Angles occupied the
North Sea coasts, the Cherusci and Chatti the interior, while east of
the Elbe lived the Suevi, Langobardi and Hermunduri, whose lands
stretched to Regensburg. Because of their constant conflict with the
Empire these tribes held somewhat aloof from Roman things ; yet they
were strongly influenced by their tussles with the Romans and the
proximity of the limes. During the first three centuries AD the older
tribes regrouped to form new peoples: Saxons, Franks, Alemanni,
Thuringians and Bavarians.

The East Germans were much more restless. First to move were the
Goths, who
towards the end of the second century swept from the
mouth of The Vandals, their eastern
the Vistula to the Black Sea.
neighbours on the Baltic, made a parallel incursion south into Hungary.
The Burgundians started from the region round the mouth of the
Oder and drove diagonally across Europe towards the south-
west while the Langobardi, the most easterly of the Western Ger-
manic tribes, were penetrating the upper reaches of the Elbe. None of
these movements resulted in settlement; they herald the era of
migrations.
In northern and central Germany there are graves as rich in table
of Denmark. Among them the find at Lubsow in
utensils as those
Pomerania takes pride of place, with another pair of silver cups,
numerous vessels in bronze, a drinking horn and pieces of jewellery.
42
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
The ostentatious wealth of these burials testifies to the presence of an
aristocracy; later on, in the third and fourth centuries, we find

cemeteries with a handful of luxury inhumation burials looking very
conspicuous among the surrounding cremation pits, which are both
more numerous and more modest, for example at Hassleben (Kr.
Weimar), Leuna, Merseburg, Haven in Mecklenburg and Sackrau in
Silesia. They provide us with a wealth of magnificent artifacts and
reflect social hierarchies similar to those known from similar evidence

to have existed at a slightly later date in Denmark and later still in
Sweden.
Towards the end of the second century the effects of the Roman
economic revolution made themselves sharply apparent. Cadmium
was being extracted at Gressenich not far from Aachen, which became
the centre of a flourishing metal industry and supplanted Capua as
the supplier of the German market. Paterae disappear, but dippers
and strainers continue to be found. The older types of situlae are
displaced by two new models the 'Hemmoor' bucket, so called after
:
a site not far from Hanover where one of the earliest examples was
found, of brass and resembling a much magnified egg cup (see
made
3
plate 17) ; and the 'fluted type, a large pot-bellied cauldron.

By now glass was being manufactured within the province, at a
place in the R bin eland close to Cologne, which was also the seat of the
provincial bronze industry. All the later glass so far discovered is of
Rhenish origin. Neither glasses nor bronzes can compare in quality
with Capuan work, nor do they carry a maker's stamp. This was
provincial stuff, mass produced during the Later Empire and designed
for export ; yet the general standard is still high, there is a great variety
of forms and a certain exuberance - in short every appearance of a
still flourishing industry.
There is no dearth of material; what we aim
do with it is to write
to
the cultural history, not of the Roman export trade, but of the Germanic
response to it. The specialized study of forms is by no means irrelevant
to such an undertaking and exciting contributions can be expected

from scholars so engaged, though it would be foolish to imagine they
can be produced with the staccato speed of the journalist writing for
the daily press. Fresh evidence of what man has been able to discover
about his past is expounded in the journals devoted to prehistory. We
have a gap of seventeen centuries to bridge, the long years of stagnation
for which the earth's records remained almost permanently closed.
i> 43
Now we have powerful earth-moving tools to bring us discoveries
denied to earlier generations. Such a privilege automatically confers
its own obligations. We should also be critical of our motives. In the
last resort we should find ourselves moved not by a love of the antique
nor by national pride, nor by feelings of condescension and conceit

3
('how amazing that men could already do such things! ), but by the
urge to know how man became himself, to trace his arduous descent
over so many generations down to the present, to rediscover men as
they really were, in their pains and pleasures, in their primitive and
creative endeavours.
The final synthesis is achieved not in the printed pages of a book
but in every man whose mind is lively enough to appreciate it. And
prehistory has assembled its few crumbs of information about man's
early intellectual struggles with his environment only with great

difficulty.
We must now return to our theme, which was the impact on the
Nordic peoples of their initial encounter with Roman culture and its
products. At first the Germans were merely purchasers of Roman
goods. Apart from the household utensils, a few brooches and bronze
statuettes of classical deities undoubtedly of Roman provenance have
been found in the graves. Other discoveries, for example of two pine-
cones, suggest that a wide variety of articles was being imported,
although fine fabrics and wood carvings have naturally perished. A
warm welcome was no doubt extended to traders who brought news of
doings at Rome and in the Rhineland, or of the Emperor whose
portrait appeared on the silver coins they carried and who was a
living god; such traders could tell too of hazardous enterprises, of
border raids and fights at sea, of superstitious marvels and of the
mystery religions so popular among the southern soldiery. This very
extensive trafficwas probably in the hands of 'collectives' formed by
inhabitants of the Danish islands, large enough to sustain the losses
and share the profits. The traders would be men with an intimate
knowledge of the southern trade routes and often personal acquain-

tances of the manufacturers in the Rhineland.
They also made perilous
in the other
journeys direction, to visit the fur- trappers of the northern
forestsand the amber fishermen of Jutland. Few of the producers
grew rich, but middlemen always prosper. The Danish islands lay
at the intersection of the northern and southern
trade-routes, and
each of the circuits had its problems for the traveller; the island
graves
are crammed with more
typical salesmen's wares than are to be found
44
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
in any other part of Scandinavia. It was here that people formed their
first impressions of the Roman Empire.
The Trojan War as depicted on the Hoby cups awoke no sympathetic
echo. The Aphrodite of the Hoby dish probably had a more direct
appeal. Enterprising potters found the bronze buckets stimulating

models. We can trace their earliest and tentative efforts at imitation
in the handle of a clay pot, in a simple human mask, in a new form
added to the already numerous types of crocks and jars. The manufac-
turer's stamp would also arouse curiosity, which must have turned to
astonishment when it was realized that the Romans could actually
communicate with each other by this means without uttering a sound,
that it was possible to make names and the spoken word visible. The
Scandinavians had still not encountered the Romans in any serious
sense. Yet we have here the first intimations of that crucial moment in
the life of a human society when the old and the new come together
and a primitive culture mingles with a mature civilization. The union
had a brilliantly successful future before it, which would reach its
initial peak of achievement during the period of the migrations, having
put forth its first signs of life in the third and fourth centuries.
The evidence from another small cemetery, at Himlingoje in Zealand,

may help to make clear what has already been learned from the older
sites,Hoby, Juellinge and Dollerup (see plates 18 and 19). It was over
a century ago, in 1828-9, that the first bronze vessels from this cemetery
rolled down the hill, and through the good offices of the Queen of
Denmark found their way into a museum ; unfortunately, they formed
only a small part of the contents of these graves, which were rich in
artifactsand carvings. Among the missing articles sought in vain by
the police was a heavy gold arm-ring, which must have ended up in the
melting pot. The most striking objects that survived are an ornate
brooch, a beaker with applied thread-ornaments in colour
tall glass
which by some miracle emerged intact, an unusual pair of silver cups

and a Hemmoor bucket finely decorated with a classical frieze
of animal figures: horse, lion, bull, ram, stag and boar (see plate
17)-
Then all was quiet again until 1878, when a glass horn rolled down
towards the railway and survived undamaged to join the beaker
already in the museum. An expert now came to probe the soil, for it
was obvious that the graves lay a long way below ground level, but the
major part of the hoard still escaped detection. In 1894 another glass
45
this was a squat cylin-
made appearance and also survived intact;
its
drical cup in milky glass, superbly painted with classical animal
figures, a lion in pursuit

of a chamois, and a green panther. A full-
scale excavation followed, producing a rich hoard of bronze vessels, a
gold arm-ring, an ornamental brooch and some personal toilet articles.

It was also discovered, and this was interesting, that the corpse had a
small flat mouth. The Greeks made similar provision
gold coin in its
for their dead, so that they could pay Charon his fare for ferrying
them over the Styx, which divided this world from the next. Such
notions had a long life and apparently travelled north in the wake of
Romano-German trade. We should certainly look on this custom as
being one among many; it just happens that in this case we have
more evidence than in most. It may be mentioned in passing that
9
quite a number of have been found in

these 'Charon's pennies
Scandinavia, where they were probably thought to have some

additional function, such as warding off evil spirits. But we must
return to Himlingoje, where once again the diggers thought they
had uncovered all its treasures and were once again proved wrong.
For in 1948 yet another glass came to light, a thick, dark green
tumbler with large oval insets, so sturdy that it easily escaped damage.
As people never will believe that these sites really contain ancient
glass, the dredging machines were allowed to go on eating their way
into the gravel, until in 1949 the next grave was uncovered; it was
found to contain a rich hoard of bronze. This time the excavators had
some advance warning, which was fortunate since without their patient
work the three wafer-thin glass dishes which were also part of the
burial goods would never have survived to join the rest intact.
But now the prehistorians in Copenhagen realized what was
happening: chieftain's graves were being hacked about, observations
were being carried out with undue haste, and all that was left for the
experts was the sad fate of arriving too late.
The obvious thing to do was to sink test shafts. Since the graves lay
north-south, the shafts were sunk at five feet intervals along a line
east-west. Then soil was examined for
the slight discolouration, and
where this (the archaeologist's
geiger counter!) was found, the diggers
probed deeper until they struck a large stone, sure that sign suspicions
were justified and that there was yet another grave, at a quite unusual
depth below the surface. Since it is known from experience that richer
graves deeper than poorer ones, there was naturally much eager
lie
anticipation as the excavation reached the record depth of 6.5 feet.

THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
At length it came into view, the richest grave of all, whose excavation
had for once been accomplished under professional auspices. We still
await the final report on the Himlingoje find and the full inventory
of its contents, but what is already known is enough to take one's
breath away.
This most recently discovered grave contains the body of a woman

buried with rich ornaments and a Roman silver coin of AD 80 from the
reign of the Emperor Titus, which means that the coin is much older
than the other objects and is a salutary reminder that the contents of
a grave need not always be of one date. Coins would be regarded as
in a different category from bronzeware, perhaps more in the nature
of amulets to be handed down as heirlooms from one generation to
another. It must also be remembered that a coin might have been
in circulation a long time before finding its way north. So this Titus
coin need not detain us and we can move on to examine the largest
of the silver brooches, an almost over-ornate piece of finery of the type
known for obvious reasons as a rosette brooch (see plate 19). Scratched
on the catch-plate in runic characters is the word WIDUHAR, a mascu-
line personal name, perhaps that of the donor. As the man who found
the brooch observed, this is just as interesting as knowing the name of
the lady herself.

The discovery created quite a stir in professional circles, for a
similar brooch found at Vaerlose on Zealand also had a runic name on
the catch-plate, the feminine ALUGOD, followed by a swastika. The
next step therefore was to make a careful examination of a number of
rosette brooches by inspecting them under a strong light, under a
magnifying glass or even under a microscope. Fortunately there was no

need to wait for the earth to produce another specimen, since a rosette
brooch which had long lain unnoticed in a museum was now discovered
to bearan inscription, transliterated by the philologists as WARAFAUSA
(see plate 19).
It used to be thought that the runic characters were invented by
the Goths in southern Russia, since most of the signs can be traced
back to Greek cursive script (though F, U, R
and N
are definitely
Latin and not Greek in origin) and because three of the earliest runic
on spear-heads were found in Volhynia (Poland), Galicia
inscriptions
and Brandenburg, places along the route which connected the Russian
Goths with their tribal cousins still in the original Baltic habitat.
Latterly, however, there has been increased support for the view that
47
the runic letters derive from the Latin alphabets of Lugano and
Sondrio, in the neighbourhoods of Lakes Maggiore and Gomo. It
may be said that the champions of both theories spare no pains in
exposing the weak points of their opponents' case. Furthermore there
is a Norwegian spear-head with a runic inscription which is older than
the 'Gothic' examples, and it has been shown quite recently that a
rune-inscribed scabbard from the peat-bog at Thorsberg is of greater
antiquity still, while four runic words on a find in the bog of Vimose
belong to the third century. These last examples all come from
Denmark.
We may conclude from that the runes can only have been
all this
invented in Denmark Danish archaeologists think that this

itself.
alphabet was created within northern Germanic territories, and their

theory fits in surprisingly well with the archaeological record. The
runic alphabet can stand on terms of equality with other scripts and
was for eight centuries the form of writing most frequently used in
Scandinavia. Whoever was responsible for its invention was just as
much a master of his craft as the man who made the silver cups. Here
was someone who could accept the cultural benefits of Rome with an
alert and open mind and then go on to add his own contribution.
He needed to retain a measure of independence and detachment from
Rome and also possess a clear idea of the value of communication
from a distance; and above all he needed to be a linguistic genius. The
first step must have been to resolve the Germanic
language into its
sound values then he had to devise simple and unambiguous signs for
;
each. In the heavily forested north the obvious medium was wood
rather than the stone commonly used in the south. The inventor of the
runes was careful to form every character so that there were no
horizontal strokes which might be obscured by any stray wood fibres.
The signs
PKHITM
F R H I T B S
came directly from the Latin alphabet, as did
IU
U L
48
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
the only difference being that for some unknown reason they were
turned upside down. The forms of three other letters were also adopted
XNP
X M P
but were given different sounds, becoming G, E and W. The remaining
signs
Th A K NJ P E r M Ng D O
have no Latin exemplars. The inventor of the script must be credited
with a few original contributions of his own ; otherwise he might just
as well have adopted the Latin alphabet wholesale. Several characters
were probably created more or less involuntarily from slips of the
perpendicularly-held stick when making diagonal cross-strokes. Others
may very w ell be
r
secret symbols which every German would have
recognized and understood.
The unique feature of the runic alphabet was that each letter had
its own name with a meaning quite distinct from the runes. The names
have been interpreted, for the most part probably correctly, as follows :
cattle, aurochs, giant, god, cart, abscess, gift, joy (?), hail, need, ice,
year of plenty, fruit-tree, yew, elk, sun, Tyr, birch-twig, horse, man,
leek (or water), Ing (a legendary hero), day, inheritance. Classifying
them by subjects we have first the divinities and their relations, that is
Tyr, Ing (who was only partly man), giants, and nameless gods (the
Aesir). Then there are three sacred animals, elk, aurochs and horse,
and four plant names, yew, birch, fruit-tree and leek. Other names
relating to natural objects and the weather are hail, ice, year of plenty,
sim and day. The need or misery rune is sandwiched between hail and
ice. Abscess, as a manifestation of disease, would also be classed as a
natural force. Cart and gift must certainly have had liturgical implica-
tions. In their final form the runes ran from F = Vieh = Cattle, stand-
ing for something acquired, to O = Odalan, which means something

inherited. We have no means of knowing how the remaining letters
came to occupy their positions, but the complete alphabet, or the older
futhark as it is called from its first seven letters, was as follows :
49
FUThArkGW: HNIJPERS: TBEMLNgDO
The rune names must go back to one of the earliest phases of
Germanic religion, a time long before Snorri's Edda, when natural
forces and ritual objects assumed a very concrete shape; we shall
encounter such forms frequently in the pages that follow. It is clear
that whoever devised this written language was a person of exceptionally
strong religious feeling; he must also have had a large share of common-
sense, since he approached his task with a thoroughly practical grasp
of its scope and purpose.
The invention of the runes meant that the northern peoples were now
at last capable of meeting Roman culture on its own ground. This
achievement had its parallel in the work of a master in metal-work,
perhaps a contemporary of the man who invented the runes.
We know of a few heavy gold arm-rings with terminals in the form
of animal heads which are quite as stylized as the handle-attachments
to the Dollerup silver cups. They are either imports or imitations of
Pannonian models. Now almost all the gold arm-rings of later date
have been found inside Scandinavia, and their stylization is totally
different. The northern craftsmen obviously took their original inspira-
tion from Roman provincial models and proceeded to adapt them in
their own way. A few of their animals are alarmingly realistic - wolf-
heads, creatures of the pine-forests, giant reptiles from the still more
remote past who lived out their pointless lives in gloomy swamps,
sucking men down into the depths. So powerful and miasmic is their
aura of night and terror that we can readily believe these ornaments
were created against a living background of myth and saga.
The hoard of Himlingoje, and especially the pair of silver cups
already mentioned, tells us a good deal more. With their long stems
and rounded bodies these vessels are quite un-Roman; round their
upper rim runs an attractive friezeof animals in motion, horses, goats,
geese, all looking very much like human masks, and a
crouching man
bearing a sword (see plate 18). Three other Scandinavian examples
are known, a pair from an exceptionally rich
grave near Valloby and
one on its own from another rich grave at Varpelev, also in Zealand.
However, the backwards-looking animals and dolphins processing
round their friezes are considerably more sedate.
Nothing about these silver cups, neither their shape nor their work-
manship nor their animal figures, is in the least Roman. They might
just possibly have come from southern Russia, where there were
50
THE GREAT ENCOUNTER
Gothic who had migrated to the Black Sea. They could, on this
tribes
hypothesis, have been the work of Asiatic nomads, Scythians perhaps,

carried by Black Sea Goths back to their original homeland on the
shores of the Baltic.
Preliminary comparison with Scythian and Sarmatian finds showed
some staggeringly close parallels, but was quite inconclusive. The
two groups \vere still far apart, both in space and time, when in 1930
a Hungarian scholar came forward with one of those exquisitely simple
observations which periodically enliven archaeology. He had noticed
that the sword held by the crouching man has a pommel-ring: in
other words, it was a Scythian ring-sword. Everything fitted, and the
connection with southern Russia seemed secure. But in 1941, when a
German scholar made a
survey of the entire contents of this wealthy
burial, the picture altered yet again. He pointed out how odd it was
that while there was bronze from Gressenich and glass from Cologne,
there was nothingelse, apart from the two silver cups, which betrayed
any trace of south Russian influence. Animal friezes were not exclusive
to the Scythians and Sarmatians. They are found on Hemmoor
buckets, including the one from Himlingqje. The painted glass cup
also depicts animals in motion and is by no means unique in Denmark
(see plate 20) : there are two painted glasses from other graves at
Nordrup, three from Varpelov, two from Thorslunde and one each
from Stenlille and Bornholm. That makes ten in all, yet until specimens
appeared recently in Trier and Afghanistan none had been discovered
in any other part of the world. Is there any reason why the islanders
of this period should not have shared our appreciation of these lively
animal forms, peacocks, growling bears among flowers and butterflies,
gladiators fighting wild beasts in some Roman arena? Furthermore
a Roman dish in terra sigillata made by the Roman potter Comitialis
of Rheinzabern, and also decorated with leaping animals, was found
in association with the VaJloby cup. And the shape of the silver cups
is echoed in earthenware pots found at other Danish sites.
We must surely conclude from all this that no reliance should be

placed on the little pommel ring as evidence. Even more important,
itbecomes clear that the pair of silver cups must be native northern
work. The Roman animal friezes on buckets and glasses must have so
stimulated Zealand craftsmen that they embarked on their first
attempts at the animal motifs which were to dominate northern
Germanic art for the next eight centuries to such an astonishing effect.
But this was no careful imitation of foreign models. The artist who
made the silver cups and who must be considered the first indigenous
northern artist struck boldly out along his own line: bronze was
discarded in favour of silver and, although the animal frieze was

retained, the figures were set in motion, their outlines emphasized
(a characteristic feature in the work of later generations of northern
artists) and the animals infused with a wonderful vitality, so that they
come leaping and bounding out of the metal. There is no point in
looking for anatomical correctness, of which the artist has as yet little
experience as will be seen, it was never a strong point with Germanic
:
artists. His work must be valued for its total effect, as a new creation
by a new and effervescent talent possessing boundless potentialities.

THE PEAT BOGS
AND THEIR CONTENTS
Unusual natural phenomena have always aroused man's interest and

excited his imagination, and prehistoric man was especially susceptible
to their appeal. In central Sweden there is a place where an unusually
large rock is lodged on a heap of broken stones, and it comes as no

surprise to discover that the farm nearby is called Lund, or sacred
grove. North and south of the shingle lies a large cemetery, with a
Bronze Age barrow in the centre, cremation pits of the Celtic Iron
Age along the upper edge and more recent graves all round the
periphery. There are many similar sites.
The peat bogs, so dank and sinister, had a peculiar fascination for
prehistoric man. The living who trod this ground did so at their
peril since men were inexplicably engulfed into its squelching depths.
The deities who were always to be found in springs and still water
must surely also inhabit the bogs, either permanently or temporarily,
and be accessible, from time to time. Most intriguing of all were the
little basin-like bogs which were so clearly distinct from the surrounding
terrain, especially where gently rising ground provided a natural

platform from which to contemplate the mysterious depths below
(see plate 20). Offerings to the gods were already being deposited
here in large numbers during the Stone and Bronze Ages, a practice
which certainly did not cease with the coming of the Celtic and
Roman Iron Ages.
That this was so is very fortunate for the prehistorian, since the water-
logged conditions of the bog have preserved a wide variety of objects
which would otherwise have vanished. Our knowledge would certainly
have been the poorer had custom decreed that a high chalk cliff was
the proper place for making votive offerings. As it is, there is no end to
the surprises uncovered by the turf-cutters or still waiting to be
found.
53
TheHjortspring war canoe (see plate 12) was found in one of these
basins, a place so small that the stems of the boat rose above the level
of the bog. Although we must lament the loss of the prow, the find can
still teach us a great deal about methods of ship-building and warfare
in the early Iron Age which would otherwise have remained unknown.
What is more, we know that the victors even sacrificed some of their
domestic animals to the gods: a hound was buried on the north-
western edge of the bog, a small puppy and lamb to the south-west,
a horse to the south-east and a calf to the north-east. It looks as though
these were prescribed animals arranged in a definite pattern at these
various points, suggesting an established ritual.
The two Celtic carts mentioned earlier were also votive offerings.
Raido and Gebo, cart and gift, are the two liturgical names which occur
in the runic alphabet, as already noted. Cartwheels and other separate
parts of vehicles have been found, and with the complete carts form an
established group among the bog offerings. We
know from Tacitus
that in the last centuries BG and the first centuries AD, carts had a
definite liturgical function. He tells us that white horses were yoked
to the sacred vehicle and their neighs and snorts were studied by the
priest or king. Or take another passage :
In an island of the ocean (Tacitus must mean the North Sea, since his
source originated in one of the Danish islands) stands a sacred grove, and in
the grove stands a cart draped with a cloth, which none but the
priest may
touch. The priest can feel the presence of the goddess in this holy of holies
and attends her, in deepest reverence as her cart is drawn by cattle. Then
follow days of rejoicing and merry-making in every
place where she enters
and is entertained. No one makes war, no one takes up arms ; iron loses its
power. This is the only time when the Germans know and value peace and
quiet, and it lasts only until the priest restores the goddess, now weary of the
company of men, to her own holy place. Then the cart, its covering, and, if
you like to think so, the goddess herself are washed clean in a secluded lake.
This ritual is performed by slaves, who are
immediately drowned in the
waters of the lake. Thus mystery begets terror and a
pious reluctance to ask
what that sight can be which is allowed only to dying eyes.
(Germania)
Tacitus is here describing the procession of the fertility goddess in

her sacred cart. This text is of prime importance for an understanding
of the religion of the early Iron
Age, and it must be remembered that
it antedates the surviving Edda by some eleven centuries. The divine
fertility pair in Snorri's Edda are called Freyr and Freya, but these are
cover names signifying
simple 'lord and lady' ; they conceal forces so
54
THE PEAT BOGS AND THEIR CONTENTS
potent that even to speak their names was fraught with danger, as
in the Middle Ages when men referring to the devil would speak of
c c
'the evil one',the fellow with a long tail*, the bellower' and so forth.
The real, the original names of the fertility gods have come down to
us by another route.
In Ostergotland there arefourplaceswherelargeandancientfarmsteads
have the names Mjardevi and Vrinnevi; in other words they are
places sacred (vi) to Mjard or Nerthus, to
Vrind or Mauergriin. And
three miles from these farms is another called UUevi, that is, sacred to
Ullr. Now Ullr makes a fleeting appearance in Snorri's Edda. His

name means brilliance he is the beaming one, sunshine, the giver of
;
fertility. There must have been

a track, eight miles long, connecting the
places sacred to the goddess Nerthus and the god Ullr, which was trodden
each spring by a procession bearing the fertility goddess - very likely
on her cart - to her divine spouse. Later four important medieval
towns, Norrkoping, Linkoping, Vadstena and Skanninge, grew up

close to these cult centres, focal points in a prosperous countryside;
the Ullevi sites in fact lie partly within the town limits. One finds a
similar pattern in other parts of Sweden and in Norway, so we are
probably justified in assuming that this ritual was practised all over
Scandinavia and that it indicates the existence of a Nerthus cult.
We can even meet the fertility goddess in person, as it were not, :
however, in one of the groves 'sacred to Nerthus* but in those peat

bogs where the gods were thought to dwell, and where they were
certainly present in effigy. But first we must rid our minds of any
thoughts of a Greek Aphrodite and enter the thought-world of the
wooden idols.
One day in 1950 a Himmerland farmer rang up to report that while
cutting peat he had come across a wooden stake shaped like a human
being. An expert at once set out to inspect the find, but as he journeyed
in the train through the hot afternoon he became more and more
depressed, since he knew only

too well the devastating effect of sunshine
on bog-timber. But the fanner turned out to be a man of unusual
sense ; he had wrapped the soggy piece of birch wood in moist coverings
and placed it in a dark cellar. The find was kept secret for four years,
while chemists patiently baked, scoured and steeped the wood. Their
efforts were rewarded by the wood becoming both harder and heavier.
The figure is just over three feet tall, formed by nature into a shape
resembling the torso of a woman and with the top whittled into a head.
55
Such pieces would in any event have acted as a stimulus to the imagina-
tion, and the worship of wooden posts
was practised among northern
Germanic peoples throughout the prehistoric period. Their image-
- they felt
making was quite uninfluenced by artistic considerations
too closely involved with the powers of nature. The sexual characteris-
tics of this goddess are indicated simply by placing a few notches here
and there, and the four distinct grooves which mark the waistline are
- yet how successful in drawing atten-
just as artless in their execution
tion to the rolls of fat on this otherwise wand-like goddess ! The bog
where she was found is associated with a small prehistoric settlement
surrounded by miles of forest; the 'congregation' of this cult centre
can only have been small and we must expect their cult objects to be
unpretentious. Pollen analysis has confirmed that the find belongs to
the Roman Iron Age.
The divine pair found in 1947 at Braak in Entin, surrounded by
traces of a great conflagration, are more commanding still (see plate 21).
They are ten feet tall; and, since the timber is fork-shaped, they have
legs. The female has been given a carved knot of hair, a bun in fact,
and detachable breasts dowelled into the smooth surface. The sexual
characteristics of the male have been chopped off with a hatchet,
perhaps in a fit of resentment against a god who brought only bad

years and famine.
The number of wooden idols so far recovered is slowly increasing
and has now reached nearly a dozen, as turf-cutters and other country
folk show a more lively interest in helping to preserve these pieces of
rotten timber. Even so, the scholarly world learned only quite recently
of a discovery made at the beginning of the century at Njutaanger
in the southern part of northern Sweden the figure had remained in
:
the possession of the finder's daughters, who were school-teachers.

Although distressed at discovering the true nature of their heirloom,
filial them from selling it to a museum. So there the
piety deterred
object stays, a heathen god with staring eyes, pointed beard and
carefully fashioned members who has become the permanent inmate
of a respectable household.
Nowadays we tend to take such things as they come, but in the
eighteenth century it was otherwise. In 1714 a conscientious country

parson travelled by sledge through the Norwegian winter night for
the express purpose of admonishing a farmer named Onund Flatlund
for flouting the First Commandment. For years there had been
56
rumours that the man was a wicked idolater. Full of wrath and
righteous indignation, the parson now made his formal accusation,
in which he claimed that Flatlund was making secret sacrifices to a
pagan god named Gudmund-Faxe, who was concealed on the premises.
In answer the farmer (whose sense of self-importance was no smaller
than the priest's) said he saw nothing wTong with his conduct; so far
as he himself was concerned he was a good Christian; Gudmund-
Faxe had inhabited the farm since long before the days of his own
grandfather and was surely entitled to stay, especially as there was no
question of his receiving any sacrifices, although admittedly a spoonful
of mead was poured over his head at great festivals. When after much
argument the parson was allowed a sight of this contentious object
his scruples were dissolved in laughter. What he was shown was a
shapeless wooden stump with indistinct chisellings here and there to
indicate face, neck and arms; the wood was cracked, worm-eaten,
rotting and at least seven hundred years old, the mead-spoon sat on the
idol's head like an ancient helmet, the enormous notched eye-holes
were plugged with tin and gleamed uncannily. There are other
reports of heathen idols having survived in Norwegian homesteads
down into the eighteenth century, but unfortunately all have now
disappeared, including Gudmund-Faxe himself. The men who made
and used these figures never looked on them as pieces of sculpture. The
striking resemblance to the human form produced by even the lightest
chiselling and the suggestion of living forms in the natural shape of

the timber seemed to prehistoric man emanations of the deity within.
So we may imagine the faithful worshippers approaching these
sinister bogs bearing their sacrificial offerings, most frequently in the
form of small clay pots, the Moorpotte, containing various products of
rural industry. We also know that these offerings were carefully
fashioned for their purpose; there is even one bog which seems to
have acted as a rubbish heap for ceramic failures.
Thanks to the frequent changes of style, the pottery can be dated
with some accuracy, all of it falling within the Celtic or Roman Iron
Ages. Microscopic remains of the original contents have also been
recovered. The substances most commonly present are butter, fat,
flax and Bones of sacrificial animals are also found, and include
nuts.
horses, cattle, dogs, sheep and goats; among other animal remains
are the bones of a cormorant, cow horns, antlers, goat-skins and pig-
skins. Occasionally we cantrace the course of a path leading into the
bog, paved with stones and supported on wooden struts ; its existence
57
is usually indicatedby an accumulation of pots near the beginning.
A wooden baking trough seems to have been buried more than once.
It was used to bake meat, which was enclosed in an inner oven with a
hole in the bottom to allow the juices to escape. This particular article
was found in association with a wide variety of objects in a very
productive bog in western Sweden. It is worth noting that some of the
pots from this site were found to contain remains of black puddings,
still very popular in Sweden to this day.
Each of these objects was originally offered up to the accompaniment

of pagan prayers, invocations and chants, as a plea for the god's
intervention in some personal concern. The ploughs and parts of
ploughs already mentioned also belong to this category. One bog has
produced no fewer than ten leather shoes, an abundance which need
not surprise us since other religions have been known to encourage
specialized offerings in return for the bestowal of patronage.
Long tresses of female hair, also probably intended as votive offerings,
strike a somewhat bizarre note. Dating from the Bronze Age are small
bronze idols of female deities with strongly emphasized sexual charac-
teristics, naked apart from a neck ring. The women of the period offered
necklets to the fertility goddesses, and the practice was continued
during the Celtic Iron Age.
The marvellously well-preserved corpse of Tollund man (see plates

7 and 8) must also in the last analysis be counted a votive offering, the
greatest and most horrifying sacrifice a primitive community could
offer to its gods. The corpse has a noose around its neck ; death was
brought about by strangulation. The examining experts in forensic

medicine (whose investigations had to be deferred to some eighteen
hundred years after the time of death) were unable to discover any
fracture of the spinal column. The doomed man was given his last
meal at least twelve hours before he was hanged, and during the last
twelve or even twenty-four hours of his life received no other nourish-
ment. Yet despite the horrible manner of his death the countenance
of the victim appears completely composed, even
transfigured ; his
face suggests, indeed, a person of intelligence and refinement.
We are naturally curious to know what was happening around him
as he died and what events brought him to such an end. Our knowledge
of such matters gradually becoming more
precise. For example,
is
there a figured stone from the Baltic island of Gotland which

is
depicts
a sacrificial hanging of a rather later date
(see plate 22). On the left
58
stands a man wearing a shield on his arm and a noose about his neck ;
he is tied to the trunk of one of two slender trees whose tops are crossed
and firmly lashed together. The tallest branch of the tree without the
noose points like a ghostly hand towards the sky. On the right stand
four large figures, armed guardians of the sacrificial grove. The
foremost of them holds a bird, perhaps also destined for sacrifice,
since it appears to be bound. Between the two groups and occupying
the centre of the scene are two officiants, busy about an altar. are We
approaching the climax of the ceremony, the moment when the cord
binding the trees is cut leaving the top branches free to spring back
to their natural positions; in doing so they will jerk the noose tight as
the victim is tossed high into the air and the gods will have received
another sacrifice, all in a matter of seconds.
Tollund man is by no means the only bog-corpse to have survived.
Close on a hundred have been discovered altogether, eighty from the
Celtic and Roman Iron Ages, but they are much less well preserved.
All had met with a violent death, whether in expiation of a crime, as a
sacrifice to the gods or as a casualty in a blood-feud. Each was once the
focus of human passions. One young women had first been shorn of
all her hair, the age-old punishment for girls whose conduct offends
the powers that be. Her lover may have been the young man found
close by, although this cannot be taken for granted since it is surprisingly
common to find several bodies in the same bog, as for example in
Borremose, which contains a woman with mutilated face (indicating
promiscuity), a hanged man with the bones of a baby at his side and a
fourth body about which no details are known.
One wonders what it felt like to stand on the firm dry margin as
some miserable creature was pushed down into the dark gurgling mud,
his despatch sealed by the piling on of large stones and heaps of brush-
wood. Another method was to pierce the floundering victim with a
pointed stake. A dark and troubled conscience must have warned the
perpetrators that ghosts would haunt the night and disturb their
sleep. Many a tale of human folly and tragedy must lie behind these
bog-burials. Even the calmly factual prose of the archaeologist becomes
a little disturbed at recording such acts of violence.
Grauballe man, another of the corpses discovered at the same time
as Tollund man and the shorn maiden, is also amazingly well-preserved,
although his features have been compressed from the weight of the
earth above. Here is another victim of a violent and dramatic death,
as is shown by the grinning cut which runs from ear to ear, the work
E 59
of a remarkably professional hand This must have been the cause of
death, since the various medical
abnormalities revealed by X-rays
would not have been lethal. With the help of the carbon- 14 dating
technique, this man's death has been established as having occurred
about AD 310, although the date mayperhaps be out by a century

either way. His right hand is extended in a menacing gesture, like the
hand writing on the wall (see plate 23). The shape of the nails, even the
folds of the skin, are clearly visible. llie victim's finger-prints have been
studied by the Danish GID, who may well have found this assignment
a little They were surprised to see the papillary-
out of the ordinary.
lines so clearly defined, since this would indicate that the man had
done little heavy manual work. In general the finger ridges show no
deviations from those of people now alive, as is only to be expected.
Tacitus had heard reports of criminals being put to death in bogs.
The punishment varies to suit the crime. The traitor and deserter are
hanged on trees; the coward, the shirker and the unnaturally vicious are
drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wattled hurdles. (Germania xii)
The mention of wattled hurdles is arresting, since so many have actually

3
been recovered, and thus far Tacitus account seems reliable. But in his
remarks about the types of crime punished in this way he diverges
somewhat from the archaeological evidence. Tacitus says there were
three punished by drowning: cowardice, desertion and
crimes
unnatural vice, all of them primarily associated with men; yet female
corpses are just as numerous. So it is interesting to see what Tacitus
has to say about punishments for women :
Adultery in that populous nation is rare in the extreme, and punishment

is summary and left to the husband. He shaves off his wife's hair, strips her
in the presence of kinsmen, thrusts her from his house and flogs her through
the whole village. (Germania xix)
No death penalty is mentioned, yet at least one woman with shorn

hairhad met a violent death. It is time to gather together what we
know and attempt an interpretation.
Many of the men and women buried in the bogs died by hanging or
beheading, their bodies being placed in the bogs afterwards, either as a
or in expiation of a crime. This must be what happened to
sacrifice
Tollund man, since the experts tell us that his body was carefully
arranged in its resting place immediately after death. Others, however,
were thrown into the swamp alive. The presence of infant bones
suggests that we are dealing not with punishment but with a particular
60
form of human sacrifice. We know of four instances in which a skull
was buried on its own*
In fact what we have here is a fully developed and many-sided legal
code in which the death penalty might be incurred on a \vide variety
of grounds. The ultimate aim, as with peoples at such a primitive
all
stage of cultural development, would be the restoration of order as

ordained by the gods, and immersion in a bog would be looked on as a
kind of legal transaction. Human were certainly still being
sacrifices
offered at Old Uppsala and Lajre in the heathen temples of the late
Viking period, without any implication that the victim had a personal
guilt to expiate.
So seems that Tacitus gives us a few well-substantiated hints to
it
show we are on the right track but which still leave us a long way from
fullunderstanding. We
should do better to concentrate on the archaeo-
logical evidence and use the written texts as an auxiliary source,
instead of the other way about. We
can expect to learn a great deal
about the criminal law and religious beliefs of the early Iron Age from
the corpses already discovered and from those which may turn up in
the future, so long as they are salvaged with care.
The unusual action of the peat acids on these bodies has produced
some weird effects. The bones of the upper cranium, normally very
tough, become as soft as rubber, although the surrounding skin may
be preserved intact* Once when I myself was digging in the turf, I
came across first the soft parts of a body, then the finger nails and
finally the chin, covered in red-gold stubble. There are two feminine
coiffures which can be studied in minutest detail, together with the
interwoven bands and fringes which make an important contribution
to the effect. It is remarkable that the male corpses are all clean-shaven,
apart from the stubble that normally goes on growing a brief time after
death. It seems these men prided themselves on appearing freshly
shaved at the ceremonial preliminaries to their execution.
Although the actual bodies are naked, ritual appears to have
demanded that various articles of clothing should be cast into the bog
after them. This is all the more fortunate since practically no textiles
have survived from normal interments. The clothes are truly remark-
able. Fur wraps, leather caps, hats and shoes, sturdy fabrics and
garments woven in the round, bodices, leggings, loin-cloths and trousers,

to mention only some. The centuries have left their mark in change
and decay, but it is clear that these garments had already undergone
patching, mending and alteration in prehistoric times.
61
In our mind's eye we can see prehistoric women handling this
material, twisting and turning it, measuring and comparing the length
and width of various pieces. The garments included in the burials
have
to been chosen at random. One dress is in 'round-weave',
appear
that is to say it is made from a piece of continuous fabric without
side seams, instead of from separate pieces stitched together (see plate
24). This garment measures about nine feet round the waist and five
and a half feet from the shoulders Unless designed for a giantess a
!
gown of these dimensions must have been worn draped and folded.
Allowing for a fairly deep turn-over at the top, the dress would then
be of a reasonable length to cover a woman from shoulder to foot.
In wear the points would be held together at the shoulders by brooches
or pins back and front, leaving ample and readily adjustable openings
for the arms.
There nothing particularly strange about this attempt at draping
is
heavy material; the women of Greek antiquity managed their equally

voluminous garments in the same way. In fact this bog garment is
another version of the classical peplos, woven on an upright loom in
some northern farmstead of the type we have come to know. Any
surplus material at the waist could easily be contained by a belt of
the same material. The final result would be a full-length robe
falling
in graceful folds and allowing ample freedom of movement. As a
garment it had the additional advantages of flattering the female

figure and being convenient for breast-feeding, which must have been
an important consideration.
The oldest examples of these gowns, which can be dated from
associated finds, go back as far as the
early IronAge or even into the
lateBronze Age. This was a time when Scandinavia was still in active
communication with the 'mainland', so it is not unreasonable to
suggest
that the new style may have been taken from the Greeks. We know for
a fact that feminine costume during the greater part of the Bronze
Age was quite different, consisting of a short jacket with abbreviated
sleeves and a fringed skirt barely reaching to the knees.
Garments resembling trousers have also been found
lying among the
bog corpses. These consist of leg bands with tapes and cords for fastening
and of footed leggings which come to a
point at the toe. These garments
were worn by men and were also an Iron borrowed
Age innovation,
not from the Greeks but from the nomadic horsemen of
Asia, the
Thracians, Scythians and Persians; the Greeks went about their
business soberly on foot and never shone in the saddle. Men who
6s
spent their days on horseback, however, found trousers a real boon.
They were introduced at the same time as a new style of horsemanship
and just when the climate was deteriorating, a period when men were
grateful for something warmer than the Bronze Age tunic. Shirts were
not worn tucked into the trousers but left to hang free. They often
had a small decorative border round the lower edge.
Our reconstruction of life during the early Iron Age can thus be made
to include even details of clothing. The general accuracy of our picture
can be checked against Roman monumental sculptures which depict
Germans from southern tribes in battle or captivity, for example the
Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. But for information on technical
- four-shaft,
points, for example all the details about weaving high
thread-count, twill, left-spun bobbins, etc.
- we must go to the clothes
themselves, a unique wardrobe two thousand years old. They represent a
style of dress which came into fashion at the beginning of the Iron Age
and continued into medieval times or even later; although there was
frequent modification of detail, the general line remained unchanged.
Even now our account has by no means exhausted the marvels of
the peat bogs. For example, what are we to make of a measuring
stick on which the unit of measurement is 6| inches, a unit which
bears no relation to the Roman foot but is roughly half the Greek
unit of measure? Then there are some little wooden boxes with sliding
lids, just like the pencil boxes used by school-children.
We have not mentioned the most magnificent object of all, a
still
large silver cauldron found in one of the characteristic basin-shaped

bogs at Gundestrup in Himmerland. This is a really large piece,
weighing nearly 20 pounds and measuring 26 inches in diameter. It
is certainly not Germanic work; it may well be Celtic and have come
north by way of trade. One might think so splendid a piece, with such
magnificent decoration, would be easy to classify. But this is an Out-
sider', which makes things harder. In 1915 the theory was advanced
that the cauldron came from one of the Celtic communities of the
lower Danube; nowadays generally thought to be of West Celtic
it is
origin and made in Gaul. Again, the cauldron was at first assigned to
the third century BC, but the third century AD is now thought to be a
more likely date. By that time the Celtic kingdoms had long since
vanished as political units, but Celtic influence in and
artistic intel-
lectual matters remained strong right up to the end of the Roman

Iron Age.
63
The cauldron presents us with a complete pantheon of Celtic
silver
deities. There are seven heads in relief on the exterior (the eighth
at the time of immersion in the bog) and
panel was already missing
three on the longitudinal panels of the interior. There is the Celtic
stag-god, Cernunnos, who is identified by his antlers and the stag

he holds in his hands, and the Celtic fertility goddess, attended by a
maid-servant dressing her hair and holding a small bird. The decora-
tions surrounding the deities consist partly of their special symbols
and partly of scenes depicting ceremonies in their honour, notably
an armed cavalcade of horse-men, foot-soldiers and a corporal, accom-
panied by three horn-blowers performing on the peculiar Celtic
wind-instrument known as the carnynx.
The Germans probably found some liturgical use for the cauldron
even though most of the gods and other figures were foreign to their
ideas and rituals. For some reason they finally immersed it in the
swamp, and level place where
in a fairly dry it remained while the
peat accumulated over and around it*
One further important class of bog-finds remains to be discussed.
During the Roman Iron Age the custom of dedicating weapons to the
gods (as in the Hjortspring ship) assumed much greater importance.
This was no longer a matter of sacrificing weapons singly or even in
small numbers. The bog at Vimose alone has yielded 1,000 spears,
dozens of bows and arrows, 100 swords, a pile of shields, a complete
shirt of mail made up of 20,000 small rings, hatchets, horse-gear and
much about 50,000 objects in all. From Nydam there is a large
else,
seaworthy ship of oak with room for thirty-six oarsmen, a captain,

weapons and a store of provisions. There was also another ship of pine,
but this was destroyed in the war of 1864, soon after it was discovered.
The finds at Thorsberg, perhaps the headquarters of the Angli before
their migration, may be more numerous still. Thorsberg is now part of
Germany, and the objects found there and at Nydam are preserved
in the Scbleswig Landesmuseum. The weapons from
Kragehul are
of more recent date, and those from fifteen other
bogs investigated
are somewhat smaller in quantity. Other objects offered include
gold
rings and many Roman imports not found in graves for example, a
:
heavy Roman cavalry helmet which has been adapted to suit the
German taste for lighter headgear, a Roman mask in silver transformed
into a kind of parade helmet, a
griffin's head in bronze, a large silver
ornamental disc made by a Roman master named Saciro, another
and a silver bracelet with animal decorations very much
silver disc
like those on the Himlingqje cup, certainly one of the earliest extant
pieces of native German art, and many other examples of smith's
work, including a quantity of horse headgear and ornamental

plates.
These are clearly not the modest offerings of a peasant population.
c
Typical bog-pottery' is found only in the lowest strata of bogs con-

taining weapons, and then only rarely. In fact these offerings were not
made by individuals at all, but by large warrior communities. There is
no question of their having been deposited en masse: for example, they
cannot represent a tithe of weapons used in some great battle since
they cover a period of some two centuries. They were offered to the
gods to mark a victorious advance or the repulse of an enemy; many
of the weapons have been badly damaged in battle, and exhibit gaping
spear-holes and sword-slashes. Moreover, it seems likely that they were
further mutilated at the time of deposition still in the grip of their
:
battle frenzy the victors doubtless gave their passions full rein and
inflicted this symbolic shame on their enemies, which also ensured
that their weapons were quite unserviceable even before they were
dedicated to the war-god in his swamp.
This is all the more interesting since there is mention of the custom
in two written sources. Orosius admittedly belongs to a much later
period, but his account of the savage way the Cimbri treated their
Roman spoils is taken from earlier authors: garments were torn,
mail slashed, horse trappings ruined, gold and silver thrown into the
river, horses overturned into deep wells and men strung up on trees.
Tacitus reports much the same of the Celts and we have every reason to
think his remarks are equally applicable to the Germans :
They dedicate their battle spoils to the god of war. After a victory the
captured animals are sacrificed and the rest driven together into one place.
Mounds of such things can be seen in sacred places in many parts of the
country and rare for anyone to be so irreligious as to conceal loot for
it is
himself or for any object once deposited to be recovered.
The truth of this observation is borne out by the fact that the uppermost
shields in a pile of weapons are seen to be worm-eaten, from exposure
to the atmosphere in the period before the peat started to accumulate.
Who were the aggressors, who the defenders? Where were the
boundaries separating one tribe from the next? These contests are
unlikely to have been on a larger scale than the perennial skirmishes
among the various southern Germanic tribes and the Roman frontier
outposts. As battles they were hardly of epic quality and their outcome
is immaterial.
Let us briefly recapitulate. All the houses of the earlier Iron Age,
which reflect a society dominated entirely by agricultural concerns
and achievements, go back to a period before about AD 300. From the

same period we have rich burials of prosperous farmers, buried without
weapons but endowed with all the trappings of material success.
Modern Danes have every reason to be proud of their peace-loving
fanner ancestors. The offerings found in the peat bogs covering the
period between 150 BG and AD 150 are also quite consistent with this
picture, for weapons and other impedimenta of war are either scarce
or absent. But during the Roman Iron Age a change came over the
social scene as farming was joined and even overtaken
by warfare.
The weapon offerings in the bogs speak
of battles, surprise attacks,
victories, military brotherhoods and patron gods of war. We
are on the
eve of the age of migrations.
66
THE VOICE OF THE EAST
So far we have concentrated on Danish finds, which may have given

the impression that the rest of Scandinavia was somehow less important.
The of course that the archaeological centre of gravity is con-
fact is
stantly shifting. The bulk of the material relating to this period comes
from Denmark.
This does not mean that Norway has nothing of any interest to offer.
It was a region where the practice of cremation lingered on ; inhuma-
tion burials are rare and sporadic. Those that have been found are
unusually rich, proof that the adoption of this new and alien custom
was largely confined to a narrow and prosperous upper class. The
ground-plans of farmsteads uncovered by careful excavation indicate
large and well-appointed households there is no
; difficulty in imagining
them inhabited by a clan ruled over by a farmer-patriarch with
complete power over his children, grandchildren, men-servants and
maid-servants, as was the case on large-holdings in Norway right
down to the eighteenth century. It is said for example of a farmstead
at Tydal in the early 1 7005 :
The household was composed of five married couples and their children,
some 27-30 persons in all. They lived under one roof and drank from one
stream. The head of the clan, Alt-Peter, was the governor and he ruled his
sons and their wives and children. Every penny passed through his hands,
every detail went through his head, and great was the unanimity among
them all.
Remarkably enough, there is a runic inscription which suggests
that this type of domestic economy was already fully developed in the
Roman Iron Age. The rune-stone in question (one of the earliest)
stands on the eastern shore of Oslo fiord. On one side it reads: % Wiw,
made runes for Wodurid the master'; and on the other: Tor me,
Wodurid, the daughters born in slavery raised the stone but the heirs
descended from the gods provided the funeral meal.'
5
The description of Wodurid as 'master is arresting and highly

significant.
One wonders whether Wiw was his successor, since he
dedicates the inscription. However that may be, these terse phrases
provide a lightning sketch

of clan farming around AD 400, when things
seem to have been much the same as in AD 1700, the only difference
probably being that Wodurid's power was even greater than that of
Alt-Peter, obligations to a king and government, both local
who had
and central, whereas Wodurid was bound to nothing but an occasional
his pagan gods. Wodurid and his
gesture of obedience towards
immediate successors looked on themselves as of divnie descent. They
were free-born members of a household which included men and
women of servile birth to do the heavy work. Wodurid was master,
omnipotent ruler of the clan whose destinies he alone controlled, just
as he alone bore the burden of responsibility in times of famine and
hardship.
The variations in forms of burial which can be observed in different
parts of Scandinavia is evidence of the existence of regional peculiarities
and shows how cultural influences can affect social and religious
phenomena in different ways. At one time cremation was the prevailing
mode, at others inhumation in one form or another. Grave goods are
lavish in some periods, in others scanty and meagre. Our aim must
be to penetrate these kingdoms of the dead to reach the living
behind them, at least in those regions where history was in the
societies
making. And now we start to hear voices from the east, especially from
Eastern Sweden, whose existence as a cultural unit is impossible to
ignore.
Tacitus is more circumstantial in his

description of the Svea or Suiones,
inhabitants of the littoral north of Stockholm, than in his account of
any other Scandinavian peoples.
The states of the Suiones that follow along the shores of the ocean are
strong not only in arms and men but also in their fleets. The shape of their
ships differs from the normal in having a prow at both ends, \vhich makes
them always ready to be put in to shore. They do not rig sails or fasten their
oars in banks at the side. Their
oarage is loose, as one finds it on some rivers,
and can be shifted as need requires from side to side. Wealth too is held in
high honour, and that is why they obey one ruler with no restrictions on his
authority and with no mere causal claim to obedience. Arms are not, as in
the rest of Germany, allowed to all and
sundry, but are kept under custody
and the custodian is a slave. There are two reasons for this the ocean makes
:
68
any sudden invasion impossible, and men with arms in their hands easily
get into mischief, if not fighting. As for putting no noble or freeman, or even
freedman in charge of the arms, that is part of royal policy.
This was the tribe which during the next few centuries was to emerge
as the victor in battle and founder of the Swedish state. It is remarkable
that Tacitus was already aware of their bellicose disposition and the
strict discipline which forbade them to carry arms except in war.
The picture here is very different from the peaceful Denmark of about
AD 100. Tacitus' comments on the ships used by the Suiones are so
accurate that he must be speaking on good authority.
Some of the burial grounds used by the Suiones in the time of
Tacitus have recently been identified. Many of these cemeteries,
characterized by low cairns and carved stones, have been discovered
in the region of Uppland, but few have so far been investigated and
further systematic excavations are urgently needed. The cremation
- and the metal artifacts
pits are of the kind common all over Sweden
they contain are quite humble in character. No weapons have been
found, apart from a few spearheads. This fits in with our picture of a
strictly regimented military organization where individuals were not
allowed to carry arms. The inhumation burials, richer but also much
rarer, are all of later date.
Ostergotland, a region closely linked with the Svea, has its own
distinguishing feature in the sudden prevalence of inhumation burials
during the first century, so much so that the small cremation pits are
interspersed with large numbers of skeletons buried at a deeper level.
What is more, these cemeteries have been made on good arable land,
again in marked contrast with Denmark! After working through all

the finds in this region, a mass of material derived from several hundred
inhumation burials, I have yet to come across a single clay pot. The
skeletons were placed on their backs or in a sleeping position, and
there is an almost complete absence of grave goods. From a period
covering four centuries the only artifacts recorded are 22 brooches,

18
clasps and sundry combs, keys, scissors, gaming stones and pearls.
So far not a single gold neck ornament or arm- or finger-ring has come
to light; there are no Roman vessels in bronze, no glass drinking
horns, not even any pottery apart from the cinerary urns. In other
words it was not customary to supply the dead with food and drink
and there was thus no reason to include Roman tableware among the
grave goods. Instead we have weapon burials, very rare in Denmark.
69
to a cemetery. Eighty-
Here they are numerous, apparently several
three are known to date from
the Roman period. Their principal
iron shield bosses, shield fittings,
contents are single-edged swords,
referred to above) and various other small
clasps (most of the clasps
There is also quite a mountain of spearpoints, many of them
objects.
from burials discovered in the nineteenth century and incompletely
excavated.
Sodermanland and Smaaland, to the north and south of Ostergotland
the 'findless' period; when burials finally reappear
long remained in
weapon burials. The distinctive
in the third century they are almost all
archaeological pattern of
Eastern Sweden is becoming clearer. Military
interests predominate. In the north
we have the Suiones with their
state arsenals and a king who rules 'with no restrictions on his authority'.
The dearth of weapon burials here and among the traders of the Danish
islands arises from two totally different situations. In the three more
southerly regions, Sodermanland, Ostergotland

and Smaaland,
political control
was clearly in the hands of a body of armed free-men
who had the right to be buried with their weapons; apart from this,
however, the graves of both men and women are almost completely
in rich feminine
bare, so it is no surprise to find these regions lacking
graves.
The military organization of the nordic peoples has
once again
engaged our At present we know less about these military
attention.
brotherhoods and political elites than we do about the economy of the
early Iron Age, but I am confident that once enough material has
accumulated our understanding of them will correspondingly increase.
Around AD 300 we find a sudden and totally unexpected novelty

in Ostergotland : four masculine graves as richly furnished as any of the
Danish burials and also containing weapons. Two of them, at Grebo
and Harg, are cremations, the others at Granby and Ostervarv
Lilla
being inhumations. The burials are covered by mounds about 60 feet

in diameter, and instead of lying in an established cemetery they are
placed on a high ridge commanding an open view of the surrounding

countryside. These burials contain both pots and animal bones, which
must surely mean that some people in Ostergotland had now learned
to view the next world in terms offood and drink. The man at Ostervarv
had two drinking horns at his side, one of natural horn and the other of
exceptionally fine glass. Each burial contained two shields, an unused
double-edged sword and from two to six spearheads. With these
70
and - as
discoveries the social stratification into chieftains, free-men
we must assume - slaves, becomes unmistakable. So far no trace has
been found of any comparable feminine graves from this period. But
if we have not found these chieftains' wives, neither have we found
their sons and grandsons. Once this generation, so far represented
only by these four chieftains, had passed away, Ostergotland again

c 5
entered a graveless period, perhaps in consequence of intensified
warfare.
We know of only one weapon burial from the fourth century. Here
the shield has been made completely useless by a savage sword-thrust
and no less than nine spear-holes. It seems incredible that a man who
must have been badly wounded could have continued for so long in
the thick of the mele. But this is not really surprising. After all, we are
on the verge of the migration era, when men became battle-hardened
from constant fighting.
The vast and forbidding East now lay just over the threshold,
ultimately a source of dark savagery and destruction, but bright too,
with the allure of barbaric colour and gold.
As we have seen, scholars have recently become more doubtful of
the existence of a Gothic 'culture-route* running north from southern
Russia via Hungary and Poland. Yet it was one of the Swedish graves,
filled forthe most part with table-ware from the Rhineland, that
produced the earliest known example of an object made in south-

eastern Europe, the magnificent bossed shield found at Lilla Harg, in
the burial already mentioned. It is a sorry sight, already severely
damaged at the time of interment. Only about half the fragments were
retrieved when the shield found its way into amuseum some fifty
years ago. They were enough, however, to show what a marvellous
piece this must once have been, made of iron covered with silver gilt
and decorated with coloured stones. The only comparable object is
the bossed shield found at Herpaly in Hungary, an equally fine piece
of work, though in this case the decoration is provided by animal
figures instead of gems. The Herpaly
shield is probably of Vandal
origin, since the Vandals were then living in this region.

The Lilla Harg fragments looked as though they would repay more
careful cleaning and reconstruction. Two birds in flight, originally
poised on the rim, were painstakingly pieced together from

minute
scraps of sheet silver. Then there was a copper rivet, whose function
was to hold the gold setting of a stone long since lost. On the rivet-plate
I found a mark which looked like a written character. This sent me
back to a careful re-examination of the other fragments and led to the
discovery of a similar mark,
on the inner side of the shield's protruding
gold point, and of a gold-plated copper rivet. This posed the dilemma
whether to damage the shield still more by removing the gold plating
to see what lay beneath. The risk was taken and proved justified a :
third character was revealed.

But what were these characters? It seemed no-one had ever seen
letters of this kind before, indeed they were. I put the question
if letters
to one expert after another, without success. At last a Viennese scholar
suggested that these were

Greek letters from classical antiquity,
variants of TC u 5
If this is correct, then these are the earliest Greek characters found
in prehistoric Scandinavia, apart from the name scratched on the Hoby
area where Greek, Roman,
cup. This discovery brings us into a frontier
Oriental and Vandal influences mingle, perhaps somewhere on the
middle Danube, where the Roman soldiery had adopted the new non-
classical barbarian oriental style, with its fondness for gold and bright
stones, which was soon, on the eve of imperial ruin, to adorn imperial
heliftetsand all the finery of the Roman court. If this was 'Rome in the
embrace of the Orient*, as one great scholar aptly put it, we could add
that on Rome's frontiers the east and the north were shaking hands.
Since the Greek letters on the bossed shield were so inaccessibly
placed they presumably had some occult significance. There are one
or two fine imported pieces of somewhat later date found in Scandinavia
which also have Greek writing on them. These inscriptions are in the
nature of mottoes. 'Drink and live like a lord', we read on two cups of
thick-walled glass, one from Denmark, the other from Norway; and
'Good Luck", on a magnificent bowl of dark blue glass decorated with
white glass flowers and silver chasing. A gold finger-ring inset with
three red stones carries the wish that a friend may find untroubled
rest. A crystal ball from Aarslev has the
c
inscription Ablatanalba', a
gnostic magic formula which should be a perfect palindrome but is here
imperfectly reproduced, no doubt to the detriment of its powers.
These objects are all evidence of an open channel of communication
between the south-east and the north, which could bring bright stones,
carnelians and paste gems to the now numerous
workshops of the
northern goldsmiths. The north was still dependent on external
stimuli, its artists apparently still too immature to produce original
creative work. The silver cups of
Himlingoje remain an isolated triumph
with no immediate successor. A further
impetus was needed before
72
nordic art could start out on its own. This impetus, when it came, came
also from the south-east.
Around AD 400 Scandinavian silversmiths started to use punches to

decorate their work, beating out stars, triangles, circles, true and false
spirals and other geometrical shapes as ornaments for the square head-
plates and rhomboid foot-plates of their boldly fashioned brooches
5
(see plate 25). This ornamental 'star-style was the first to be evolved
by nordic artists and owes an unmistakable debt to influences from the

south-east. Articles so similar that they could have acted as models
have been found at Cosoveni in Wallachia, at Untersiebenbnmn near
Vienna and at Kelpin and Treptow in northern Germany.
5
Side by side with the 'star-style , but rather later, we find heavy
bronzes chip-carved in geometrical patterns. These represent a short-
lived Roman provincial style, found in both the western and the
eastern parts of the Empire. No article of this type has so far been
found in Scandinavia, but the fashion clearly appealed to native
craftsmen who found the squares, bent hooks, wavy lines (known as
'running dog*), rosettes, palmettes and the complementary heart Sad
post-horn patterns capable of endless variations. In some ways the
Scandinavians found this chip-carved style even more congenial than
the star-style; it is more powerful, more flamboyant, inclining to the
Baroque rather than the Classical.
The more one thinks about it, the more likely it seems that northern
artists must have had some experience outside their own countries.
If they did, they were not the only ones to travel. A
hoard at Brangstrup
on Ftinen island has yielded a considerable treasure of gold comprising
both ornaments and coins, of which there are forty-eight in all. Two
are from an earlier period, but the rest cover the reigns of second and
third century emperors, distributed as follows :
Aurelian (270-75) 2 coins

Tacitus (275-6 i coin
Probus (276-82) 3 coins
Cams (282-3) i coin
Numerianus (283-4) i coin
and so on, until we come The most

to Constantine the Great (306-37)*
important Emperor represented, he also has the largest number of

coins, thirteen. Two Emperors who followed him have two coins apiece,
Constantine II (337-40) and Constantius II (337-61). As a coin
73
collection this could hardlybe bettered since it includes at least one
specimen from every reign over a period of seventy years. Whoever
amassed it had certainly not spent all his life in Scandinavia. He had
perhaps served as a mercenary and returned home with a well-filled
bag of gold earned defending the Roman limes. These forty-eight gold
coins thus provide a section of the specie current in the Roman world
about AD 340 - the later coins are also the most numerous. know We
where the coins were minted: seven in the West, nine in Italy and
thirty-two in Pannonia, the Danube region and the East. Some of
the older coins minted in the West were probably carried eastwards
on the current of Roman internal trade. Since so many of the coins are
of eastern origin it seems reasonable to assume that the owner had
served in the more easterly part of the Empire. The same hoard
contains gold pendants of exactly the same vine-leaf form as those
worn by the German bodyguard in the Hippodrome at
Constantinople,
as depicted in sculptures, This
helps to fix the origin of the hoard
among the East Roman auxiliary soldiers.
A Scandinavian serving on Roman soil and in
company with his
southern Germanic kinsmen could not fail to add to his store of
knowledge and experience. We can learn something of this from the
figure decorations on the pendants human masks, lions drinking from
:
either side of an urn, and female heads surrounded

by animals. There
is also a
gold mount which once a
supported crystal sphere (now lost)
similar to the one found at Aarslev. These
objects were believed to
avert calamity, heal wounds, confer
strength, drive off enemies and
evil spirits, act as love charms, and ensure eternal
felicity. Ideas of this
kind, derived from the oriental cults and were
mystery religions,
eagerly absorbed by Roman and German soldiers round their camp
fires and at their frontier posts. An
enterprising Scandinavian who
made his fortune as a mercenary did so at the
expense of estrangement
fromhis own primitive and involvement in alien
religion practices.
He northern fastnesses to plunge into the tumult of
left his
competing
cultures and peoples. He encountered ambitious
emperors and armed
powers whose battles were on a far grander scale than those reflected
in the votive own
offerings of his native bogs.
There was certainly no lack of contenders

waiting ready in the wings
to assume command of the Roman Empire in its hour of doom. The
entire region north of the Danubian limes was
controlled by the Goths,
Gepids and Vandals. Their neighbours were the
Burgundians and
74
Langobardi, large Germanic tribes without any real home who had
inhabited the area for two centuries and more and took every opportu-
nity of improving their position. Further west the Alemanni and the
Franks were pressing hard on the Romans all along the Rhine and in
Gaul. Germans provided something like half the Roman army and
filledthe highest offices of the imperial government. In AD 375 the
precarious balance was disastrously upset from the rear with the
onslaught of a new and alien people, the sinister Huns. Ruthless,
rapid and unpredictable they swept on horseback from the Asian
steppe to descend on more densely populated Europe. First to succumb
was the Ostrogothic kingdom of Hermanric in the Ukraine. The
Visigoths succeeded in parrying the thrust and some of them were
allowed by the Emperor Valens to settle on imperial territory south of
the Danube.
In year of 375 the Visigothic king buried his royal
this terrible
treasure; the hoard was not discovered till 1837, at Pietrossa in

Rumania. It consists of gold dishes, bowls, tankards, brooches and
other ornaments. One priceless buckle throws light on the whole: it
proclaims in runic characters that this is the treasure of the indestruc-

tible Goths. Having remained inviolate for fifteen hundred years, in
modern times the treasure was once again threatened by storms in
the east; during the first world war and the years of revolution that
followed the hoard disappeared, only to reappear, still intact, in
Moscow, where it has remained ever since.
The hoard found in a field at Szilagy-Somlyo in Hungary is also
rich in gold coins and ornaments : seven Roman imperial medallions,
seven soluK9 twenty-one ornamental brooches, three gold dishes, one
gold circlet and various other ornaments. Since the latest medallion,
struck at Trierand splendidly mounted by a Gothic craftsman, belongs
to the reign of Gratian (367-83) it seems likely that this hoard was
also buried in AD 375 or a little later, on account of some sudden
emergency of war.
The events of the migration era followed one another in rapid succes-
sion. The Visigoths led by Alaric advanced into Italy, where despite
by Stilicho, Commander-in-chief of the Roman army
their initial defeat
and himself a German, they pressed on to capture Rome in 410. The
Vandals, also under pressure from the east, migrated from Pannonia
into Gaul. The Huns pursued their destructive way through the
Balkans, northern Italy and the Rhineland, leaving behind them a

* 75
trail of scorched earth and devastation. Attila was finally challenged
in 451 by the powerful army assembled by Aetius at the Gatalaunian
Fields, and forced to retreat. But this meant that the Germanic tribes,
no longer threatened by the Huns, were free to deploy their superior
military strength against the Romans.
In 476 Odoacer conspired with German mercenaries in his command
to depose the last of the Roman Emperors, who ironically
enough
rejoiced in the sonorous and evocative name of Romulus Augustulus.
While in the west Glovis was already at work founding the new Prankish
kingdom, in the east the situation was still very confused. The Heruls,
of whom we shall hear again, moved from Bohemia into the Balkans.
In 493 the Ostrogoths under Theodoric invaded Italy and came to
terms with Odoacer. The two rulers met for the first time in the castle
at Verona. According to one account of what then took
place, Theodoric
drew his sword, split his ally open from top to bottom at a single stroke,
tersely remarking that "The fellow hasn't a single bone in his body*.
However abhorrent the deed, it produced peace and quiet in Italy
and among the Germans north of the Alps for the next thirty years.
5
Fighting broke out again after Theodoric s death. In 552 the Ostrogoths
were finally defeated by a Byzantine force at Vesuv (otherwise known
as Busta Gallorum) in the
Apennines. Some years later the Langobardi
crossed the Alps and assumed control in
Italy, the last Germanic tribe
to do so.
Such, in brief, were the main stages in the conflicts which marked
the ending of the prehistoric era in Central
Europe and the beginning
of the Christian Middle Ages. In Scandinavia the
great dramas of the
migration era were following a similar course at the same time.
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
There lived in southern Denmark during the seventeenth century a

little lacemaker whose name was Kirsten Svendsvatter. It was her
custom to walk every Saturday to Tondern, close to the present Danish

frontier with Germany and thirteen miles north of Niebull, to deliver
her week's work to Miss Marina Ambders. This was the period when
the Tondern lace-making industry was at its height. As Kirsten was
walking through the village of Gallehus on Saturday 20 July 1639, she
stubbed her toe on what she thought was a root but which turned out to
be a metal object, in fact a horn twenty-seven inches long and weighing
six pounds (see plate 26). When looked at closely it could be seen that
the horn was built up in sections and richly decorated with strange
figures and shapes, men, horsemen, bowmen, beasts, serpents, fishes,
and intricate designs in punched work; it was also found to be of pure
gold. Kirsten, Marina Ambders, the local goldsmith and a crowd of
inquisitive onlookers all realized that this must be a prehistoric object
and as such belonged by law to the King. The relevant statute con-
concerning Danefae, promulgated in 1592, ran as follows: 'Any gold
or silver discovered in the plains or in the mountains or under the
plough or in any place shall belong to the King.'
The horn was accordingly handed over to King Christian IV who
was staying at Gliickstadt. He had
cleaned and polished, and on
it
seeing the result exclaimed at 'the artistry of ancient times, whose

mystic meanings defy the probings of scholars'. It is said that on the
same day he and the prince and their courtiers drank Rhenish wine
from the horn and became very merry.
As for Kirsten, she was quite forgotten by the great men. It is
only quite recently that a petition has come to light in the archives,
couched in formal and elaborate language, in which she presents her
case:
77
It is therefore to Your Royal Majesty, my most gracious King and
Master, that I address my respectful plea since I am a poor but decent god-
fearing woman, who has inherited nothing
from her parents save honour and
honesty and has nothing but what can be earned for board and lodging by
the work of her hands that Your Majesty will continue my most gracious
:
lord and master and

will, moreover, further your Royal purpose in accord-
ance with Your Royal Majesty by granting a small reward . . .
There is no need to pursue this breathless effusion through its remaining

159 words. The request appears to have been granted, judging from the
official note on the back which reads : 'Dealt with. I have written to
Giersdoff about this/
Orders were given to ensure that a search was made of the adjacent
in case further material lay buried. Gregers Krabbe, the nobleman
soil
who held the land, writes to the king of his diligence in sending labourers
to Gallehus to dig up the ground and make carefiil search for any other
treasures. He reports that they found nothing of any value.
Unfortunately for him he was not speaking the truth he had ordered
:
no such search and thereby missed his chance of discovering another

golden horn, which lay hidden until it was found in 1734 by a peasant
named Erik Lassen. The pointed end was missing, but even without it
the horn weighed more than the earlier one, eight pounds, and had
the further distinction of runic inscriptions in addition to richly figured
decoration. Small wonder that the natives of Gallehus were lost in
amazement and remarked in a moment of worldly wisdom that in
Gallehus things below ground were more valuable than those above.
The golden horns were put on display in the royal collection of
curiosities at Copenhagen, where
they were much wondered at and
admired. The pile of learned books and manuscripts devoted to their
interpretation was reaching mountainous proportions, the professors
of Europe were in constant
correspondence on the subject, when this
burst of activity was brought
abruptly to a halt. On the night of 5 May
1802 a professional coiner named Niels Heidenreich, who had been
released from gaol under an
amnesty, used his own keys to break into
the museum and made off with the two
golden horns. He was captured
by the Danish police a year later, but the melted down remnant of the
gold was no compensation for the loss to the learned world. Heidenreich
was again imprisoned, without trial, and
spent the remaining forty-one
years of his life quite comfortably at the state's expense. He was a
highly skilled technician by trade, and occupied himself with delicate
mechanisms ; he also took a keen interest in the
squaring of the circle, a
78
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
problem much In vogue at that time and which he felt confident of
solving before he died. He read a great deal and was surrounded by
birds and flowers. Heidenreich was a hardened criminal who had the
luck to live in one of the world's most genial cities at the most tranquil
period of its history.

Even before Heidenreich had been caught the theft had created such
a stir that Adam Oehlenschlager was inspired to write a poem on the
5
golden horns, and so inaugurated the 'golden age of Danish romantic

poetry. Some literary historians even go so far as to say that the most
important thing about the golden horns was that they were stolen !
Modern scholars have to relyon old engravings for their knowledge of

the horns. The drawing of the *rune' horn has been executed with
remarkable care, but the rendering of Kirsten's horn is much less
and it is unfortunate that the baroque form wished on it by
faithful,
the engraver has so seriously distorted our sole surviving picture of the
lost original. These two horns were certainly the most valuable objects
inworked gold so far discovered from Scandinavia's golden age. For a
long time it was difficult to incorporate them within the categories
evolved by modern systematic research. Quite recently, indeed,
attempts have been made to identify them as Celtic or south Russian,
although they are quite unmistakably major works in the Scandinavian
'star-style' of the early fifth century. The punched triangles at the
margin of each section, the stars, semi-circles, pseudo-spirals, and

other patterns betray their origin down to the last detail. Most striking
of all are the figures of beasts and men cut from exquisitely fine gold
leaf and soldered on, just as we find them now and again on fibulae
and other personal adornments in the star-style. The figures on the
horns have become actors in a drama, guardians of a mystery and ;
this is their creator's great achievement. The runic inscription gives us

his name: *I, Hlewagast, son of Holt, made the horn.'
Hlewagast is a purely Germanic name and may perhaps mean

famous guest. Hlewa- crops up again in the names of the Prankish
kings, forexample that of Chlodowich or Ghlodwig (known to us as
Glovis) who founded
the Prankish kingdom. It seems then that the
gold horns are works of northern art made by a northern artist who
wrote in an early north Germanic tongue. We must therefore try to
interpret the figures in the light of a predominantly norse mentality,
or at least as the expression of ideas and assumptions current in
Scandinavia about AD 425.
79
So of figures that one might almost think that
eclectic is the choice
Hlewagast had journeyed over half Europe, noting down unusual and
striking motifs in a little book. For example there is the three-headed

mana whose twin can be seen on Celtic stone monuments in northern
France. The facial mask flanked by leaping beasts is, however, more
suggestive of south-eastern Europe and the Brangstrup motifs. The
centaur is Roman, the remarkable beast with a head at each end is
provincial-Roman cum oriental; so is the bird standing on a large
fish and pecking away at it.
Here we are in a world of fifth century pictorial magic, whose power

was universally recognized. Hlewagast's collection of Roman or
oriental borrowings is second to none; but he has cast them in the form
dictatedby the canons of the northern 'star-style* and subdued them
toan intellectual and religious system which is purely Germanic. We
must now examine the underlying assumptions of this system as revealed
in these pictures.
The artist follows the annual cycle month by month, depicting the
happenings proper to each season. All the figures can be related to later
folk customs which are either known to be
very old or can be proved to
be of pagan origin. For example, the archer who takes aim at sucking
beasts the winter demon, arresting the earth's fertility with his bow-
is
leading a goat-like creature is

shot. Again, the three-headed monster
obviously a northern creature described as three-headed in Snorri's

Edda. As a symbol of the spring equinox there are two men in cross-
shaped formation. The standing member of the pair brandishes his
sword over the other, a prostrate bald-headed who recalls the
figure
3
'victims of laterGerman spring festivals, Pfingstl, Lambfrosch and Knecht
Rubin> who were shaven and shorn before submitting to their mock
murder. Then there is a serpent
supporting a triple branch on its
tongue, emblem of returning life, in the presence of a mounted figure
swinging a club, A club has always been the emblem of the leader or
admonisher: in German folk lore a club was carried
by the old man
who restrained the wild rout following Frau Holle,
by similar characters
in Patching revels - masked carnivals - and
by the Eckhart of Hans
Sachs. And this same object is at the heart of that most distinctive
social institution the
English club ! Mythical beasts and horse mummery
are also a feature of carnival
spring processions.
The next section shows a man who with one hand leads the saddled
horse from which he has dismounted and in the other brandishes a
sickle. This invites
comparison with a ceremony still observed in many
80
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
places, in which the chief actors also descend from their mounts and
flourish sacred emblems this is the ceremony known as beating the
:
bounds, explicitly described in many written sources as of Celtic and

Germanic origin, although adapted to a pious Christian custom by the
addition of crosses and relics. To return to the still strictly pagan scene,
the sickle carried about in ritual progress to bless the germinating
seed and ensure a good harvest must be the sickle carried by the horned
man in the topmost section. The two statuesque horned figures who
occupy this section must indeed be the deities in whose honour the
ritual springtime dances were performed. There can be no doubt that
their images stood in the pagan grove where the golden horns fulfilled
their liturgical functions. Since the idols were too large to be carried
symbol of the fertility god was taken from his hand

into the fields, the
and carried in procession in his stead. Medieval men were doing much
the same when they carried the axe of St Olaf of Norway or the banner
of St Eric of Sweden into the fields instead of the images of the saints
themselves.
So we have deduced the existence of two huge idols in a sacred grove.

It is not known where this grove was. Gallehus, where the horns were
found, lies on the ancient north-south highway at a spot known to have

been the site of a gibbet in medieval times. During the Iron Age, how-
ever, it was certainly unoccupied, so the horns must have been buried by
fugitives. The question is not in fact very important : the pictures them-
selves afforda deeper insight into the beliefs and social organization of
the early migration period than we could have dared to hope. The cult
observances of the sacred grove were focussed on two gods, a fertility
god with a sickle and a war god with a spear. We can call them Freyr
and Wodan, although we do not know whether the cover-name Freyr
(Herr, lord) was already widely accepted in AD 425 we may also note
;
5
that 'Wodan is as yet unmounted, although he apparently fills the
role of leader and admonisher. We have come a long way from the
modest bog pottery and harvest offerings of small farmers and herds-
men. Here the Germanic exaltation of war has already taken its place
beside the worship of fertility, and the guardians of the sacred grove
were obviously great heroes, capable of contributing over fifteen pounds
of gold to be wrought into cult vessels and votive offerings.
The golden horns are actual drinking horns, very much like those
found among the table-ware of the earlier Iron Age period. They would
have been used chiefly at important sacrificial feasts. Kirsten's horn,
81
which was open at the lower and narrower end, could also be blown
a circumstance exploited by the Copenhagen museum attendants.
Another use for horns, when suitably propped up, was to act as a
receptacle for the blood of the sacrificial animal. All over the world
one finds that liturgical objects carry illustrations of the use to which
they were put. The horns are no exception. On Kirsten's horn, for
example we a long-haired bearded priest in a long gown
see
bearing
the golden horn away from a slaughtered horse, who had met his
death from an arrow. The horn was presumably full of
horse-blood,
since we know from later accounts by Christian missionaries that the
sprinkling of horse-blood on wooden idols, priests and congregations

was an essential feature of the ritual of the whole late
pagan period.
Tacitus had some inkling of these matters. He describes how
among
the Naharvali, a southern Germanic tribe, there was a c
grove hallowed
from ancient times. The presiding priest dresses like a woman . . . One
hears of gods whose Latin names are Castor and Pollux . . .
They
are worshipped as young men or brothers. Their name is Alci' elk
(i.e.
or stag).
We cannot fail to be impressed by the resemblance between this
account and our picture of a priest in flowing feminine robes
facing a
pair of divine brothers. What is more, placed between the two deities
in a position of the highest symbolic
significance is the figure of a stag
rampant :
I saw the sun-stag go down from the south.

His feet were planted on the earth but his horns touched the heavens.
We can go further and assert that the horse-sacrifice took place at the
end of August, in later centuries the season of the
great Scandinavian
horse fairs and German tournaments.
Next comes another pair of men
forming a cross; although the
engraver has introduced some baroque alterations, they must corres-
pond to the spring pair and symbolize the autumn equinox. The
checker-board was valued as a means of the and in
divining future,
later centuries the
vigil of St Andrew's day (29 November) and All
Souls' Day were associated with revels
devoted to the same end.
Finally there is a mask firmly placed between two
leaping wolves, to
avert the perils of the and
dying year midwinter darkness. The mask
is
eyeless and stands for the departing sun which
reappears proudly
rampant in the form of the New Year's stag on the other band; so the
year's cycle starts afresh. The setting and the rising sun provide the
82
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
fixed points withinwhich the annual sequence unfolds itself, just as the
characters standing for acquired and inherited property are the keys
which hold the frame of the runic alphabet in place.
Hlewagast appears a master worthy to set beside the inventor of the
runes and fax superior to the artist who made the silver cups of
Himlingoje, from whom he is separated by some 150-200 years. The
period between them was marked by the growing importance of
influences from the south-east and south-west. His pictures reveal a
vital and independent culture with its own religious and social struc-
ture without this evidence it would be totally unknown to us. Germanic
;
art might well have gone on from here to develop further skills in
pictorial representation. Yet this

road was not followed. Hlewagast's
masterpiece stands on the threshold of a totally different and quite
unexpected development.
The Roman emperors were in the habit of striking gold medallions,

twice or even four times as heavy as their regular coinage, to give as
presents to their friends and allies. Six such medallions
have been found
in Scandinavia, all with a loop, so that the medallion could be strung
on a chain and worn round the neck and 28). Afore
(see plates 27
interesting still, there are ten medallions of Germanic workmanship

which are clearly a deliberate imitation of imperial prototypes; in
some cases the imitation is so exact that we can point to the model,
although the artist has turned the Latin characters into a meaningless
scribble. We can watch the northern artists playing with this new idea.
Naturally their talents varied. One emperor is given a chin like
a
rubber boot, another a forehead like a melon, but these beginner's
mistakes are not important. The Germanic artist is instinctively
striving aftera complete transmogrification of his model and his whole

stress is on the outline, on the contour of the head rather than the
moulding of the cheeks. He is much more concerned with the interplay

of lines than with the expression of character. He can calmly plant a
bird'shead on an emperor's neck, or detach a hand raised in dignified
salutationand transfer it to a point behind the subject's head. The
Roman medallions were stamped on both sides. Northern goldsmiths,
however, preferred to use gold discs embossed on one side only and
soldered two together to achieve the obverse and reverse of their
Roman models. The equestrian figure on the reverse is given headgear
made of large ring-mail, exactly like the example found in the bog
offerings.
83
After a while it was realized that two sides were unnecessary, since
only one face of these pendants would normally be seen. The circular
in south-eastern Sweden is quite
gold pendant found at Senoren
extraordinarly beautiful with its dignified head, meticulously patterned
hair and equally stylized imperial diadem. These gold discs stamped on
one side only are today known as bracteates. The imitation medals
may perhaps be classed as the earliest of the 740 bracteates so far

discovered on Scandinavian soil.
The man who made the Senoren bracteate apparently found diffi-
culty in draping the toga over the emperor's shoulders. There were
ways of avoiding the difficulty the emperor might be given a longer
:
neck, or a more streamlined torso, or some quite different arrangement

might be attempted. Another possibility was to dispense with the
shoulders altogether. All these different variations were explored, but
quite soon a happy solution was found which met with general approval
and was frequently imitated the intrusive garment and its folds, quite
:
meaningless to northerners, was abolished in favour of an animal

form, so that the huge head was made to rest directly on the back of a
supporting quadruped. This bizarre metamorphosis of the imperial
effigy would have been horrifying to Roman eyes, but to a German the
figure would appear both significant and benign, reducible to the
terms of his own aesthetic sensibility. The earliest gold bracteates carry
the names of their makers, written not in garbled Latin but in runes :
Ekfakahf I Fakar wrote
The final f is an abbreviation for fahi =1 wrote, just as in Latin people

often put F for fecit.
Spelling has its difficulties even today. The goldsmith probably had
to rely on a single draft written for him by a skilled rune master.
Another gold bracteate made by the same craftsman has been found
at Aasum in Schonen, with the following inscription :
Ei kakakRfahi
Here *fahi* is written out in full, but several mistakes have crept in.
The workmanship is fine and since the gold
margin is exceptionally
wide the whole ornament is larger than any so far discovered. The
quadruped could not be anything but a horse - the line of the jaw,
the hooves, trotting legs and
waving tail are all unmistakable. It is true
that the beast has horns, but this is not unusual. Alexander the Great's
horse was called Bucephalus,
meaning bull-head, and on Greek coins
84
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
he is depicted with the huge horns of a bull. The Germans guarded
their sacred white horses in special groves and never allowed them to
work; these would be the horses which during the migration period
were sometimes decked out with horns. There is a horned horse on
Hlewagast's masterpiece, where it appears beside the rider with a
club and is clearly a participant in the great spring festival. Horned
horses are found yet again on a finely carved tombstone which shows a
duel between two horses, urged on by two human figures (see plate 29).
Indeed horse-fighting was a sport much indulged in by the Germans
on festive occasions from an early date, as Bronze Age tombstones
bear witness. Horse-fights are frequently referred to in the Icelandic
sagas of the Viking Age, where they seem to end regrettably often in
murder and general mayhem. Horse-fights continued to be a feature of
the Norwegian horse-fairs, held in late August, until the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
We have traced the transformation of the imperial toga into a
sacred horse. The imperial effigy itself has by now of course become a
Germanic god. Since the Germans had previously had only their
wooden idols to worship, they had few preconceptions about the
external appearance of their gods and were quite ready to adopt the
emperor's effigy : he was after all supposed to be a living god. On the
bracteates the figure is shown accompanied only by his horse, a bird
or two and a number of other sacred emblems of so general a character
that nothing can be deduced from them. We
do not even know to whom
the horses were sacred; perhaps to the norse pantheon as a whole,
perhaps to one of the two gods of the golden horns. So far we have no
pictorial evidence which helps to solve the problem, but live from year
to year in the hope that the secret archives of the earth will yield some
fresh surprises.
Hariuha is my name, initiate of peril,

I bring good fortune! Tyr! Tyr! Tyr !
This proud claim with its threefold invocation of the Germanic sky-
god is made by another master bracteate-maker. It is possible that it is
Tyr, the god of the high heavens, whose head is depicted on the
bracteate on its beautifully stylized horse. Tyr perhaps also appears on
three other unusual bracteates which show a standing man with one
hand jaws of a sharp-toothed beast of prey. Snorri's
thrust into the
Edda, which dates from the end of the pagan era, relates how the sky-
god placed his hand between the jaws of the femis-wolf, who not
85
it off. The itself is
surprisingly responded by biting story extremely
old and is found in different versions all over the world. The Celtic
god Nuada lost both his hands but

had them replaced in gold and silver,
symbols of the sun and moon.
Mucius Scaevola, the hero of ancient
Rome who stoically and before his enemies suffered the loss of his hand
by burning as proof of Roman endurance, also takes his origin

from this class of legend. Finally it must be noted that the figure at
the top of Kirsten's golden horn has no left hand. This is probably not
intended for the god himself but for the priest who took his part in the
ritual.
I, the dazzling-eyed one, dedicate the runes.
So speaks askilled rune-writer who endows his runes with magical
power and was himself renowned - and no doubt feared - for his
glittering eye. His bracteate shows the effigy of a highly stylized
running man. The legend on two other bracteates is identical :
I Wig the Herul made the work of art.
Several skilled writers are described as Heruls. spearhead has the A

inscription *I the Herul am called Muha, son of Asugisalar/ And on a
:
bone amulet from Lindholm the inscription reads

5
the Herul, am :
%
called the cunning (or the magic) one. The Heruls have already been
mentioned as one of the peoples who were wandering about Europe in
the fifth We shall become further acquainted with this
century.
puzzling tribe whose rune-writers were so conscious of their origin.
The bracteates form an aesthetic world in themselves, peopled with
figures and symbols whose import is in many cases still far from under-
stood, whose written message is conveyed in runes of every kind, some
intelligible, some mysterious. It is not surprising that the runes which
occur most frequently are those we have learned to recognize as the
names of natural and supernatural powers, 'ehwu* ( == horse) is found
quite frequently beside the image of the sacred horse. the Alleso On
bracteate, probably made in the workshop of 'glittering eye', we read
:
LauR Eg OdaR Lu T:E athl
There are many errors here, but LauR must mean Laukar ( = leek).
The rune after the swastika is Odal ( = inherited property), then comes
quite plainly Alu = protection, amulet) and finally Lathu, = defence,
( , (
warding off). In between we have T and E, for Tyr and Ehar, the god
and his sacred horse.
86
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
The gold bracteates are proof that by this time there were several
workshops and schools in Scandinavia; in fact they can be

different
grouped by their putative origin. The men who worked in these ateliers
were both receptive of outside influences and capable of bringing
technical and stylistic innovations to a ripe perfection. Naturally there
were also less ambitious workshops where the men lacked originality,
whose effigies of gods and horses were blurred and ugly; but their
very existence at least goes to prove what pleasure Scandinavians of
this period took in their own artistic effort. However, it is the really
creative artists who are of most interest.
The precise geometrical pattern of the Aasum bracteate is enlivened
by the heads of four open-jawed beasts about to swallow up four human
masks ; only the lowest of these masks can now be seen, the others, which
were on the margin, having broken off. This amulet for warding off
evil spirits recalls Human masks are
Brangstrup and the golden horns.
found on four other gold bracteates, all from the earliest group. The
six masks on the gold bracteate from Gerete (Gotland) are a con-
spicuous example of the power such miniatures can convey (see plates
27 and 28) grim-faced, gape-eyed men, their hair combed forward, a
:
band of pagans whose hearts were gripped both by terror of wild beasts
and of war and by the ecstasies of the great cult festivals, men to whom
the golden mean of classical form and the temperate way of life meant
nothing, whose inclinations were in the direction of baroque exuberance
and uninhibited zest. The artist who fashioned such faces was well on
the road towards diverting classical impulses into indigenous channels.
These human masks have been cut separately and soldered to the
finished work, an unusual technique found elsewhere only in the
hoard of Szilagy-Somlyo and in the latest of the imperial medals,
struck by Gratian, which has fifteen human masks soldered round the
margin. The northern artists must certainly have used Danubian

examples as their models. Even the barrel-form loop is the same, a
tube of puffed-out rolls decorated with granular filigree.
A really long hollow roll of this type could look very grand,
and if it
were slightly curved might even be used as a collar. An effect more
grandiose could be achieved by working three parallel rolls into
still
one ornament, as in the collar discovered at the foot of the Aalleberg,

a mountain in western Sweden (see plate 29). The opening provided
for the convenience of the wearer istipped at one end with a smooth
piece of zinc which fits into the hollow at the other end. Ornaments
as magnificent as this were worn by men as well as women. They were
8?
even worn by gods; one of the bogs has produced the wooden figure,
more carefully carved than usual, of a grim-faced god with broad
cheek-bones, wide eyes and a stubborn chin, who wears a three-ring
round his neck this rare example of
collar (see plate 30). Incidentally
German portraiture produces an effect very similar to much
prehistoric
modern sculpture.
What more, between each of the three rolls of the gold collar sits
is
a row of animal figures and human masks, strongly reminiscent of

those on the uppermost section of Kirsten's horn. Both portray a
curious quadruped with a human head, and the gold thread winding
round the outer rim of the rune-horn is like the filigree decoration on
the collar. It is unlikely that both masterpieces came from the same
workshop, but Hlewagast must have been a contemporary of the
artist who made the gold collar; exposed to the same influences, the
two craftsmen arrived independently at the same forms of expression,

and can be considered members of that school of soothsayers and
goldsmiths whose confident assertions of identity made in the first
person are a feature of the gold bracteates produced
around AD 425.
In addition to the six gold medallions which were precursors of the
bracteates, late Roman gold coins were found frequently. The great
majority have been found on the three Baltic islands of Oland (272),
Gotland (245) , and Bornholm ( 145) ; the total for the rest of Scandinavia
is much smaller (84) A few go back to the time of the Emperor Arcadius
.
(395-408 AD), the most recent belong to the later years of Justinian
(538-65). It will be remembered that the earlier hoard of coins at
Branstrup was identified as the accumulated pay of returning warriors.
The same explanation probably applies here, since as many as 79 coins
have been found in one place. There is much in favour of this theory,
for the presence of these coins is evidence that there was considerable
unrest and war, especially on Oland.
Oland a long narrow island composed of limestone instead of the

is
granite found elsewhere in Scandinavia. The island's plateau supports

a lime-loving flora, markedly different from that of the mainland. From
these heights one has the impression of an endless vista, although in
is enclosed on both sides
fact the island by the Baltic and not the open
sea, and on days of quivering summer heat mirages may be seen. Oland
is rich in historical monuments.
Along the coast cluster barrows from
the Viking Age ; inland are the impressive foundations of houses built
during the migration era. From time immemorial the islanders have
88
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
marvelled at these huge walls of earth and stone; until their real
purpose was recognized they were known as 'the giants' graves/
Running between the houses and extending far up into the woods are
the remains of stone walls, known as wastdr^ which divided the arable
fieldsand pastures as in the older Jutland settlements, except that these
walls are stronger and stonier. Now they lie in ruins., memorials of a
past culture and a vanished prosperity.

In the decade between 480 and 490 fate struck Oland a heavy blow.
Everything from before this period has been destroyed. We know
exactly what must have happened - a brave assertion for a period
without written records but one the prehistorian can make in all
confidence. The coin hoards of Oland contain nothing later than
coins struck between 467 and 477 by the emperors whose ephemeral
reigns fell within this decade Anthemius, Glycerius, Leo II, Romulus
;
Augustulus and Basiliscus. Yet hoards on Gotland and Bornholm and in

other parts of Scandinavia contain coins struck by Anastasius (491-518),
Justinus I (518-27) and Justinian (527-65). Thus it was only on Oland
that the steady sequence was interrupted. The coin hoards of Oland
had already been buried before the coins of Anastasius, which occur
in large numbers, made their appearance. Another significant discovery
is a five-ring gold collar, grander than the three-ring specimen though
less finely worked, which was buried in the ground on the road leading
down to the harbour. The cause can only have been an external
attack so devastating that the island was left gutted, the houses and
villages burned out and all else so thoroughly destroyed that nothing
was worth rebuilding. Excavations among the houses have uncovered
no objects later than 480-490.
The disaster cannot have been entirely unexpected. There are
indications that the inhabitants were prepared for trouble and had
hastily built places of refuge, stone walls on. the hill-tops which provided
some cover. A few articles of every-day use, mostly in pieces, have been
discovered, among these fortifications, together with some spear-heads.
All can be shown to date from the second half of the fifth century. One
fortification differsmarkedly from the rest in its construction (see plate
31). It stands on level ground and the walls, ten feet high and twenty
feet thick, are -made of limestone slabs arranged in steps. The interior
space of the 423 feet in diameter, is occupied by eighty-four

fortress,
rectangular house foundations, some arranged radially, the rest

scattered haphazard in the centre. The stronghold is unique in
Scandinavia. A
German scholar has recently shown that the Emperor
Valentinian III (423-55) planned to protect Italy against the Huns
and other invaders by building a chain of similar fortifications, and
that the scheme was in fact put into practice in Pannonia, in the
Drantal. Comparison between the fortification on Oland (Ismantorp)
and at Sadowetz in Bavaria certainly reveals a striking similarity.
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that islanders lately returned from
overseas had taken on themselves at short notice the herculean task of
building a fortification in the most modern style.
But such a last-minute frantic effort and communal endeavours were
all to no avail. The storm was not to be averted, the islanders buried
their gold and none survived to reclaim it. All died a violent death
amid the rubble of their falling houses.
Who were these invaders whose aggressive movements had warned
the islanders of their danger? The catastrophe is not mentioned in
any
written source, but we can identify the victors with some certainty as
e
the Svea, that tribe rich in men and weapons and also mighty on the
sea' whose king ruled *in virtue of his incontrovertible
right to be
3
obeyed.
Thus began a grim period in Scandinavian history. Sweden and

Denmark were now theatres of war* Fighting men, heavily-armed and
trained for the purpose, were
constantly in readiness, prepared to
descend on a smiling island and transform it into a smoking waste.
No-one was not even the Gotlanders on their larger and more
safe,
distant island. That their respite was brief is proved by the gold coins
buried there, which indicate two or three disasters
during the first half
of the sixth century. In this case, however,
although flourishing settle-
ments were destroyed the life of the island was not
completely paralysed.
There is a brief contemporary account of the Svea,
omitting any
mention of wars, in the writings of Jordanes the Goth who took his
facts from Cassiodorus, chancellor to Theodoric the Great :
The Suehans, like the Thuringians, have magnificent horses. These are
the people who send the famous sable-coloured furs to
Rome, along trade-
routes which pass through the territories of other
many peoples. Although
they live in want they clothe themselves like millionaires.
Perhaps he thought the Svea swaggered about in furs all day Jordanes
!
continues with a long list of

peoples and tribes : Theustes (in Tjust on
the east coast), Vagoth,
Bergio, Hallin (in Halland, south-west Sweden),
and Liothidia whose homeland was the level fertile vul-
plain, very
90
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
nerable to Next come Ahelmil, Finnaithae, Fervin and
attack.
Gauthigoth (or 'gothic Goths', like the Vagoth), a strong and very
warlike people, Mixi, Evagre and Otingis. Then follows an important
piece of information : The Danes, who of all the peoples of Scandinavia
are considered the most advanced, have driven the Heruls from their
5
homes.
The restless Heruls have reappeared on the scene. It seems they were
natives of the southern Baltic, neighbours of the Danes. But we also
met them in Moravia. This southern branch, however, was conquered
by the Langobards in the reign of Anastasius (491-518) and we are
told that a remnant of them returned to their homeland on the island
of Thule (=Scandinavia) where according to Procopius they were
5
neighbours of the 'Gautoi , that is, of the Gotar, or Geatas. Another

party of survivors pushed farther south and settled in the Balkans.
When their king died they were apparently not allowed to choose a
new one but had to send ambassadors to Scandinavia
for themselves
to receive a nomination from the members of the tribe still inhabiting
the homeland. The process was long drawn-out, because the chief
ambassador died and they had to start again. Meanwhile the Emperor
Anastasius had his own nominee appointed, only to be ejected once the
ambassadors finally returned with the Swedish choice, who was
proclaimed the rightful king. The most remarkable feature of this
confusing tale is the ease with which the Scandinavians appear to have
travelled about Europe, wars and disturbances notwithstanding.
Theoderic the Great, whose ancestors had migrated from Sweden,
also occupied himself with the affairs of the Swedish Heruls to a quite
astonishing degree. From his royal seat at Ravenna he despatched

duplicate letters to the kings of the Thuringi., the Warni (who lived
at
the mouth of the Warne), and the Heruls, inviting them to form an
alliance against Clovis. In conclusion he proposed to the king of the
Thuringi that he should marry Theoderic's daughter, Amalaberga, and

to the king of the Heruls that he should become his son by military
adoption. This last offer was couched in the most formal and ceremonious
terms:
King Theoderic to the King of the Heruls The peoples count it a high
!
honour for a man to be made a son by military adoption, since only he who
has shown himself worthy is fit to be numbered among the strongest of
strong. Our natural children often disappoint us. But the children
we choose
for ourselves cannot be unworthy. For they achieve their position not by
birth but by their merits . . . Wherefore it is our will that you, who are
G 91
to the custom and ceremonial of the folk,
already declared a hero according
should also be made our son in proper fashion through our gift of weapons
to you. We
bestow upon you horses, swords, shields and other weapons of
but more still, we also bestow
on you our favour. You, in
war; important
virtue of your recognitionby the judgement of Theoderic, shall stand first
Take then these weapons, let them serve both you and
among the peoples.
me ... The rest of the message we have entrusted in our mother tongue to
the two ambassadors who will explain our letter in all points and convey by
word of mouth what access of strength our alliance may bring.
I fancy we can identify this king of the

Heruls. Jordanes' source was
Cassiodorus, Theoderic's chancellor. As already mentioned, Jordanes
tells us that the Heruls were driven from their settlements by the
Danes. listed the other tribes he goes on to say : 'Not many

Having
years ago they were ruled over by king Roduulf,
who found his own
too small and took himself to the bosom of Theoderic, king
kingdom
of the Goths, who gave him what he wanted.* This wording, especially
5
the phrase 'the bosom of Theoderic , is tantamount to saying that he
became his son.
There no need to press the written sources further. The main-
is
tenance of regular connections between the Swedish and the Balkan

Heruls, together with the friendship between their king and the great
Theoderic, emphasizes the continuing role of northern Europe in the
tribal migrations of the south.
In thisbook the archaeological evidence has pride of place. Once

again itshows, rather surprisingly, a shift of the cultural centre of
gravity. The graves on the Danish islands belonging to the migration
era are quite insignificant, and central and southern Sweden are
practically barren at this period. But Norway and northern
Sweden
offer tumuli of unprecedented grandeur, whose contents afford unmis-
takable evidence that leadership in the artistic field had passed to the
far north. We
find prosperous fanners and warrior chieftains being
buried with weapons, fine ornaments, and gold : bronze vessels, glasses
and imported artifacts are also found in the graves, and although few
in number they are the only known examples from the migration era.
Here is one of those far-reaching alterations in culture patterns which
we cannot as yet explain. There are several possible reasons and it is
difficult at present to decide which to choose. For example, a further
alteration in the burial customs of southern Scandinavia may have led

to the disappearance of the subterranean chamber with its provision
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
of food and drink, perhaps in deference to a less concrete conception
of the after-life ; the discovery of miniature weapons and symbolical
objects lends some colour to this theory. Or again, the disappearance
of graves during periods of unrest may be accounted for by the natural
preoccupation of southern Scandinavian chieftains, whose splendid
burials ought to stratum of finds, with more urgent
appear in the first
matters than building monuments for their after-life. Another sugges-

tion is that the Huns had blocked the usual trade routes with the
continent, so that was only in the extreme west, by way of lower
it
Saxony and Jutland (still an important source of finds) that fruitful

contact was possible, and this would bear directly on Norway and, via
Trondheim, on northern Sweden.
Scattered among the great mounds of northern Scandinavia are
some truly royal burials, for example at Snartemo, on the most southerly
slopes of Norway (see plates 32 and 33) The sword offers a compendium
.
of all the main stylistic features of two fertile centuries. The faceted
drinking glass is a costly import ; it had already received some damage in
antiquity and has been repaired with ornamental silver rivets. The
buckle is as fine a sample as may be found anywhere. The remaining
weapons and grave goods are not quite up to the same standard.
Another royal tumulus at Sundsvall, in the best timber and farming
country of northern Sweden, was also very large. The grave goods
proved to be so badly damaged that only the best professional skill could
save them. The generous sponsor of the excavation arranged therefore
for special transport to convey the find to Stockholm. The centred
portion of the burial, which contained most of the finds, was enclosed
in a plaster cast. Iron bars were then pushed under it and the whole
unwieldly package was transported on a trailer to the museum in

Stockholm. This norse king had the distinction of making his last
journey not by horse and cart but on board a long-distance lorry some
fourteen-hundred years after his death. The investigation was resumed
inside the museum and the scientists seized the opportunity of using all
their magic more fanciful by far than the king's wildest
tricks, devices
imaginings. We
have been permitted now and then to lift the lid off
the secret brew in the laboratory and inhale some of the enticing
by little even these decayed objects are achieving a new
smells. Little
shadows of the past once again take material shape. A
solidity as the
paper on the ceremonial sword buried with his ancient predecessor
was presented to our present king on his seventieth birthday, but
publication of the full record of the excavation is still awaited.
93
is naturally welcome, since it provides a cross-
rich burial
Any
section of the material wealth of the period. These burials have the
further merit of showing that the decisive step towards full realization
of the type of animal-pattern known as Style I was taken in western
and northern Scandinavia and not in southern Sweden or Denmark.
We owe our knowledge of these marvellous pieces, the work of great
artists, to the prevailing burial customs.
The Germanic had little interest in naturalistic or representa-
artist
tional art. He aimed

at linear patterns, stylization, pure ornament.
We have already reviewed the star-style, chip-carving, the bracteates,
and the gold collars. The next experiments built on what had already
been achieved with these artifacts of gold, silver and bronze. Crouching
beasts start to appear along the margins of brooches and buckles,
forward and backward looking quadrupeds, sea-horses with their
spiral tails. Hlewagast's golden horns are covered with horses, serpents,
birds and men. The Roman coins and the earlier bracteates show
human heads in profile with raised hands and arms. Now the artist
allows himself freer reinand creates grotesque hybrids beasts whose :
frontpaw a human
is hand raised in a greeting which seems to ape the
imperial gestus. Hlewagast and the creator of the gold collars had
already supplied human heads with quadruped bodies.
The curious chape found at Nydam has at the top the figures of two
men facing each other. On a closer look it can be seen that their bodies
are in fact two birds, while their heads and arms bear a remarkable
resemblance to the imperial effigy as it appear on the gold coins. Here
we have different parts of different bodies put together as in a puzzle,
a way of combining two motifs. The rich burial from Hoi in Nord-
Trondelag provides a further assortment of styles. The brooches are
examples of chip-carving, and the small silver discs are pure star-style,
but chip-carved tendrils have had to make way for bizarre four-footed
beasts, wolves, dragons, and so on, stalking at the heels ofa man holding
his hand The long narrow fibula carries a fantastical
before his face.
arrangement of human figures with crooked arms raised, as on the

chape from Nydam.
Experimentation continued freely. Beasts were dismembered as
ruthlessly as in a slaughterhouse and appear as disjointed
pieces (see
plate 34). Shoulders and haunches usually become pear shapes, with
necks and disintegrated trunks sandwiched between
them, while
animal paws, grotesque masks and tails may
crop up anywhere (see
plate 35). It was no longer enough to use a single animal or human
94
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
head as a terminal; a second, smaller
one had to be added, the final
terminal. Amid anatomical hotchpotch a clearly formulated
all this
aesthetic principle was at work, which treated animals purely as
pattern. By accepting dismemberment and concentrating on line instead

of moulding it was possible to fill any irregular space on a piece of
jewellery with an animal form, anatomically speaking complete.
Animal bodies, with all their ornamental possibilities, could be curled
and stretched at will. The interlacing effect so achieved is just as
expressive of aesthetic feeling as any other form of pure decoration.
The coiled tail of the sea-horse led to the fantasy of setting the hind-
quarters of a quadruped on its own back. Eventually the parts of

elongated bodies were made to interlace to suit the artist's plans and
pleasure.
From there could emerge objects as splendid as the silver
all this
fibula from Gronby in Schonen (see plate 36). The rectangular head-
plate has a border of egg-moulding, still quite classical in tendency;
in the centre are two red stones surrounded by fine granular work
which in turn is set in a chip-carved frame with the profiles of heavily
stylized human heads at each corner. The arched bow leads on to the
so-called footplate, elongated and triangular, also decorated with
stones and granular filigree. As usual the terminal is flanked on either
side by two large dragons* heads in profile, gnawing at a snarled
complex of lines quite baroque in character, admirable as a fine piece
of decoration in its own right, full of strength and movement.
But on trying to unravel these serpentine tangles, as one scholar
has recently tried to do, we discover two distinct entities. To perceive
them we must learn to picture them as children do when they draw
rabbits : one circle for the body, a smaller circle for the tail, yet another
circle for thehead and two pointed ovals for the ears. What we are
confronted with (plate 36) is a maze of lines so cunning that even
sharp eyes have difficulty in following the artist's thread. First we have
the dragon's head, a, with gaping jaw and D-shaped eyes clearly visible.
This head is shown again at 4, with a cross-hatched body coiled like a
snake. The forequarter, to be seen at c, is bent at an acute angle, the
paw being separated from the leg by three bars. Finally at d the last
portion is added, the hindquarter with its pear-shaped haunch and
sinuous tail, which weaves in and out to finish up in front of the dragon's
eye.So we are back where we started. To unravel the second figure
look ate for the human head joined to the cross-hatched body by the
cranium instead of the neck. The loins are covered by a form of breeches,
95
of the type known to have been worn during the Iron Age. One leg
encircles the body, the other is planted on top of the head so that the
arch of the foot seems to caress the neck. The arm runs straight across
the coiled body and the waist is enclosed by thumb and forefingers.
To make quite sure everything has
been accounted for, f shows the
human knot untied and the figure's anatomical parts clearly
distinguished*
What a monster tearing at a man's neck with
finally emerges, then, is
a
ravening jaws, contest between a man and a dragon as in the Siegfried
legend and in Beowulf, where the hero finally meets his death caught
round the neck by a monster's 'lacerating fangs'. We have already seen
that dragons and heroes in combat provided the major motif for the
Hoi fibula. The treatment on the Gronby fibula, perhaps a century
later, is considerably more sophisticated. The artist has such mastery
over his theme that it takes all our wits to trace the design to its con-
clusion. Regarded simply as a work of art, however, its appeal is
immediate and direct.
The style which is here in full flower is known to scholars as Germanic
animal-pattern Style I. It originated among the northern Germanic
peoples, although echoes and imitations are to be found in the art of
the Anglo-Saxons and some of the southern Germanic tribes.
The gold scabbard mounts, excellent examples of Style I at its best,

are worthy of close attention (see plate 35). There is a diverting piece
from Oure, whose principal figure we have no difficulty in recognizing,
a plump-cheeked human face with goggle eyes and a moustache which
5
might well have been the envy of a guards officer from the time of
Kaiser Wilhelm I. The lines running right and left of the nose can be
resolved into two four-footed beasts, whose pear-shaped, indeed almost
rounded, shoulders and haunches are clearly visible. The beasts are
shown edgeways on, with their heads twisted back, which makes them
all of a piece with the human mask.
Norwegian scholars have recently come across the prototype of such

scabbard mounts. In this instance the facial mask is more compact
and the backward looking beasts more clearly defined. They have
pointed rhomboids for ears, like the ears of a horse. On either side
crouch two highly-stylized men with pear-shaped biceps. The meaning
of the scene is dear at a glance. This is a horse-fight, like the one
depicted on the tombstone shown in plate 29. The composition, the
grouping of the human and animal figures is almost exactly the same,
96
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
which not surprising when we remember that artists were formerly
is
closely bound by their models. In any case, horse-fighting was a manly

diversion and worthy of a place on a hero's sword.
If an artist managed to insert a plump-faced human mask between
two beasts as part of his linear pattern this was all to the good, as a
protection against evil spirits. These artists show great virtuosity in
making fresh objects from their interlacing designs, objects quite
distinct from the pattern's original components. But with mastery of
the style technique becomes an end in itself. Human forms dwindle into
a loop and then vanish altogether in deference to the overriding
demands of interlace.
What the goldsmiths were trying to express in their creations is a
subjective matter, in many cases best left to the masters themselves.

The appreciation of their art must also be to some extent a personal
experience and not always a matter of scholarship. I make no excuse
therefore in expressing own preference and singling out the Fonaas
my
fibula as the most perfect example of the animal-pattern known as
Style I (see plate 37).

This silver gilt fibula, nearly seven inches long, with three red stones
inset in the head-piece, is an outstanding example of cleanly executed
work. The coiled animal bodies are at their most profuse on the
borders, which are more powerful than the central portions. This
strength comes from the firm contours of the margins which add
emphasis to the main outlines. It would be possible (but tedious) to
resolve the interlace into complete animal figures. It would have to
be admitted, however, that these bodies had some anatomical failings -
which is as it should be with an artist of the first rank. Our chief
concern must be to assimilate the strength and restless energy of the
whole as a pure work of art. If the word baroque comes to mind there
is every justification for it. This style of ornament makes precisely the
same effect as the scrolls and foliage of the seventeenth century, the
only difference being that here the repertory of forms is even greater,
deriving from the endless possibilities of purely zoomorphic shapes and
the creative joy of the Germanic artists who used them.
We should like to be able to name this artist but must be content to
call him the master of Fonnaas. It is true there is a runic inscription
on the back of the fibula, but instead of the artist's name we read:
'Angilaskalk, Vaker's Hausmann from Ingisarff, owns this fine clasp.*

It is understandable that the owner should show pleasure and pride
c
in this fine possession. *Angil* and skalk* are two name-elements
97
frequently met But the Norwegians had a long
in other combinations.
hunt through the place-name registers before they discovered Ingisarff,
which turned out to be in Sweden, close to the well-known copper
mine at Falun. A charter of 1438 describes Ingisarff as lying 'east of
the bridge at Falun at the copper mine'. Now although Fonnaas was
not settled during the migration period, it lay on the main line of
communication from Dalarna to Nidaros-Trondheim, along the Rendal
valley. At the time of St Olaf this was the great pilgrim route ; during
the migration period provided the main east-west link between
it
Sweden and Norway. So here we have another object buried on a main

highway, to set beside the golden horns and the five-string collar.
What is meant by Hausmann? According to Danish sources, which
can surely be regarded as valid for Scandinavia as a whole, Hausmdnner
were royal officials charged with a number of duties, including keeping
a look-out for ships, attendance at the Thing and military service. In
compensation the Hausmdnner were exempt from taxation. Presumably
Vaken was a petty king in Norway or Sweden and Angilaskalk was his
Hausmann or magistrate at Falun, who was overtaken by some unknown
fate on the road from Dalarna to Trondheim.
Since as many as no fibulae have been discovered all told, it is
impossible to mention every style and group of artists. One further

example does, however, deserve to be singled out since it illustrates the
later evolution of this
audacious use of zoomorphic ornament. This is a
fibulafrom Dalem, whose decoration contains the dismembered parts
of no fewer than twenty-two complete animals (see plate 38). Once
again, great power and a sense of movement are combined with a firm
sense of structure and discretion. This is
perhaps rococo rather than
baroque. One could hardly describe it as inferior to the Fonnaas fibula,
yet one feels that Style I has here reached the limit of its development,
and that no further stimulus could be from within. It affords
expected
no bridge to the next stage.
Naturally, an art with such a strong indigenous tradition was not

confined to professional artists. Patrons and customers were to be found
in the prosperous farmhouses and
royal courts of regions which enjoyed
a measure of tranquillity, in effect regions within the political and
economic orbit of Norway and northern Sweden.
As has been said, southern Scandinavia (i.e. Denmark and Sweden
as far north as
Dalarna) can show nothing comparable for the migration
period. What has been discovered there is in its way even more exciting
and impressive, hoards of pure gold : heavy bars or rings emerge from
98
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
the earth as bright as on the day they were buried (see plate 39).
Gold was the first metal kno\vrn to Stone Age man. During the
northern metal age gold in small quantities was mixed with
earliest
copper and bronze, but then disappears almost completely. It came

into use again during the first centuries AD. Mention has already been
made of gold rings with animal heads. The imperial government
probably regulated the supply at source, from their control of natural
deposits of the metal in the east and in Africa. The Romans used gold
to pay their mercenaries and friendly frontier tribes for help in defend-
ing the Empire during its declining years and in the migration period.
Scandinavian hoards which contain Roman gold coins were probably
mostly deposited by men who had served as soldiers in the imperial
armies. The Gallehus horns, the gold collars and the earlier bracteates
are evidence that large amounts of gold were already finding their way
north during the fifth century, to be fashioned into superb works of art
by native craftsmen. In the sixth century even this astonishing profusion

was surpassed, so that together the two centuries can with justice be
described as the golden age of Scandinavia.
Unlike other metals, gold is imperishable, shining with undiminished
glory even after centuries of interment. There can be no doubt that
in the past gold treasures were unearthed only to find their way into
the melting-pot. Otherwise there would have been no need to issue the
law concerning Danefae, promulgated by the king as early as 1592.
And small places with the tell-tale name of Goldring testify to the good
fortune of their earliest settlers.
The great mass of prehistoric gold came to

light only during the
nineteenth century the increase in population brought more
when
land under intensive cultivation and iron spades and ploughs thrust
deeper than ever before. Nowadays the soil is thoroughly churned up by
dredging machines, and scarcely a summer passes without the
announcement of a fresh discovery. It is impossible to say how much
gold still remains to be recovered. Mere treasure-seekers will exert
themselves in vain. The only people who may sometimes be rewarded
with the ill-fated gold of myth and legend are those who go patiently
about their daily work of harvesting the golden ears from the fields of
billowing grain. A finger-ring may turn up on the prong of a hay rake,
a gold ingot may glitter from the black bottom of a ploughed furrow, a
gold coin can slip in among the newly lifted potatoes or be found sitting
on the high road, poured out with a load of gravel. New bracteates
are discovered every year.
99
Every find must be reported and the government is by no means
niggardly in its rewards. A finder is paid the full value of the gold plus
at least another one-eighth of that amount. All gold objects are kept in
specialrooms in the museums of the four northern capitals, protected

by steeldoors and modern alarm systems which make a repetition of
Niels Heidenreich's disgraceful deed impossible. The collection at
Stockholm is generally considered the largest and most valuable.
Gold hoards seem to be governed by their own destinies. The same
field be dug repeatedly and still produce piece after piece of some
may
major hoard. Yet a field in Halland where a fragment of a heavy gold
collar was found by the farmer more than a century ago is still being
ploughed by his descendants in the quiet hope of discovering the rest.
They know exactly what is missing - 1,326 grammes (about 3 Ib.) of

- but not whether it lies in the same field.
gold
In 1738, just before midsummer, the farmer at Bankalla Backguard in

Vastergotland ordered one of his labourers, Anders Persson (commonly
known as Par) to see to the horses on the shore pastures. Bent on his
errand Par came upon four giggling girls who had apparently been
trying to catch crabs. The results were meagre, but although wet
through the girls were in good spirits and had lit a fire to dry their
clothes. The bright northern summer night seemed full of timeless magic.
Par bent to take up a handful of sand, meaning to throw it into the
water to startle the girls, and was himself startled to discover that he
was holding two large gold rings. "Throw it away, that is troll gold!'
cried three of the girlsand scurried off. But the fourth, who was called
Kjerstin, joined him and pulled from the sand yet another trolP ring,
e
with eight smaller ones attached. Par and Kjerstin were also nervous.
They weighed the gold in their hands and found how heavy it was. Par
e
said solemnly: Let us take the ring in God's name and
cling together
9
if any evil thing crosses us.
They joined hands and ran all the way
back to the village. The quiet of the night remained unbroken. Next
day Kjerstin was all for going to town to exchange their find for a
pair of brass candlesticks, which she had always longed to possess.
The find was handed over to the provincial governer and finally
reached the royal chancery. The finders were paid 1,556 thaler for
the gold, so Kjerstin was able to
buy candlesticks to her heart's content.
She and Par decided to cling together for life and used their to
money
buy a farm. He became known as Gold-Par and their descendants own
and work the farm to this day.
100
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
The smallest gold object discovered from the migration period is a thin
gold plate measuring only 12X15 mm.
shows a tenderly embracing
It
couple. The woman, who is on the left, wears a long robe and the man
a short jacket. What exactly can they be doing? They appear to be
rubbing chins. The set of the head which creates this effect by making
the nose point upwards and the crown of the head down is a stylistic
trait typical of the period, so prehistoric modes of
kissing were presum-
ably different from our own. Gold plates of this type are frequently
found among house foundations, so it may be assumed that they were
actually buried indoors, perhaps as a talisman to bring good fortune
to the marriage and the family.
The
largest hoard of gold ever found in Scandinavia was unearthed
as early as 1774, at Tuna to the south of Stockholm, The total weight
was twenty-seven pounds. The government was unable to recover the
numerous ingots contained in the hoard and the only objects saved
were a heavy gold collar weighing over two pounds and decorated with
heavily punched half-moons, some fine gold clasps for a sword handle
and a scabbard. Thus the largest hoards of both Denmark and Sweden
have unfortunately been lost to posterity. The largest hoard we can
now examine in its original state was discovered in 1904 at Timboholm
in Vastergotland (see plate 39). It weighs about 15 pounds and consists
entirely of ingots of a type common at this period. They are thick

coils of gold wire made up into open-ended rings of varying sizes and
known as spiral or ring gold. One such ingot stamped with a half-
is
moon, which makes it certain that this impressive hoard belongs to

the migration era.
As might be expected, these great hoards of gold found their way
into poetry. The dragon-head rings ofthe Roman period and the dragon-
fight on the Gronby ornament can be linked to episodes in a song-

cycle which has come down to us in writing. Beowulf, the heroic epic
of the seventh century, is full of gold hoards 'Treasure, gold in the
:
earth, may easily get the better of any man, conceal it who will/
(Lines 2765-6, transl. Clark Hall). The same epic tells of Grendel the
monster, who wreaks havoc in the royal palace of Heorot and is slain
by Beowulf. GrendeFs crazed mother pursues Beowulf in revenge, and
he sorely wounded and nearly drowned in the battle of the quaking
is
bog before he finally triumphs. At the end of his long life, however,
e
he fights a terrible dragon and is killed : That was for the prince the
lastday of victory by his own deeds. .' .
Another famous dragon-treasure is the hoard of the Nibelungs, the
101
subject of epics in both Scandinavia
and Germany. The first part of the
story which tells of Siegfried's fight with the dragon Fafmr is pure
myth, the counterpart of Beowulfs battle with Grendel and GrendePs

mother. The second part, which deals with the heroic contests between
Siegfried, Gunther, Hagen and Etzel,
has some basis in the historical
events of the migration period. Etzel Attila, king of the Huns, and
is
the other leading characters are his Germanic adversaries. A poem

about a fabulous and doom-laden hoard of gold could have significance
only at a time when there was plenty of gold in circulation. It would
not be unfair to claim that the real gold behind the legend lies in
Scandinavia, even though the legendary gold was sent to the bottom of
the Rhine.
There is reason to think that in actual fact a tragic destiny hung
over the great hoards of the north, since many Swedish warriors
apparently had no time to transform their ingots into works of art.
Their arm-rings and collars were thick unwrought coils of gold, their
scabbard mounts were decorated with twisted golden wire. A
region
might be overwhelmed by several disasters in succession. The warrior
of Tuna tore the gold clasps and mounting from his sword, added his
precious neck-ring and his ingots and buried the enormous hoard in
the safe-deposit of the earth. In southern Scandinavia such hoards are
never found associated with burials. They may be found by a perched
rock, on the sea-shore, on a highway or turned up in a field by the
plough the hiding-place was perhaps marked by an oak, long since
:
Hoards have also been discovered in the peat bogs, presumably

fallen.
deposited as votive offerings. But the majority of the hoards must have
been buried, like those of Oland, on the approach of a hostile army.
Their owners fell in the conflict and never returned to claim their
treasure.
This probably explains why such varying amounts of gold have been
discovered in different regions. For example, Vastergotland has
pro-
duced thirty-six pounds, neighbouring provinces only a pound or so.
Sodermannland, which passes almost without interruption from the
blank of the early Iron Age into the void of the
migration era, makes
through large number of hoards,
its presence felt in the short interim a
including the Tuna treasure. Sodermannland was presumably unlucky
in being sandwiched between
Ostergotland and the victorius Svea,
which made life hard indeed.
We should dearly love to know more about the wars which harassed
102
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
Scandinavia during the sixth century, and look to further archaeological
discoveries to rescue many episodes from oblivion. But we do know
something of the between the Svea and their greatest

last decisive battle
enemies, the Geatas. We

have no historical narrative to turn a search-
light on this event and must rely on the flickering illuminating of
legend. One source
Beowulf, the heroic epic of the Geatas already
is
mentioned. Composed in England about AD 700 from a number of

different traditions, it was committed to writing about AD 1000.
The other source is
Tnglingatal, made up by Thjodolf of Hvin
in the
ninth century and incorporated by Snorri into Heimskringla. This saga,
which relates the destinies and deaths of the Svea kings, also provides
us with the genealogy of the Ynglingar, as it had been handed down
from ancient times. So we have two mutually independent sources, one
from each camp. What more could one wish To some degree they are
!
a check on each other, at least when they are describing the same
events.
Swedish school-children learn to rehearse the royal genealogy of
the Ynglingar as confidently as the list of Old Testament prophets :
Yngve, Freyr, Fjolner, Svegder, Vanlande, Visbur, Donalde, Domar,
Dyggve, Dag, Alrik and Erik, Alf and Yngve, Aun the Elder, Egil,
Ottar Vendelkrahe, Adils, Osten, Yngvar, Brot-Anund and Ingjald
c
Evil-doer. With the same eye of faith they see
Fjolner drowning in the
the windless sea of horns* (i.e. in a vat of mead), the incubus riding
Vanlande to his death, and Ingjald, Evil-doer incarnate who invited
twelve petty kings to a feast and, while they sat eating his salt, barred
up the house and set it on fire, so that all perished miserably.
This last episode might well have some historical basis, but Snorri's
prose text has been much criticized by the philologists and historians.
One obvious feature of this list of royal names is that all the earlier
ones start with a consonant, the later ones with a vowel. It is quite
impossible to imagine so drastic a change within a dynasty, so we need
concern ourselves only with the later names. Attempts have been made,
with little success, to establish the two pairs of kings (Alrik and Erik,
Alf and Yngve) as historical figures. Aun the Elder, who sacrificed one
of his sons every tenth year in order to prolong his own life, also plainly
verges on the mythical.

But with Egil we are already in the thick of the struggle between the
doughty Svea and the prosperous and powerful Geatas. First the Geatas
succeed in their foolhardy prank of kidnapping the wife of Egil, known
to the Geatas as Ongentheow. The Svea have no choice but to go to
103
war to win back their queen. At this juncture we cannot do better than
allow the Geata epic to speak for itself:
father (Ongentheow), old and terrible, give a

Quickly did the veteran
return-blow, killed the sea-king and, though
an old man, rescued his wife,
bereft of her gold ornaments ; and then he followed his deadly enemies until
with difficulty they escaped Ravenswood without their lord. Then with a
mighty army he encompassed those

whom the sword had not despatched,
faint from their wounds, and through the livelong night he threatened the
wretched band with misery, said he would destroy them by morn with edge
of sword, hang some on a gallows-tree as sport for birds. Once more came
help to the sad-hearted ones with early dawn,
when they became aware of
Hygelac's horn, his trumpet blast,
when the hero came . . . (Beowulf, Lanes
2961 ff., transl. Clark Hall.)
So in the morning hours the fortunes of war took another turn. Hygelac,
the brother of the fallen king, at once succeeded him as ruler of the
Geatas. Further engagements followed, and in one of these fluctuating
battles Ongentheow-Egil killed a Geat warrior named Wulf, and was
accused by WulPs brother of his murder. In revenge Eofor kills Ongen-
theow:
There was the grey-haired Ongentheow driven to bay by the edges of

swords, so that the people's long had to submit to his end at the hands of
Eofor alone. Angrily did Eofor strike at him with his weapon, so that at the
stroke blood spurted from the veins under his hair . . (Lines 2961 ff.,
.
transl. Clark Hall.)
In however, it is said that king Egil-Ongentheow was

Ynglingatal,
killedby giant steer. But this really amounts to much the same thing,
a
for Eofor =
Eber, wild boar. In one version the king is slain by a
tusked boar, in the other by a horned steer, and the following line
from Tnglingatal could apply just as well to either : 'The thrusting point
pierced the hero's heart.*
5
and Volf need not have been the brothers actual names.
*Boar'
They were probably noms de guerre, taken from the badges which
figured on their helmets. We know of such badges from a bronze die
used in the production of embossed sheet metal this shows two warriors,
:
each with sword and spear, wearing knee-length cloaks with an orna-
mental band round the hem, and on top of their substantial-looking
helmets sits a boar, easily identified from a very obvious tusk (see
plate 40). Other warriors could have different badges, a wolf, an eagle,
a snake, from which they took their names (see plates 41 and 42).
104
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
The period of peace which succeeded the death of Ongentheow gave
the Geatas opportunity for a voyage over the North Sea as far as the
lower Rhine, which suggests they were able to deploy a considerable
fighting force.
But the battle they fought on alien soil ended badly for
them:
Not least was that of hand-to-hand encounters in which Hygelec was

s
slain, when the Geat Kong died a bloody death in Friesland, struck
down by the sword in the rush of battle . . .
(Beowulf, lines 2354-23593
transl. Clark Hall.)
The enemy are described as the 'Hetware* or Chatti, one of the

Prankish peoples. We are unusually fortunate in that the fact of this
military encounter is confirmed by a totally independent source, none

other than the celebrated History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours. He
relateshow a northern king named Chochilaicus appeared with a fleet
at the mouth of the Rhine. Ghochilaicus isthe Latin form of Hygelac!
Gregory also tells how Chochilaicus died in the ensuing battle (516).
This year, 516, is the first exact date in the history of Scandinavia
and of Sweden. From it we can also deduce that Egil-Ongentheow died
in 515 or 514. The conflicts between the Svea and the Geatas are thus
securely anchored in history.
It is time we by the Geatas.

tried to identify the territory inhabited
c
Several parts of Sweden have had goth' names from time immemorial :
Vastergotland with Goteborg and the Gotaalv, Ostergotland and the

Baltic island of Gotland. Correspondingly, we find Procopius and
Jordanes, who wrote in the early sixth century, referring to a number

c
of goth' peoples : the Gauthigoth, Ostrogothae and Vagoth. Also of
Gautish' descent were those nomadic Goths, already on the move at
c
the time of Christ's birth, who during a sojourn in southern Russia

separated into Visigoths and Ostrogoths to go their different ways, so
that by the early sixth century the Visigoths ruled Spain and the
Ostrogoths, under Theoderic, ruled Italy.

The homeland of Beowulf's Geatas has been the subject of much
controversy. Several scholars have even tried to turn them into Jutes,
although the trend is now decisively away from this opinion They
5
were in fact the 'Gotar of Vastergotland, that lovely region of hands-
some table mountains fertile fields. And it is in Vastergotland
and
that we find those huge accumulations of gold which we must describe
as 'gothic' for example, the hoard weighing 15 pounds and the gold
:
105
found by Par and Kjerstin. The three roped gold collar was found at the
foot of the Aalleberg, and lastbut not least, from Vastergotland came
the seven-roped gold collar, the pride of the gold room in the historical
museum at Stockholm and the greatest glory both of the golden age
of Scandinavia and of the land of the Ggatas (see plates 43 and 44).
The tubes are hollow, as customary, and the whole ornament weighs
is
less than two pounds. It ismarvellously wrought, in the finest granular

filigree, and like the other two collars has a wealth of figured ornament,
no fewer than 424 animal and human forms individually cut and
attached by soldering. In places as many as six almost identical figures
appear in a row. The three-roped collar belongs to the early experi-
mental stage of animal-patterning. In this somewhat later piece we
see Style I at its peak each animal is a distinct self-contained whorl,
:
which when looked at closely can be resolved into its anatomical parts.
At the end of each row, next to the hinge, is what looks like a lizard but
is perhaps more safely described simply as a quadruped - the creature
is seen from above, and has four pear-shaped haunches and four
splayed paws. Next to these beasts comes a procession of six right-facing

men with jutting-out chins ; they wear granular-work sashes which run
from the nose across the forehead and eyes to end half-way down the
back. They have firmly moulded legs and their knee-length garments
are patterned with circles, perhaps intended to represent mail. These
men, and a warrior procession which can just be made out on the
small plate, are the only naturalistic forms found on the collar. Full-
scale deployment of zoomorphic patterns inevitably led to the ousting
of naturalistic motifs, which almost completely into disuse during
fell
the sixth century after having flowered so richly at the beginning of

the migration era.
The heroic epic of the Geatas refers to many incidents in the desperate
struggle. Finally, Hygelac's nephew Beowulf, the epic's eponymous
hero, becomes king of the Geatas and shelters Eadgils, grandson of
Egil,whose place among the Svea has been usurped by Ale, his uncle.
In Tnglingatal Eadgils is called by the closely similar name of Adils*
... he became the friend of deserted Eadgils, he supported the son of

Ohthere over the wide sea with an army, with warriors and weapons,
avenged him afterwards with campaigns fraught with disaster and distress :
he deprived the king of life. (Beowulf, lines 2395 ff.)
Under Beowulf s rule the Geatas enjoy a last period of peace and inde-
pendence. Then come the death and obsequies of Beowulf. But the
1 06
CRAFTSMEN AND KINGS
troubles of his successors, who fought the last decisive battles with the
Svea, are referred to only as ominous prophecies and put in the mouth
of a young Geat warrior at the end of the epic :
'Now there is likelihood for the people of a time of warfare, as soon as the
king's fall becomes widely known among the Franks and Frisians . . . Nor
do the least expect peace or fair dealing from the Swedish people . . .
I in
(who) will attack us, as I have no doubt, when they learn that our lord is
dead ; he who in the past guarded against enemies our wealth and kingdom,
the people's welfare, and furthermore did deeds of valour . . Therefore
.
shall many a spear, chill atmorning, be grasped ; ... no sound of harp

shall wake the warriors but the dark raven, eager after doomed men, shall
recount many things and tell the eagle how it sped him at the feast when he,
contending with the wolf, laid bare the slain.' Thus the brave youth was the
teller of grievous tales, nor was he much amiss in facts or words.
Although no historical source provides us with details of these later

battles, the portentous words quoted above, with their general aura of
doom, point clearly enough to the ultimate fall of the Geatas. It seems
the Geat rulers were again and again forced to submit to the overlord-
ship of the Svea king. Beowulf died about AD 550, so the last battles
must have been fought during the second half of the sixth century and
continued perhaps into the early part of the seventh.
Events in Scandinavia seem to have paralleled those of central Europe.

An era of confusion was now to be followed by a period of peace and
consolidation, during which the positive results of all these struggles
would emerge. The political effects were far-reaching indeed. Sweden
now comes to the fore as the first western kingdom to be united; the
Swedish monarchy is as old, if not older, than that of any other country
in Europe. Swedish history can be said to start with Adils, the first
king to emerge distinctly from the mists of heroic legend, perhaps even
with Egil, the king who was slain in 515. If the reign of Hygelac the
Geat had been crowned with victory either Goteborg or Falkoping,
the chief town of Vastergotland, would now be capital of Sweden. But
the fortunes of war decided in favour of Old Uppsala, superseded
during the Middle Ages by the new city founded at Stockholm.
Struggles of this nature may be unavoidable if a nation is to
achieve
a more complex social structure and greater sophistication in its organs
of government. As has been said, the Norwegian chieftains of this
period were left relatively undisturbed. Perhaps it was for this very
reason that the unification of their country was achieved so much
H 107
later, in the time of Harald Haarfager (Tairhair*) towards the end of
the Viking period. And Harald, be it noted, rested his claims to
monarchy not on his descent from his Norwegian forebears but on his
kinship with the royal house of the renowned Ynglingar, in the kingdom
of the Svea.
108
AT THE COURT OF THE SVEA KING
Sweden was at last at peace. Trade and agriculture prospered, life

became richer and easier. It also, at the newly established courts of
the chieftains, became a matter of elaborate ritual and ancestral pride.
The situation is not uncommon. In periods of war and unrest soldiers
and heroes are given hasty burial, but when peace returns there is
time for elaborate state obsequies complete with parade weapons and
ceremonial trappings. It was so in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I :
the blades might clash and flash, but they had lost their bite. The
paraphernalia of war becomes a spectacle, a resounding symbol and
an attribute of an established royal power with no real enemies to fear*
This happened in the Svea kingdom of the seventh and eighth
centuries. A few princely clans developed a taste for luxury articles
and their chieftains took the finest specimens withthemintothegrave (see
plates 45, 46, 47 and 48). So we have a chance to study this prosperity
at first hand. The gold of the preceding period has disappeared. There
are gilded articles, but not the smallest object in pure gold. We know
of three centres Vendel, from which the Vendel period covering the
:
two centuries AD 600-800 gets its name; Ultuna, discovered a century

ago; and Valsgarde, a recent discovery. All are in Uppland, on the
river Fyris, and not far from Old Uppsala.
The oars of the dragon-ships moved slowly in and out of the water.
These were small ships with only four or five pairs of oars, intended for
use in narrow rivers. The large sea-going ships lay in sheltered and
closely-guarded harbours. Even the great ship of the Svea king, when
he came to the burial of one of his chieftains at Valsgarde, was no
larger than the rest. The flat landscape, perpetually raked by cold
winds, can hardly be described as inviting. The soil produces good
cattle-food, but is too moist and heavy for tillage. Strangely enough,
many of the world's great cities have grown up on inhospitable soil,
109
instead of being surrounded by good farming country as one might
expect. Naturally, the

Svea were not entirely without arable fields, but
those they had were neither 35 fertile nor as extensive as those in the
lands of the Geatas. At a turn of the river there comes into view the
low gravel ridge which served as burial place for the dynasty of Vals-
garde. A few members of the clan were cremated according to the old
pagan rites and their ashes buried here. But the farmer-chieftains of
this clan, who stood close to the king in peace and war, were now
normally given a ship-burial.
Several long furrows can be traced in the greasy loam of the field
between the river and the gravel mound. These marks were made by
the burial ship being hauled up from the river by slaves and dragged
over the field to the gravel mound, where it was lodged high and dry
in preparation for the last symbolic voyage into the beyond, with the
dragon prow turned towards the river.

The body of the fallen chieftain was taken to the ship by his comrades,
in solemn procession. We have no pictorial record of the ceremony
from Svealand itself, but there is a nobly carved stone from Gotland
which apparently depicts it (see plate 49), Three panels are occupied
by an allegorical illustration of the hero's death and his journey to the
beyond. In the first we have a graphic representation of the fall of
the hero overwhelmed by superior forces. He lies supine beneath his
horse, at the mercy of his enemies' drawn swords, while the bird of
doom, perhaps the raven of the battlefield or the eagle of battles,
hovers above the empty saddle.
The next picture has greater power and concentration. It shows
still
the mourning procession, with the hero now prone and on top of his
horse - or possibly being carried on a bier drawn by two horses whose
heads are enveloped in sacks - while former comrades walk facing in
his
the opposite direction, their bodies at the forward slope, their swords
pointing downwards. The pain and sorrow of a funeral journey can

rarely have been conveyed with such economy*
The third picture shows the hero seated high on his horse and being
feted with garlands and balls which tumble through the air like con-
fetti. This is the hero's entry into Valhalla, the kingdom of the next
world, and shows his joyful reception by the Valkyrie and the warriors
who have already achieved immortality. Its effect is heightened by the
contrast with the previous pictures.
Further down the same stone is a picture of the great ship in which
the hero will embark for his voyage to the next world (see plate 49).
no
It has a high prow, oars, a crew and a large square sail. Pictures of
ships occur most frequently on carved stones from Gotland, an exact
parallel
with the ship burials of Valsgarde, for which there is solid
archaeoligical evidence.
So we must take it that the men of Valsgarde regarded the sequence
of death, funeral, and entry into Valhalla as the heroic ideal for every
chieftain,no matter how he died, whether in a blood feud, campaigning

with the king against rebels, or in one of the expeditions over the Baltic
which heralded the coming Viking era. Perhaps the hero's death was
merely an unrealizable ideal cherished by warriors of a peaceful and
more sedentary age, when intestinal complications and blood poisoning
were among the commonest causes of death.
Much had still to be done before the burial could be concluded.
First the chieftain was laid in his last resting place in the stern of the
ship, sheltered by a roof of wooden beams which left enough space

imcoveredtoaccomodatetwoimaginaryoarsman.Hisbedwasnotmadeof
hard boards but of down cushions, as was only fitting for a man of such
social eminence. A great variety of stuffs was used to cover the cushions :
a fabric checkered red and green, or, more frequently, wool, linen or
fine oxhide. The chieftain was to lie as though peacefully asleep, so
his clothing must be light. His weapons were at his side, though close
at hand: on the left, at the ready as it were, lay his heavy sword and
the shorter single-edged dagger known as a sax. At his feet lay his helmet
a highly ornate piece of finery, and a wooden chest containing his
armour, with his two shields resting on top and almost concealing his
feet. The shields were copiously decorated with iron mountings.
The next step was toassembleavarietyofobjectsrangingfromarticlesof

common use to the dead man's most precious possessions axe, knife,
:
lance, forty-five spears and a complete tool box containing a second

knife, a whetstone, scissors, flint and straw for fire-lighting, pincers, a
comb and a lump of resin. There was provision, which he would no
doubt appreciate, for the chieftain's leisure hours, splendid drinking
glasses and a checkerboard. The checkerboard was laid at his feet with
the thirty-five checkers, made of convex bone pieces, set out on top all
ready for a game. Closer still was the drinking glass, a beaker with
trunk-shaped excrescences made in the Rhineland of bright aquamarine
colour. At its base the glass is so small and narrow that it can barely
stand on the tiny coaster provided and when full, either of wine or mead,
was meant to be quaffed at a single draught. The decoration is provided
by an inlay of thin glass threads and four trunk-shaped excrescences
in
thick at the centre and tapering off towards the bottom. The wooden
beakers, also conical in shape, and the native drinking horn with metal
close to the Chieftain's hand. Draughts
clasps must also have been lying
and drink - fitting occupations for valiant men in their hours of ease !
But all this would be incomplete without food. So the next duty of
the dead man's sons and comrades was to transport an elaborate
kitchen outfit from the hall to the burial ship, complete down to the
smallest detail and with provision for every contingency. The cooking
and dining equipment consists of a large iron cauldron, a three-pronged
cooking fork, seven small wooden bowls turned on the lathe, cups and
plates, two wooden pots made from staves, and two spoons. These
preparations made, a cow, a sheep, a pig and a goose were ceremonious-
ly slaughtered and stowed in the ship's bows. The most important
members of the ships' company, the warriors' two saddle-horses and
his faithful hound, now made their appearance, one of the horses
decked out in the best harness, the other led with a halter but with
harness and saddle to hand. Once they and the dog had been killed by
a dagger-blow and their bodies stowed in the forward part of the ship
preparations were complete and the chieftain was equipped with all
he needed for his final voyage. Huge mats made of birch bark, carefully
painted, and a number of woollen covers were placed round the
corpse and precious things to provide protection. The grieving warriors
themselves shovelled the first spadefuls of earth, and with assistance
from brawny slave labour it was not long before all that remained to
be seen was a low hillock. No eye might witness the chieftain's departure
on his last voyage, but it was believed that the ship would sail again,
first down the river, thence to Lake Malaren and
finally out across the
vast and unknown sea from which there was no return, only an eternal
pressing forward into the kingdom of the beyond.

The pointed oval hummock gradually fell in and became a small
depression in the ground, which over centuries and millennia continues
to proclaim to the initiated eye that a hero once set sail from this spot
for his voyage into the hereafter.
Each time a son succeeded his father at Valsgarde, to assume the duties
of government owed to the court of the Svea king, the dead chieftain
was buried after the fashion of his ancestors. This continued for nearly
fivehundred years, for it was not until shortly before 1 100, when their
contemporaries had already accepted Christianity, that the lords of
Valsgarde felt constrained to abandon their family plot and allowed
112
themselves to be buried in the churchyard, in accordance with their
newly adopted faith. Farmers, goatherds and animals made their way
over the fifteen hummocks for centuries, barely aware of their existence.
It until 1926 that they came under professional scrutiny from
was not
the Professor of Prehistory at Stockholm, who observed them in the
course of a field excursion. The
ship graves of Vendd, so tragically
damaged, originally presented a similar appearance, so hopes were
aroused of discovering a completely undamaged ship burial-ground.
This was the beginning of a meticulous and rigorously professional
excavation, which has salvaged a great wealth of treasure from the
past.
A veritable armada lay anchored in the Uppland earth, never to
sail again in rightful element. Yet the day came when the ships
its
were manned by a crew of an unusual kind, sailors such as can never

before have been seen on board ghost ships, Swedish university students
in their white-peaked caps, myself among them; I actually assisted
in the excavation of the ship whose contents was described above. In

a wooden hut nearby sat our painstaking ship's doctor, who shook
his head sadly over the decomposed objects we produced. He never-
theless applied gauze bandages and plaster wrappings, steeped every-
thing in paraffin and despatched the patients in numerous ambulance

loads to Uppsala - not to the University hospital, where they would
not have been welcome, but to his own wizard's kitchen where he
worked out entirely new water-cures in his efforts to revive wood,
bark, down, fabric and iron and reintegrate the chieftain's helmet
from the precisely one thousand pieces into which it had crumbled.
The ship was provided not only with a new crew but also with a
fresh and unique 'tackle A stout beam was hoisted above the ship
5
.
to run parallel with the keel and sturdy cross-beams were placed at
intervals of exactly two metres. This formed a frame of reference from
which the exact position of every object could be measured. It was
particularly important to establish the exact position of the ship's
nails, 440 in all, which together with some minute wood shavings
were aU that remained of the ship itself. When the position, depth and
direction of each nail had been noted the information was charted on a
large drawing-board in the museum. A few nails had slipped out of

place and both prows were damaged, but apart from these casualties
the ghost-ship came to life again on the drawing-board in such a
living likeness that we could have handed the drawing to any ship-
builder with instructions to recreate the chieftain's ship.
"3
Thirty feet long, the ship
was clinker-built, mainly of spruce with
an oak keel and eight bentwood ribs. There were four side-planks on
each bow, their joints sealed with strips of sheep's wool of which
fragments still remained. There
were traces, too, of streaks of clay
which had stuck to the ship on its journey over the fields from the
river to the burial place. There was no evidence of any mast or sail,
but provision had been made for four pairs of oarsmen. To sum up,
this was a ship designed for river journeys, and must itself have been
the most valuable of all the objects the dead man took with him to
the next world.
The objects of greatest value to us, however, are the artifacts of
metal and glass, the masterpieces
of the Vendel period. Finds of this
quality and scale occur only in four of

the Valsgarde ships, in three of
tie Vendel ships, and in the much earlier find at Ultuna; the ship
burials of the Viking period aremarkedly inferior. The finds include
eight helmets, a complete suit of armour, several mail shirts and a
whole panoply of dress swords, shields and horse gear, wonderfully
evocative material which enables us to bring these ancient warriors to
life.
The occupant of the ship burial just described at once becomes

more real when we can imagine him encased in the heavy armour of
this period, long before the heyday of medieval knighthood. Scholars
have long been interested in the origins of armour. The trail is a con-
fused one and leads back into the history of the distant Asiatic steppes,
to the time when nomadic cavalry hordes were embarking on their
whirlwind advance. A few finds even point to the period when the
Huns were still fighting the Chinese, and there is also some evidence
from Iran. But surprisingly enough our latest firm landmark stands,
not halfway on the road to the Far East nor even on the borders of
Asia, but in the far north, in the neighbourhood of Old Uppsala.
There, in addition to 'splinted* armour and 'scale* armour, there also
emerged armour made of bars, a shirt of mail, heavy helmets with
cheek and neck guards and the single-edged dagger known as the
sax.
The student excavators abandoned their nautical preoccupations
and set up as armourers and swordsmen. The armour in the chest
was a Why was there only one arm-guard? Was the
special problem.
suitincomplete or worn out? An old soldier laughed at them and
explained that only the left upper arm would need a guard, since the
other had to be free to wield a sword. Who knows but that our chieftain
114
might not have laughed louder still, and pointed out that this particular
iron stave was really a leg greave. The matter is still hotly debated
by both German and Swedish scholars the main trouble is that the
;
mail shirt has suffered so much damage that we cannot guess its original
length.
The eight helmets, the real gems from this early period in the history
of the united Svea kingdom, present fewer difficulties (see plate 48).
They share the same general characteristics, with individual variations :
a broad iron band encircles the forehead, neck and temple, another
band covers the crown of the head and the intervening spaces are
filled with iron splints; on top is a crest terminating on the forehead
in an animal grotesque; a sturdy guard protects eyebrows, nose and
cheeks, and often extends to cover the whole face; finally, a series of
narrow vertical iron bands hangs down at the back to protect the nape
of the neck. Add figure-embossed bronze plates, an inlay of red stones,
a touch of gilding here and there, and the helmets are restored to their
prehistoric strength
and beauty. The connection, if any, between these
helmets, the Roman legions and the Asiatic cavalry is still a burning
issue. What cannot be denied is that these and other examples are
thoroughly nordic in form.
The same is true of the decoration. We have already traced the process
by which the earlier style of zoomorphic ornament budded, blossomed

and finally ran riot in the tranquil environment of the Norwegian
petty kingdoms. The second style started to evolve at the court of the
Svea kings, once the country was blessed by peace and prosperity.
It is clearly in evidence in the ship burials,
and even in the earliest is
the man with the

already fully-fledged. The first Valsgarde chieftain,
barred armour, was less fortunate in his artist than his Vendel contem-
are of outstanding quality, both
porary (grave XII), whose ornaments
in technique and in style.
It surprising to find that
is the animal-patterns which had their
origins in linear decorations of

a different kind, could achieve an
entirely new flowering. The butchers
have departed, and animals are
no longercarved into their
up anatomical parts and disposed of at the
dictates of the turn of the rope-workers and
Now it is
pure design.
weavers to take up the threads, twisting and turning them into braids
and loops and coils (see plate 50). This style is not purely Germanic.
It can be traced back to the ribbon patterns characteristic of Byzantine
art under Constantine, which were susceptible of infinite variation:
"5
one famous example is the pattern which represents eternity, in which
the running interlace interrupted at regular intervals by a wide
is
variety of knots, loops, bows, figures of eight, etc. What the Germanic
artists did was to introduce animal heads and paws among the bands
and braids. These soon became a regular feature, disrupting the basic
pattern.Even the simple wave pattern known as 'running dog* was
embellished by the insertion of an animal head at the crest of every
wave.
The of Vendel and Valsgarde (both in eastern
artists
Sweden)
realized that this was an idea full of possibilities, which they proceeded
to develop* For example, they might take two wavy bands, each with
animal heads, and invert one band so that the beasts appeared to bite
one another where the two patterns interlaced. Executed in deep chip
carving this has outstanding merit as sheer ornament. Outside influences
were certainly responsible for turning these artists' attention towards
ribbon-patterns, but it must also be noted that they themselves retained
their old love for the complete animal form. So we find the wave bands
developing into whole animals, in naturalistic backward-looking poses

even where the lines of their backs and bellies interlace with paws and
tails and muzzles or with the ribbon-like bodies of other beasts.
The eye has to be trained to discover anatomically complete animal
forms in this maze of tracery. Although by no means aesthetically
inferior to Style I, this second zoomorphic style (Style II) creates an
entirely different effect : it is more fluid, retains more than a hint of the
movement wave patterns. Four phases have already been
inherent in
distinguished in this style, which predominates in the ship graves and
cremation burials from other parts of the country for a century and a
half. At best the style operates in strict conformity with the first
its
principles of motion. The northerner willingly submitted to this stern

discipline, finding the life inherent in the rhythm and the tension of
opposites a satisfying medium for the expression of his inner feelings.
The ship burials provide a many-sided picture of the prosperity and

art of the period. But the Svea kings themselves are buried elsewhere in
memorials of a more monumental kind, in fact the largest barrows of
the Iron Age. The most striking are the
'royal mounds' at Old Uppsala,
three in number like the pyramids of
Egypt (see plate 51). This truly
national monument is visible from a
great distance, rising above the
Uppsala plain in lasting testimony to the dynamic energy of the kings
of blood and iron who made Sweden a The central
political unity.
116
mound was originally much smaller than the others but was enlarged
at some time during the pagan period, presumably in the interests of
symmetry. The largest is the mound to the west, about 200 feet in
diameter and 40 feet high. It should perhaps be mentioned that the
mounds lie on a low gravel ridge which has been cut away to give an
effect of overwhelming height.
The three royal mounds lie close beside the existing village church of
Old Uppsala, which served as the cathedral until the fire of 1273,
when the present university town with its gothic cathedral was founded
a few miles away. Excavations under the old church have revealed a
number of post-holes, so large that they must have been made for the
pagan temple which once occupied the site. This temple is described
by Adam of Bremen and was built during the Viking period. The
religious rites of the migration and Vendel periods must have been
conducted in the open, so that the trees between the church and the
mounds are likely to be scions of the sacred grove from which hung
Odin's sacrifice nine different kinds of male creatures (men, stallions,
:
he-goats, cocks, etc.) offered on nine successive days every nine years.
There is also a spring close by, another important requirement for pagan
worship, and a levelled terrace in which it is tempting to see the seat of
the royal court, the centre of government. So far no-one has ventured
on an excavation, perhaps wisely, since at best they are likely to find
only kitchen refuse from a royal hall.
We have not yet mentioned one of the most important features of
Old Uppsala, a fourth mound to the east of the three larger ones. It
measures sixty-six feet in diameter and the top has been levelled off
to provide a surface as wide and flat as possible. This is no burial
mound but the so-called 'Thing mound', a place of great importance
in the political life of antiquity. It was here, too, that during the
Middle Ages the farmers of Uppland paid homage to a newly elected
king. The mound also served as a rostrum from which the king could
harangue his subjects. At one period during the reign of Gustavus
Vasa these addresses were an almost annual event. Peder Swart
describes one such occasion :
powerful force of infantry and cavalry

The King was marching with a to
his Swedish troops
Uppsala, to celebrate the feast of St Eric ; in addition to
the party included a contingent of German mercenaries, also fully armed.
The populace was converging on Uppsala just as the King, who was himself
in fullarmour, arrived with his men. Since it was the proper time, he rode
with his councillors to the mound, from which it was the custom for the king
117
throw away. Then the
to speak. The soldiers stayed in the field, a spear's
King started on his customary address. He said he

thanked the people for
their loyalty and courage and hoped they would remain faithful to him.
After this he asked them questions.
Vasa had decreed that church bells be melted down in order to help
the government's finances, a measure fiercely resented by the country
people*
But since they could not make out a reasonable case, a few of them started
to use the language which came naturally to them and called the King
shameful names. At this he grew angry (his rages are famous), rattled his
sword, turned his horse about and declared he would suffer their insolence
no longer: it would be better, he said, for them to beat him than to scold
him. If they wanted to attack, he and his soldiers were ready for a trial of
strength; then they would see whether or not he could defend himself. Then
the people fell to their knees and begged his pardon, which, through the
intercession of the lords who were present, was granted.
This text is valuable as an illustration of the relations between king

and people which must have existed eight centuries earlier, before the
days of written records. It also establishes that the Thing mound was the
recognized place for such encounters. Gustavus Vasa, however, found

the place no longer to his liking and never used it again.
The three royal mounds of Old Uppsala are not unique in Sweden.
There are the equally impressive Ottar's mound, at Husby in the parish
of Vendel, Nordian's mound at Aas-Husby, halfway between Uppsala
and Stockholm, and Anund's mound, at Vasteraas. Husby' means a
royal hall, the place where a king stayed on his peregrinations to assert
his authority and collect the local taxes. It is noticeable that many of
the large mounds lie close to a *Husby*, on crown land or close to the
c
site of a Thing: they deserve the name royal mounds' for more reasons
than one.
The Inglinge mound at Vaxjo, the most impressive of all these
mounds, actually lies outside the Svea kingdom, in south-eastern
Sweden. There are also a few mounds in Vastergotland, the land of
the Geatas, the most important being Storhogen, in the parish of
Skalunda, and Larva Basing. This last place is well-known on account
of a quaint custom which has its origins in the medieval law-book of
the Vastergotar:
If a strolling minstrel is hit, that is not to count. If a strolling minstrel is
wounded, no matter whether his instrument be the fiddle, the viol or the
118
drum, then a heifer must be caught and led to the Basing, where its tail
must be shaved and greased. Likewise freshly greased shoes must be placed
on the animal's hooves. Now the minstrel is to grasp the heifer by the tail,
while the animal is soundly whipped. If he can hold her, then he shall have
the valiant beast and enjoy her as a dog enjoys the grass. But if he lets her
slip,
then he shall have and hold only what he has received, namely shame
and dishonour. His legal rights are now no more more than those of a birched
slave girl.
Such junketings were doubtless a welcome relief at the conclusion of

more serious business, and must have been just as popular in the days
before written records.
We have now to attempt the difficult but interesting task of assigning

the Svea kings to their respective mounds. One generalization can
safely be made: while their chieftains were being buried in ships
closely huddled together, the kings took the whole kingdom for their
burial ground, leaving monumental mounds as witness to their power.
A few of the medium-sized mounds already excavated belong to the
period 700-900 and so do not concern us here. The excavation of the
most easterly royal mound at Old Uppsala was undertaken in 1846-7,
regrettably early some might think; but since Bror Emil Hildebrand
was then in charge of antiquities the work was at least done with all
proper caution. The centre of the mounds was found to be occupied
by a cairn about fifty feet in diameter, resting on layers of ash and
loam. Hidden among the rubble and earth was a clay pot containing
the bones of the cremated king together with a number of minute
fragments of metal, our sole means of dating and identifying the
mound's royal occupant.
Hildebrand also started digging in the central mound, but this
excavation was never completed. In 1874, however, on the occasion of
the Archaeological Congress, he opened up the largest mound of all,
the westernmost mound at Old Uppsala. But it must be admitted that
the mountain travailed and brought forth a mouse, in the shape of a
central cairn about five feet in diameter resting on a layer of ash and
loam and containing a jungle of bones and the meagre remnants of
the grave furnishings.
Undeterred by the unpromising character of these finds, in 1902 the
future King Gustav VI Adolf initiated another attempt at uncovering
traces of his remote ancestors, the excavation of the Haaga mound.
The result was surprising but unhelpful this mound (also in Uppland)
:
bronze sword with gold mountings and a
produced a magnificent
number of other bronze objects belonging to the period of about
1000 BC, long before the foundation of the Swedish kingdom. In 1914
yet another attempt was made on a royal mound, this time Ottar's
mound Once again a central cairn was revealed, covering
in Vendel.
a layer of ash and a wooden bucket with a bronze coating which
contained a number of small objects, including a gold coin of the
Roman Emperor Basiliscus (476-7).
No further attempts have been made at excavating a royal mound.
One reason is that work on the Valsgarde finds has rightly consumed
much time and attention, since they are so much richer in metal
labour necessary for excavating these large mounds
artifacts* Also, the
has become very expensive. Finally, the number of mounds is limited,

and since excavation methods are improving all the time it seems better
to wait. There are still three mounds within Svea territory as yet
wholly or partially unexplored, the central mound at Old Uppsala,

Anund's mound and the Aas-Husby mound, There are two more in
Vastergotland, one in Smaaland and several smaller ones. The royal
mounds from the period of the founding of the Swedish kingdom,
500-700, can thus be counted on the fingers of one hand.
It should not be very difficult to name the kings who rest - or once
rested -
in Old Uppsala and at Ottar's mound. The genealogy of the
Svea kings was given in the last chapter, in connection with the
struggles between the Svea and the Geatas. From this it appeared
that
Aun the Elder, Egil, Ottar Vendel-crow, Adils,
Osten, Yngvar,
Brot-Anund and Ingjald the Evil-doer must have been historical
personages and founders of the kingdom.
The name Ottar Vendel-crow at once arouses interest, especially
since we have just been discussing the Vendel barrow known as
Ottar's mound, whose contents have been thoroughly investigated.
Turning to the written sources, we find that Snorri has an implausible

tale of Ottar meeting his death at Vendel on the Linfjord ; he adds
that the Danes presented the Swedes with a wooden crow to taunt them
with their loss. Snorri has clearly confused Vendel in Uppland with the
Danish Vendyssel. Yet it is worth noting that although Snorri's
Icelandic text was not translated into Swedish until 1594, the great
mound at Vendel was known locally as Ottar's mound at least as
early as 1675. This strongly suggests that the name is a genuine survival
from the migration era, which is made all the more likely by the
120
striking fact that the inhabitants of Vendel parish were known as
'crows' : the inhabitants of other surrounding parishes also had nick-
c
names, there were Osterby 'magpies', Morkarla ravens' and
Soberbykarl 'jackdaws' So for a person to be called 'Vendel-crow'

!
merely meant that he was an inhabitant of Vendel: King Ottar

became a Vendel-crow because he died there, to be placed in the
mound which for centuries has been known by his name.
Wehave already discovered that Egil, Ottar's father, died in 515.
Ottar's death occurred between 530 and 550. He was buried with a
gold coin struck in 477, much worn by use. There is

nothing in the
rest of the find inconsistent with this dating.
Now in Snorri's Tnglinga saga it is said of King as of his son Egil
Aun,
and of Adils, Egil's grandson, 'and he was buried in the mound at
Uppsala/ This very neatly with the three royal mounds, and as
fits
long ago as 1913 a Swedish scholar suggested that an examination of

the small fragments of grave goods retrieved from the rubble with the
bones might clinch the matter. The material does indeed require to
be examined very closely, since the very smallest details must be
considered. There is much at stake, the origins of the Swedish royal
house, the foundation of one of the earliest kingdoms established in the
West, the enlargement of our understanding of the cultural events
and connections of the period. The extreme minuteness of some of the
fragments the prehistorian is called on to recognize and classify must
be appreciated. This is detective work of the highest order.
The eastern mound yielded a triangular fragment of thin sheet gold
with a delicate pattern of inlaid grain work, very much like that on
later artifacts of the Scandinavian golden age; a minute fragment
recognizable as a head in animal-pattern, Style I and a small piece

;
showing an arm and two spears, which must form part of a procession
of warriors, a particular feature of the Torslunda finds but also quite
often seen on boat burial helmets.
It is obviously impossible to mention every object (see plate 52), but
is can safely be said that the finds from the western mound seem to be
of later date. There no trace here of Style I and gold is even rarer
is
than in the eastern mound. There is, however, a tiny oval ornament
in gold with granulation and a gold transverse bar. If it is carefully
turned about between thumb and forefinger a definite resemblance to
the long rows of heads on the seven-roped gold collar seems to emerge,
though if the king had actually been wearing anything as splendid,
much more would have survived. We should therefore think in terms
121
of some much and workmanship.
smaller piece of similar quality
Another item, very much damaged but still with great appeal, is a
of doisonni> in which only one red stone remains. The work
piece gold
is very similar to that found on sword pommels recovered intact from
gold hoards. There was a special

art in making the ahnandines gleam
red : they had to be laid on gold foil, each stone carefully attached to
gold setting, and then when the ornament caught
its the sun the gold
settings reflected the light and the stones shone red. On one pommel
green enamels were also used and a few have unusually large rings of
heavy gold attached to them. The latest of these pommels now sur-
mounts a parade sword of the ship burial period, which was not its
original home^ since the sword is of gilded bronze and the pommel
itself is so hefty that two hands are needed to lift it. The most delicate
cloisomJ work comes from a royal grave, which is only right and proper,
and we are entitled to assume that the furnishings of a king, both in
life and death, were more precious than the objects found in other
burials with which we may be better acquainted.

A fragment of bone was found in the western mound, carved in a
wavy ribbon pattern with recurrent animal heads in the shapes typical
of Style II, huge-fanged upper jaws, pointed chins and so on. It is
clear that this, the largest of the royal mounds, must be later than both
the eastern and Ottar's mounds.
There is still much
uncertainty and debate over precisely which
kings lie buried at Old Uppsala. Some scholars trust Snorri implicitly
and place Aun in the as yet unexplored central mound, with Ottar's
father and son on either side. Others believe that since Snorri was
misinformed on many points he is likely to have been wrong about
the burial place of Ottar Vendel-crow, On this theory all Snorri knew
for sure was that there were three large mounds at Old Uppsala. He
did not know which kings were buried there and if he guessed right it
was purely by chance. The researches of the next few decades will
no doubt decide the question, or at least throw some light on the
problem.
Prehistorians can console themselves that they are in a better position
than scholars in fields such as philology, since there is always a chance
that fresh discoveries may quite suddenly illuminate even the trickiest
problems. For example, we

are waiting with some impatience for a
really rewarding find from the difficult sixth century, for someone
bold enough to explore another royal mound or fortunate enough to
discover another boat burial ground. There are rumours of another
122
but the finders are very secretive and until they are excavated
likely site,
the typical oblong depressions look quite insignificant. In the meantime
we can only wait,
Our waiting be handsomely rewarded: the last fully furnished

may
ship burial to appear was magnificent beyond measure. It was found,
however, not on the banks of the Fyris in Uppland but in England*
The discovery was made in 1939 so that scientific investigation of the
find was immediately brought almost to a standstill by the war. The
discussion has by now reached a rarefied level, although the final
results have yet to be published.
At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, at a point on the river Deben a few miles
inland, is an ancient burial ground, which in 1939 formed part of the
estate belonging to Mrs E. M. Pretty. She had already decided to
investigate the cemetery (private excavations are quite lawful in

England), but the yield from the first mound excavated was small.
As soon as they tackled the next mound, however, she and her local
archaeological assistants realized that they had stumbled on a richly
furnished ship burial. They at once called in a team of experts from the
British Museum 53 and 54).
(see plates
In England archaeological finds do not automatically belong to the
nation and the national museums; a coroner has to hold an inquest
to determine the right of possession. The coroner, sitting with a jury,
found that these magnificent objects were not Treasure Trove and that
the Grown had therefore no claim on them. His decision was reached
on the grounds that the treasures had been buried publicly by people
who had no intention of retrieving them. In proof a document over
twelve hundred years old, none other than the Song of Beowulf, was
adduced the epic was composed in England and its author may in
;
fact have been a contemporary of the Sutton Hoo burial, or at least

have heard folk about it. A verdict can rarely have been reached on
the basis of such fitting testimony. The description of Beowulf s burial
mound and the priceless treasures it contained proved decisive :
In the barrow they placed collar and brooches - all such adornments as
brave-minded men had before taken from the hoard. They left the wealth of
the nobles to the earth to keep - left the gold in the ground where it still
exists, as unprofitable to men as it had been before. (Lines 3163 ff.)
On 14 August 1939 Mrs Pretty was declared the lawful

owner of the
Sutton Hoo treasure ; but the affair had yet to be brought to a properly
i 123
English conclusion. On 23 August Mrs Pretty presented the entire
find to the British Museum for the nation.
What the Museum now received was the largest and most valuable
find ever recovered from English soil. It includes gold ornaments in
- at least four thousand garnets in gold settings - and the
profusion
workmanship is of a quality which can rarely have been surpassed,
even by the most expert goldsmiths. The magnificent purse-lid,
apparently of ivory with mountings of gold, contained forty Merovin-
gian coins. One might think this would make it easy to date the burial,
since it must have taken place at least one or two years after the most
recent coin had been struck. Unfortunately, however, it is very difficult
to establish the date of minting in the case of Merovingian coins. The
problem is at present engaging the attention of numismatists all over

Europe. The latest conclusion is that the numismatical evidence points
to the period between AD 650 and 660.
Among the treasures was an antler-crowned iron standard and a

whetstone, just two feet long and decorated with eight human masks,
perhaps intended as a kind of sceptre. It seems certain that the burial
was in honour of a king, and the choice must fall on one of three brothers,
successive rulers over the East Angles: Anna, Aethelher (j 655) and
Aethelwald (f 663). Two were zealous Christians. The burial included
nine shallow silver bowls decorated with inscribed crosses and two
silver spoons bearing the names Saulos and Paulos in Greek characters,
appropriate gifts for a new convert, sent perhaps straight from Rome,
(see plate 53).
Yet Sutton Hoo can hardly be the resting place of a Christian king.
By itsvery nature the boat-grave points to Aethelhere, the last king of
strongly pagan sympathies. This supposition is confirmed by the
remarkable resemblance between the Sutton Hoo sword, shield and
helmet and the weapons of Uppland burials, so close indeed that they
may even be of Uppland provenance certainly it would occasion no re-
;
mark if they were dug up on the banks of the Fyris instead of the Deben.
These were personal weapons and would be held to possess magic
powers. What brought them from Uppland into the hands of this
Anglian king? And why was he given a characteristically Uppland
burial in an eighty-foot clinker-built boat? Some two centuries earlier
the Angles had left Schleswig-Holstein to settle in eastern England. Who
knows what connections still remained between the Anglian royal house
of the Wuffingas and the Uppland dynasty of Ynglingar or Scylfingar?
As so often happens, this really magnificent discovery at Sutton Hoo
124
has raised more problems than it solves. Some of the
problems indeed
were quite unexpected, but it would be ungracious to complain on that
account.
The interment of an imcremated corpse, fully-armed, in a burial
ship suggests a new orientation in pagan beliefs about the after-life,
despite the fact that boat-graves and stone graves shaped like boats
are known from the Bronze Age onwards. It was believed that the
buried chieftain would make his voyage over the great ocean to
Valhalla, the next world. The royal mounds of the Svea kings, which
are earlier than 650, contain cremation burials without ships ; but we
are completely ignorant of how the later kings were buried. At VendeL,
Valsgarde and Ultima several generations of farmer-chieftains lie

in boat graves unburnt and richly provisioned; the series starts about
650. In England this new variation in pagan burial customs can never
have taken root, since Aethelhere was already semi-Christian. If he
gave orders for this form of burial his boat-grave was a piece of ostenta-
more defiant in a man we suspect of being a
tious backsliding, all the
newly converted Christian (on the evidence of the silver spoons inscribed
Saulos and Paulos), a desperate attempt at making sure of his salvation
under either creed.
Thesword, shield and helmet may very well represent royal gifts
straight from the Baltic. The relation between the Svea and Anglian
royal houses is still obscure, and it is not known whether their ties
were dynastic or merely political. So no definite conclusions have

far
been reached about which of the later Ynglingar was ruling the Svea
at the time of the Sutton Hoo burial, nor do we know where he was
buried. Whoever he was, he was by no means merely the ruler of a
remote barbarian kingdom on the borders of Europe* The armour and
weapons found at Sutton Hoo are indicative of an unprecedented
degree of political activity which extended far overseas.
The natural outlet for Svea aggression was across the Baltic, and there
is and
definite archaeological evidence of such raids both in Finland
in the countries bordering the eastern end of the Baltic. As already
mentioned, the finest example of a dragon's head ring comes from
Nousiainen in Finland, though it may have reached there by way of
trade. The earliest fully Germanic Iron Age grave in Finland was
discovered only a few years ago, a double grave at Soukainen about
40 miles north of Aabo-Turku. The furnishings comprise a full set of
weapons, a *Hemmoor* bucket and a glass horn from the region of
125
in fact very much like the rich burials
Cologne. The whole burial is
of Ostergotland and belongs to the fourth century.
For the sixth century we have a number of outstanding finds in
Osterbotten, on the narrowest part of the Gulf of Bothnia. From their
contents, however, it seems that these must be associated with northern
Sweden - Trondheim - and not with the Svea. They are perhaps
evidence of a steady trading connection based on a few trading posts
rather than of permanent settlement.
The Swedish advance into Finland which led to the establishment
of a permanent minority there started with the of the Svea during
rise
the Vendel period. The places settled at thattime continued under

Swedish occupation into historic times. The most spectacular artifact
so far discovered is the ceremonial sword from Pappilanmaki in
Satakunda, discovered in association with a number of objects which
show strong traces of Germanic influence in their manufacture.
The Kalcvala> the great Finnish vernacular epic cycle which, thanks
to the conservatism of the Finnish language, has been handed down
with many and words unaltered despite the passage of a
passages
thousand has some evidence to offer on this point. For here
years, also
too we find both Germanic and Shamanistic elements, and we may
read as part of the description of a spear-head *a dog lay on the socket,
:
5 9
a cat mewed on the nail , or *a bear growled at the nail hole These .
curious remarks become comprehensible when we look at Vendel
spear-heads and find two crouching beasts at the point where the nail
securing the head to the shaft passes straight through the socket (see
plate 55). Thus a classic of oral folk literature, which was still being
recited during the nineteenth century, contains a clear reference to a
specific feature of seventh century weapon-making.
The eastern Baltic presents a similar picture.few raids from A
Gotland were made during the migration period, as we know from
graves in Esthonia and Lithuania containing wholly Gotlandish
objects ; and in the Vendel period there appears to have been a joint
settlement from Gotland and central Sweden at Grobin. Lettish and
Swedish graves were excavated in this neighbourhood during the
nineteen-twenties. A
third site, Staraja-Ladoga, is now in Russia;
itslowest stratum, which goes back to the period before 800, may be
Finnish, but there are also definite traces of Swedish occupation.
There is thus ample evidence of preliminary forays overseas, har-
bingers of the great raids of the succeeding period whose earth-shaking
effects must be measured on a world-wide scale.
126
8
THE VIKING RAIDS
In the year 793 grave portents were seen over the land of Northumbria and
men were much afraid. There were whirlwinds and phantom lights, fire
dragons flew through the air. Soon after came a dire famine; and shortly
after thaton 8 June of the same year, merciless heathens laid waste the
Church of God in Lindisfarne, with plundering and killing.
This is the earliest mention of the Vikings, the men who came from
across the sea to destroy unsuspecting churches and monasteries. The
year 793 is as good a date as any to take as the beginning of the Viking
era, Lindisfarne,on the border between England and Scotland, was a
place of such sanctity that the indignation of the Christian world was
doubly great. As was their habit, Church leaders saw in these events a
punishment for the sins of mankind, and quoted from the prophet
Jeremiah :
Out of the north an evil shall break forth on all the inhabitants of the land.
(Jeremiah i 14)
The raid was obviously summer the

successful, for in the following
ships returned to plunder the monasteries of Jarrow and Monkwear-
mouth. Henceforth not a summer passed without a fresh visitation.
From 799 onwards thenorsemen also started to attack the coasts ofFrance.
Christendom had been invaded by a brutal new form of warfare,
which made its abrupt appearance at a date which can be precisely
determined.
Charlemagne found even year overshadowed, as he
his coronation
a
hastened to Friesland to institute coastal watch. Despite the Emperor's
precautions the Danish king continued to batter at these inhospitable
shores. The Frankish royal annalist wryly remarks :
He regards Friesland and Saxony purely as his private domain and intends
before long to appear with a mighty army at Aachen.
127
The coastline of theEmpire was protected by a defence chain
extending all along its length and incorporating
a Roman lighthouse
built by Caligula at Boulogne. A fire was kept burning there every
night, but its only effect

was to make the Viking armies and navies
transfer their operations to the coasts of Brittany, a little to the south.
Another attractive alternative was Ireland, where mutually warring
chieftains were unlikely to offer any combined resistance. As an
Ulsterman writing about 820 observed:
The sea has spewed foreign rivers over Erin, and there is now no harbour,
no landing stage, no stronghold, no fortress, no defence-work without its
fleet of Vikings and sea-robbers.
Every year saw a repetition of the same cycle of events. In the spring the
Viking ships with their huge square-rigged sails and grinning dragons'
prows appeared over the horizon, more of them every year. No-one
knew just where they would appear, and before reinforcements had
hurried to the fated spot, the coastal district was already plundered and
the Vikings were safe on an island refuge, making preparations for a
fresh or they might entrench themselves in part of the
sortie;
countryside for the whole summer.
In eastern Europe the position was much the same : ships appeared
on the Duna, on the Neva and on the Swir, where in fact they were no
novelty ; the difference was that now they pushed further east and south
till they reached the larger rivers, the Dnieper and the Volga, and
from thence sailed to the Black Sea. An Arab named Ibn Khordabdah,
writing about 850, knew the Vikings primarily as traders :
They carry pelts of the black fox and beaver and swords from the furthest
corners of Saglab-land (Russia) to the Black Sea, where the Prince of the
Greeks (the Byzantine Emperor) takes a tithe of their wares in taxation.
In 839 envoys of the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus met Louis the

Pious, Emperor of the West, at Ingelheim. They had with them a troop
of Vikings who had lost so many men on their journey along inland
waterways to Constantinople that they dared not return by the same
route for fear of the savage Khazars and Bulgars who inhabited the
regions through which they must pass. They had therefore taken this
opportunity of returning via the West. Louis was confronted with a
difficult moral dilemma. In the end he agreed to allow these norsemen
to regain their native land and the first norse circumnavigation of
Europe was accomplished.
128
THE VIKING RAIDS
The monastic annalists were given plenty of material for their
annual reports. The only motives they could impute to the norsemen
to account for their behaviour were those of aggression, blood-thirstiness
and sheer delight in plunder and pillage. Each successful foray, it
seemed, only stimulated the black-hearted pagans to further wickedness.
At the time explanations of this nature were accepted as fully satisfying.
Modern scholarship has suggested an entirely different set of motives.
Critical analysis of the chronicles taken in conjunction with the
brilliant discoveries of archaeologists help us to recognize the
deeper
human causes behind the two centuries of Viking raids.
The main reason stares us in the face :
overpopulation. The typical
mound-burial cemeteries of the later Iron Age are to be seen all over
Scandinavia, even in the depths of forests hitherto apparently unsettled,
and point to clearances of the moraines, although even then they can
scarcely have been suitable for settlement. Stronger weapons and
implements show that the iron-smiths were improving their techniques
and exploiting the bog ores to the full. The Norwegian valleys, apparently
deserted since the beginning of the Iron Age, were once again attracting
settlers.
There are also barrows all over the areas of older occupation,
particularly around Lake Malaren in the heart of the Svea territory,
where they come close to existing farmhouses, standing on sites already
occupied a thousand years ago. The softly rounded hummocks are
mute and gentle reminders to the modern fanner of his Hnks with an
ancient culture. Most of the barrows shelter cremation burials, and in
many there are such quantities of nails that we must conclude that these
Viking-farmers were cremated in their ships.
But the barrenness of the north set a strict limit to any increase in
population. New clearances on the still impoverished moraine were
often ill-rewarded.
The alternative was to branch out overseas. This was the course
likely tobe followed by the all-too-numerous younger sons of fanning
familiesand by others of adventurous disposition. Their one indispens-
able piece of equipment, the one decisive factor in their success, which
was to become the symbol of the age, was the use of a large sea-going
ship. Thanks to a combination of luck and really outstanding archaeo-
logical skill we are now able to describe the essential features of these
vessels in some detail.
The men of the north had always been seafarers. In Stone Age times
they had paddled along the coasts and even crossed the Baltic to
129
Gotland, using log boats or canoes made from skins stretched over a
frame. The double-prowed ships of the Bronze Age are known to us
literally in their thousands, from
the Hallristningar. We have already
mentioned the Danish Hjortspring ship, built for eight pairs of rowers
from planks lashed securely together and caulked with resin; although
it comes from the early Iron Age, in profile this ship is very similar to
those of the rock engravings. Ship transport was needed in Scandinavia

to carry on the extensive trade in bronze and bronze artifacts,
Denmark's five hundred islands could be reached and circumnaviga-
ted quite comfortably without courting the dangers of the open sea.
The light,flat ships of the Bronze Age were suitable enough for
sailing
along the rocky archipelago of the Swedish coast, provided one kept
well inshore, and there was plenty of scope for such light craft on Lake
Malaren and the neighbouring inland waterways. As for Norway,
there are places along the coast and up the fiords where they open out
at the foot of the mountains which even today can only be reached by
water. From all this experience of navigation the norsemen learned
how to cope with the sea, the wind, currents, the weather in fact
with nature in all her moods. The great cairns on cliff edges are
memorials to sailors rather than settlers : and they also served as land-
marks. For steering by night there were the stars and perhaps some
beacon signals.
In all the thousands of rock engravings there is never a ship with a
sail. The Hjortspring ship, which in fact was a war canoe, had no
provision for a sail ; neither did the fourth century Nydam ship. There is
nothing anywhere to suggest that sails were used by the Scandinavians
during the early Iron Age. They were not completely ignorant of sails;
some people would have seen sailing ships when Augustus* naval
9
expedition touched at Heligoland. But the Romans forte was road
building; they were unenthusiastic mariners. The ships the Romans
used in the Mediterranean were large wooden boxes, difficult to
manoeuvre, and by no means all of them had sails. The northern ships
of the early Iron Age, above all those from Hjortspring and Nydam,
must have bobbed about on the water like flat-bottomed tubs. They
have no keel and thus lack the necessary counterpoise to a sail. The
northern rowing boat had first to be redesigned to meet the waves at a
different point of impact. This revolution was effected between
400
and 800, when ships acquired both keels and sails.
A ship preserved by a lucky chance at Kralsund, in Norway, shows
the problem in process of being tackled, a clear indication that this
130
THE VIKING RAIDS
ship, dated about 600, was a transitional type. No-one would have
built such a ship if proper ocean-going ships had
already been in
existence. There is still no proper keel, only a broad bottom
plank and
an external keel, all in one piece ; there is also rudimentary
provision
for a mast and sail. The ship is a large one, sixty
long and ten feet
feet
wide, with a draught of only thirty inches. Other details of the construc-
tion provide further evidence that these northerners were
already
entertaining those constructive visions of a wider world which during
the next few centuries would beckon them to achievements
unsurpassed
in antiquity, and worthy of a place beside the exploits of the
great
sailing ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
We havealready seen what gruesome horrors lurked in the Danish
bogs, deposited as votive offerings. The Norwegian bogs alongside the
fiords have produced a number of keels and other
ship's parts, placed
there not for votive purposes but by ship-builders concerned to preserve
their half-completed work at the proper humidity. Many of them have
remained there to this day and yield valuable information about the
great era of northern ship-building, the Viking Age. At Swedish
Valsgarde, English Sutton Hoo and Danish Ladby we have nothing
but the set of the iron nails to show us the outlines of the
ships ; the
Norwegians have had the amazing good fortune to recover several
fully preserved wooden ships from barrows more than 1,100 years old,
and these are beyond question the largest, most precious and most
interesting of all the magnificent artifacts to survive from prehistoric
Europe,
An open ship built from oak strakes nailed together was discovered
at Rolfsoy as early as 1751, but few details have survived either about
thisor about another burial ship discovered at Borre in 1852. Con-
cerning the Tune ship, discovered in 1867, we are better informed,
but the really spectacular find was the Gokstad sailing ship (1880),
first
now preserved at the Bygdoy Museum in Oslo (see plate 56). In 1904
itwas joined by the Oseberg ship, which has magnificent carvings on
the prows and contained all the lavish trappings of a Norwegian royal
court of about 850. Since then the improved care of monuments has
made chance discoveries of this magnitude much less likely, but even
may well be other well-preserved Viking ships waiting to see
so there
the light of day, whether at Borre or elsewhere in Norway. The gravelly
soilof Sweden allowed air and water to circulate freely so that nature's
work of destruction was very thoroughly accomplished. In Norway,
however, blue clay mingled with the gravel of the burial mounds so
that the ships were hermetically sealed, and thus preserved. One arm
of the cruciform ship museum at Bygdoy is still vacant, ready to receive
fourth Viking ship.
its
Towards the end of the last century the Gokstad ship deservedly
won the admiration of sailors all over the world when an exact replica
was sailed to America by a Norwegian crew ; it now stands in Lincoln
Park, Chicago. This open ship, seventy-six feet six inches long with a
beam of seventeen feet, certainly proved its quality as an ocean-going

ship, riding high seas and storms and withstanding the buffeting of
the waves. Although not much longer than the Nydam ship, it is
twice as broad, and breadth is a decisive factor in a keel-built ship.
The keel gives stability and depth in the water, acts as a brake in
riding over the waves, carries the ship through the troughs and allows
for a stronger prow which can cleave the waters without being sub-
merged. The cross-supports or ribs are only lashed, not nailed, which
gives the ship a hitherto unparalleled elasticity, amounting to a play
of several inches, so that it can ride the water smoothly at all times.
It was made the Viking ships such excellent sea-going
this 'give' that
vessels.Their secret was that they always worked with the water,
they were thoroughly adapted to the element, whereas our modern
iron-clad motor vessels with their mechanized power are allowed to
work against it.
The general opinion is that the Viking ships were not built on the
homesteads but by professional ship-builders, who built from experience,
without construction drawings; they knew what the sea would do,
could foresee where the impact of the waves would fall and what
should be the relationship between the different parts. The crew of
1893 had to get used to a rudder on the starboard side rather than the
stern. They found this starboard rudder wonderfully responsive to the
tiller, while the types of rudder found in an eight would have been
quite impracticable in a ship designed to skim the waves so lightly.

Old salts know that a ship sails best if the mast has minimum support.
The large sail could be set in every possible direction except directly
against the wind; when the wind was in that quarter the oars had to
be used. The oars are surprisingly short and the rowers must have sat
uncomfortably close, but they employed a short sculling motion, which
is much more effective at sea than our long racing strokes. This style
of oarsmanship, known as 'Turkish rowing', is still practised in many
parts of the Mediterranean ; it was also used to propel the Roman
132
THE VIKING RAIDS
galleys, although our film producers are apparently unaware of the
fact!
The Gokstad ship had sixteen pairs of rowers and a total complement
of seventy to eighty men. It weighs over twenty tons, and has a capacity
of thirty-two tons register and a hull draught of less than three feet.
These measurements are not greatly different from those of the rather
less efficient Oseberg ship, and both should really be classified as
coastal vessels or caravels, to give them their technical name: they
were all-purpose ships for short journeys, with or without cargo.
There were numerous other types, for example the ninety foot fiord
ship found in the same burial at Gokstad, considered by connoisseurs
the finest and most delicate of them all; broad-beamed transports;
and, in a different category, the warships, the famous long ships, which
were developed in the Viking period itself. The best known of these,
Ormen Laange or 'Long Serpent', which took part in the battle of
Svolder, was fifty feet long, and took thirty-four pairs of rowers and a
complement of well over a hundred. But this marked the limit of what
was practicable. The ocean-going ships in which the Vikings made
their voyages of discovery were certainly not as large; they were
broader and deeper, and although not so fast as the Gokstad ship,
safer on the open sea.
We can identify the owner of the Gokstad ship. The mound was at
Vestfold on Oslo fiord and must have been occupied by a king of the
Vestfold dynasty about 870-90. The homestead to which the mound
once belonged is called Gjekstad, and the corpse must be that of Olaf
Geirstad-Alf. Snorri, on much firmer ground than he is with the Svea
e
kings of three centuries earlier, describes Olaf as remarkably handsome,

very strong and large of growth,' and mentions that he died of a
Anatomical study of the bones shows the corpse to
disease in his leg.
have been an unusually large man whohadsufieredfrom chronic arthritis.
One could scarcely hope for closer agreement between written sources
and archaeological evidence! Parts of a peacock were also found
among the bones; it was no doubt captured by the Viking in person
while raiding the French coast.
The Oseberg mound, which contained the ceremonial furbishings
of a royal court, including four richly-carved sledges and a cart (see
plate 57), was occupied by two female corpses. The older woman
must have been a was formerly
slave; the younger, since Oseberg
Asuberg, may well have been Queen Aasa, step-mother to Olaf
133
Geirstad-Alf. Aasa was a formidable woman to win her as his bride
;
Gudrod Veidekonge had been forced to kill her father and brother
and abduct her. These crimes she avenged two years later by hiring
an assassin to murder her husband in his cups. After this she reigned
alone in Vestfold. At all events, Aasa left her mark on Norwegian
history, for the son born to her shortly before the murder of her husband
became the father of Harald Haarfager, under whom Norway was
united.
A Viking ship should properly have a dragon's head prow. On the
Gokstad ship the prow was missing* The Oseberg ship has its comple-
ment of dragons' heads with suitably ferocious grins, but the prow
a spiral in the form of an uncoiled serpent. This figure-head
itself rises to
was no mere decoration but the protector of the ship's soul, a kind of
Gorgon's head designed to ward off the perils of the sea. But when a
ship's prow was turned towards the shore the grotesque figure-head
would be carefully removed, so as not to frighten the Landvettir, the
benign sprits who lived on land. This custom was punctiliously observed.
Only one genuine dragon's head prow has survived. Discovered a few
years ago in the Scheldt estuary, it is a work of violent intensity,
neither bird nor beast of prey but all brute dragon, so taut with life
and power, with passion and inherent authority, that it can stand
as the epitome of the Viking age (see plate 58).
The word Viking, used too often to describe the whole period of
all
Scandinavian prehistory, probably comes from Wik - bay or inlet, a

protected arm of the sea, the fiord where the ships lay at anchor and
the men of the Baltic and North Sea fleets had their homes.
In the days
when it was a province of Norway the littoral north of Goteborg
still
was called Wiken (now Bohuslan). Its inhabitants were thus literally
Vikings. Other derivations have been suggested, however,
Well-equipped for long voyages on the open sea, the surplus males of
Scandinavia had started on their expeditions even before 800, beginning
with a bid for supremacy over the Baltic. We have already noted
traces of settlement in the Baltic countries and Finland and a little
later round Lake Ladoga. The Swedes were interested in controlling
the Baltic trade, the Norwegians that of the North Sea; the Danes had
an equal interest in both. As a natural consequence two great trading-
depot towns were established about 800, Birka on Lake Malaren and
Haithabu (Hedeby) at Schleswig. Sea-going ships were of course
capable of sailing round Jutland, but the winds were treacherous and
134
THE VIKING RAIDS
much time was lost. Schleswig lies on the narrowest part of the Jutland
peninsula, where the distance from the Bay of Schlei to the
navigable
river Treene is only eight miles (see plate 59). When the ships came
into port the cargo would be transferred to carts and so sent on the
next stage of its journey. The market town of Haithabu was enclosed
by a stout semi-circular wall; later, since the place was continually
being fought over, these defences were augmented by earthworks
built right across the narrow neck of land ; Swedes, Germans and Danes
were all at different times masters of the town and the black earth inside
the semi-circular wall is full of relics of buildings and merchants' odds
and ends.
The sister town of Birka, the other terminus of the Baltic
trade,
served as the entrepSt for inland Sweden and is situated therefore on
Lake Malaren instead of on the Baltic. It stands on a small birch-
covered island west of Stockholm, and consists of a natural harbour
protected by a semi-circular rampart. The surrounding black earth
has by no means been made to yield all its information, nor has the
very inviting cemetery (with some two-thousand barrows, the largest
in the north) although some rich finds have been recovered. Among the
most striking are Frisian pottery jugs, remnants of oriental silks, and
numerous objects in metal.
These two ports, Haithabu and Birka, really deserve a chapter to
themselves. We have evidence enough both from the soil and from
written sources to reconstruct the scene in the bustling narrow alley-
ways and around the harbour when ships were calling or leaving.
St Ansgar, the evangelist of the north, came here on his first missionary
journey, which he combined with an embassy on behalf of the emperor,
to whom he sent a report* The Vikings had other trading stations and
strongholds along the Baltic and on the North Sea coast, Skiringssal
(only recently excavated) on Oslo fiord for the Norwegian trade,
Reric the forerunner of Wismar, Wollin at the mouth of the Oder,
Truso (Elbing in German), Seeburg or Grobin in Latvia and Staraja
Ladoga on the Russian lakes.
These Baltic markets and towns sprang up as suddenly as did the
raiders on Lindisfarne and other western monasteries modern scholars
;
have been as surprised by this rapid urban growth as the medieval

chroniclers were by the rapid success of the Vikings themselves. In
1953, however, a particularly important find was made not far from
Birka on the neighbouring island of Lillon, now joined by Ekeron to
the mainland.
135
A man digging a hole for a flagstaff at his summer cottage came
across a bronze dipper of a type never seen before. It might have been
a hundred years old or a thousand. Excavations were made round
about and revealed traces of houses, post-holes, stones, fragments of
timber and everywhere thousands of pieces of glass. The glass must
have come from artifacts of the Vendel period, spouted beakers and
glasses in reticella work to give them their proper names. Here was
evidence that a trading depot was in existence before the year 800, that
is at a period earlier than the foundation of Birka. Goods coming from
the south must have been unloaded here and broken pieces discarded.
As far as we can tell market had its heyday
at present, this important
in the eighth century and was presumably superseded by Birka. In
addition to these fragments of Prankish glass there were also a quantity :
of little gold plates of native manufacture, depicting a male and female

figure, which suggests that they were talismen of the kind placed under
the doorstep to bring fertility and good fortune to the household; a
magnificent bishop's crozier which from its decoration must have been
acquired in Ireland, either by purchase or as booty; and, greatest
surprise of all, an outstandingly lovely small Buddha in bronze,
discovered in the summer of 1956. This last object probably came north
along the Swedish trade route through Russia, bartered in exchange
for 'pelts of black fox and beaver'. Since the graves of merchants are
usually rich in their own wares, the results of excavations still in progress
at Lillon and among the surrounding barrows are keenly awaited.
We have already mentioned some of the commodities traded - pelts
from the north, objects in glass and metal from the south. There were
no doubt many other more perishable items, such as fabrics, spices,
salt and other commestibles. Nor should we omit to mention the wares
for which competition was keenest, human beings.
The slave trade played a substantial part in building up the Viking

commercial empire. For this the Vikings themselves were not solely to
blame. The Church taught that Christians must all be free men. But
since there was an urgent demand for a strong labour force, a way
round this rule was easily found by the importation of heathens, with
northern traders acting as the suppliers slaves : still existed in their own
countries, and there was always an inexhaustible supply ready to be
tapped in eastern Europe, the heathen Slavs - which is why the words
Slav and slave are identical.
In those days trade and piracy went hand in hand. We should try
136
THE VIKING RAIDS
to adjust our view of these matters to the standards of the
morality of
the time. We should remember that this was an age when everyone was
his own when the power of the state was unknown and unack-
master,
nowledged, when the highest political unit was the tribe, when the
rights of monarchy were restricted and monarchy itself something
quite differentfrom what we usually understand by it, and when the
jurisdiction of the Thing over communal life was confined within
narrow geographical Imagine a ship on the open sea which has
limits.
managed and on which provisions are despera-

to survive several storms
tely short would

: not a raid on the nearest coast seem an urgent and
obvious necessity? Or again, perhaps a fully laden ship appears in view :
it is much easier to plunder this prize than to go south in search of

goods. Each ship was a self-contained military unit, and the issue
between peaceful commerce and sudden war was decided on the spur
of the moment.
By 800 the long ships already controlled the Baltic trade route
between Ladoga and Haithabu by way of Birka, and the traffic along
the North Sea from Skiringsal. Jealous eyes were also being turned
towards the flourishing markets farther south in Friesland (Dorstadt)
and in the Frankish kingdom. The moment had come when wider
forays were to be expected. The sudden descents on Lindisfarae,
Jarrow and Monkwearmouth succeeded beyond all calculation. The
methods of the attackers were so vastly superior to the feeble measures
of resistance offered by the defenders that the Viking raids rapidly
increased both in numbers and in strength. Soon really large fleets were
being employed, to carry fighting men whose audacity and daring
impelled them to even more and greater deeds.
In 845 a fleet of six-hundred ships sailed up the Elbe and destroyed

Hamburg; in the same year Ragnar Lodbrok led 120 ships up the
Seine and took Paris. Half the army of the Frankish king, Charles the
Bald, was decisively beaten while the other half, driven in terror and
disarray to the opposite bank of the river, was forced to look on as the
Danes encamped on one of the islands strung up 1 1 1 of their former
comrades, no doubt as a sacrifice to Wodan, the Norse god of war
(similar sacrifices were offered at Lejre and Old Uppsala). Charles
the Bald finally succeeded in purchasing his freedom and with seven
thousand pounds of silver in their pockets the Danes gathered together
their loot and sailed happily homewards.
In the previous year a Viking fleet one hundred ships strong had
137
sailed along the coasts of Spain and then made a brief landing in
North Africa. Returning to Spain by way of Cadiz they proceeded to

invest Seville, which capitulated almost at once ; only the castle held
out, and for six weeks the Arabs were forced to besiege their own town.
The norsemen possessed tactical superiority and leaders whose
audacity continued to grow. It was small wonder than no corner of
Europe felt safe. Were there still any famous cities to conquer? The
Vikings soon came to hear of one : Rome, the Eternal City, capital of
the world. A Viking called Hasting thought Rome would be a prize
worth boasting of at home and set offwith his crew for the Mediterranean.
Arrived there, they came ashore and were soon standing before their
goal. The walls and buttresses looked alarmingly impregnable to
direct assault. One morning the city sentinels were treated to the
unusual sight of a forlorn group of Vikings gathered outside the walls
and bemoaning their fate ; they complained of homesickness, hunger
and the impending loss of their leader, who lay mortally ill. All they
asked was a chance to buy food. The next morning they were back
again with a still more heartrending tale. Their leader had died during
the night, but not before seeing himself in a vision receiving sanctified
burial and expressing the wish to be buried in a church. The clergy
believed the story and the Vikings entered the city with their leader's
body reposing on a bier. But when they reached the church where the
leaders of the clergy were awaiting them the corpse suddenly sprang
to his feet, split the head of the bishop open with a concealed hatchet
and made off with his comrades through the city, which they ransacked
and left before any help could be summoned. All this took place in 860
and is a favourite tale with the monastic chroniclers, because the
Christians had the last laugh. But even they could not record what
Hasting thought and said when he and his men discovered that they
had sacked not Rome but Luna, a tiny place north of Pisa which has
long since disappeared.
In their heyday the rulers of the Arab world were men of great energy.
The attack on Seville was not allowed to pass unremarked. The Emir
of Seville, Abdurrhaman, thought it worth while to send an envoy to
the Danish king (actually the king of Zealand). The interview between
the ambassador Al-Hakam and the Northmen was a rich experience,
known to us largely from his own account. He had taken care before-
hand to explain that he would not prostrate himself at the feet of the
king, an honour he reserved for the Sultan. The king had replied that
138
1 Above: late Stone Age passage graves at Mejls. Jutland. c.2.0flO BC:
below: typical pottery from
passage graves at Fjalkinge. Schonen, Sweden
Above: inhumation grave of the boat-axe culture,
Linkoping, Ostergotland,
c.2,000 BC; below: goods from two inhumation
graves, boat-axe culture
Bronze Age ornaments
D Above: furrows made by criss-cross ploughing 2JMJU years ajjn: hint': Hirht
hook plough for criss-cross ploughing
"t Opposite, above: Bronze Age rock drawing from western Sweden, showing
ships:
below: grave finds from the transitional period. Bronze to Iron Age
t)a House in the village at Skorbaek Hede during excavation
b Model of the interior of early Iron

Age house
Bog corpse from Tollund. Denmark
O Head of the Tollund corpse, showing the leather bonnet
for tvo animals, from Dejbjfl&
fern Jutland
9 Celtic art, vift shafts
1 U Finds from the late Celtic period: neck-ring, scabbard, and four ornamental
fibulae
11 Weapons of the late Celtic period
I Hjirtspringr ship, with oars and lathe-turned
wnoden boxes. Ship-drawings from Bronze Age
rock-carvings are shown for comparison
1 "T Graves of the Roman Iron Age. Above: massive stone burial chamber. North
Jutland: below: inhumation grave, well-furnished with earthenware. Eastern
Jutland
ID Roman bronze and glass ware and a piece of nordic pottery, all from Dremolla.
Sdionen. Sweden
1 Richly furnished female
grave, Juellinge,
Lolland. Denmark
I ,'
a Silver cup from Dollerup. with clnse-up oi handle cn-.i
1 / b Roman vessel with animal decor;

Silver chalice from Himlingoje with Germanic imitations of Roman animal and
human figures
19 Abuvc: rosette fibula with runic inscription. fru:n the n.us: recent find
Himlinaroje. Denmark: btl'j-&: runic name on the pin-h^ldcr of a reci
fibula from Vaerlose
20, Roman painted glass bowl with animal decoration
20 b Basin-shaped bog at Karingsjon. Halland. Sweden

1 God and goddess from Brank. Holstcin. Germany
a 'Bog-pots' from Karingsjon. Halland. Sweden
b Pictorial stone from La'rbro. Gotland, showing a ritual hanging

'
"' 1
Vîff^Wl*' '^ "*''
.. *TMS*-*'*''^.-* -^>'" -
'&&*$$
23 Hand of the bog-corpse from Grauballe. Jutland. c.3H. AD

Silver-leaf fibulae with delicate punctured decoration and animal iuuro sol
dered on
fcfd^
;
.
; ..;";;, j;;;. ..'.. .y. .
.^jj]jijj|j0^
7fc
?i m
;?AI** */*.- ju **%// ^^ M. 1
,
4
.4yv.!
u
,;
1
V, V'V.', '"J
A -1 J
,
1 1
^.v'^? /^; A'Xv^Mj y.frfC^*^**"*'

/,
"
AI
'^T- ^vVfô^Â^
.îv^':l:V^
=.K
ivx
JiIcS
r*^.^-^*^^^
_,? '^r'X,
1
3
*^ "
^^C^^Sa
/ s
>W^S
cis.
.s
>
;1
. Three early gold bracteates found in Sweden
Opposite: the figures on the Gallehus rune horn, from a copper enjrnivin;: made
bv Paulliin 1734
The human masks from the Gerete gold bracteate (see plate 27)
_ / a Horse-flight, pictorial stone
29 b The Aalleberg gold collar

30 Idul from the bog at Rude Eskilstrup. Zealand, Denmark; note the three-roped
round the neck
collar carved
01 Aerial view '(ibuvt -
and plan hiiW nj the ei: k :iif. n* i<i:.; t r.t'

32 Budle, glass, pottery and figures from the Snartemo find, Vest-Agder. Norway
OO Sword from the Snarremo find
J"T Upper half of an ornamental fibula from Galsted, Jutland
35 Scabbard mouth-plates of gold
m Gronbv, SAonen, Swede;
SafPfo .J j&WJUu
3-7 Ornamental
. fibula in gilded silver. Fonnaas. Hedmark. Norway
38 Ornamental fibula in gilded silver from Dalem, Nord-Trondelag, Norway
)) a Gold neck-rinj from Brajmum
39 b A gold hoard
from Timboholm. both Vastergotland. Sweden
Procession of warriors,
depicted on a find from Torslunda, Dland
Tl Warriors dressed up 'lejt, as Odin, with horns and one eye. and ri$t> as
wolf -mummer; from Torslunda. Dland
Above: horseman wearing a serpent-crowned helmet, Vendel XII
(Sweden): below: beast-leader from Torslunda, Dland
TO Detail, showing the hinge of the seven-rope gold collar found at Mone Kirche,
Vastergotland, Sweden
TT Detail of plate 43, the Mone Kirdie gold collar
45 Animal-patterning from gilded silver
harness fittings
and sword found in
Vcndcl XII
and at Vallstenarum, Gotland
Sword grip from Vallstenarum
47 Two swords found in Valsgarde, Uppland, Sweden
48 Helmet from Vendel XIV. in its latest reconstruction
*T 7 Pictorial stone from Klinte, Gotland
If
I
Ol) Left: rectangular clasp from Skabersjo, Schonen, Sweden; mount

right: scabbard
from Bjars 17, Gotland
'"
51 Ro^>yal mounds and church, Old Uppsala, Sweden

Finds from the royal burials of Old Uppsala, Sweden
<D*J Opposite: bossed shield, spoon and remains of the burial ship, Sutton Hoo,
England
The Sutton Hoo helmet
00 'A bear
growling
at the rivet-hole';
spear-head
from Vendel XII, Sweden
DO Above: the Oseberg ship during excavation: below: the Gokstad ship, as
seen in the Bygdoy ship museum, Oslo
57 Part of a sledge, from Oseberg, Norway
OO Dragon prow found in the mouth of the Scheldt, the only example
surviving- from the Viking- period
59 Aerial view of Haithabu (above), with (below) a cross-section of the wall
60sMarble lion once at the Piraeus, now at Venice, with runic inscriptions
1 Above: human mask from the Oseberg cart, Norway; below: dragon's head on
bridle-holder from Sollested, Denmark
Dragon's head from sledge found at Oseberg,
Norway
\.
0<J a Reconstruction of the barracks, Trelleborg, Zealand, Denmark
>
Model of the camp and encircling wall, Trelleborg
Large rune-stone from
Jellinge. Jutland, with the
figure of Christ
THE VIKING RAIDS
since this was not the custom in his circle he attached no importance
to the gesture. But when Al-Hakam came to the hall he found the
doorway so low that he would be obliged to make a considerable

obeisance merely to enter. Convinced that this normal and sensible
attack was directed against him personally,
precaution against surprise
he thought for a while, then dropped to the ground and using his
hands propelled himself into the king's presence sitting on his rump.
King Horec graciously accepted the envoy's credentials and the
valuable gifts of clothing and tableware he had brought, kindly adding
that he thought none the worse of Al-Hakam for having received him
feet first. Later the Arab flirted with the Danish queen and returned
south well content with his mission.
Arabs and Vikings were also
meeting quite frequently in eastern
Europe. Several useful and lively reports of these encounters have
survived, recorded by their Arab participants. Of these certainly the
most interesting is that of Ibn Fadlan, an ambassador sent from
Baghdad on behalf of Caliph Muktedir. While on a mission to the

Bulgars in 921, Ibn Fadlan encountered a group of Vikings, known
in those parts as Rus. The meeting took place on the banks of the Volga.
Ibn Fadlan has a good eye for what was important and characteristic
and a most effective style of narration :
I saw the Rus when they came with their goods and encamped on the
river Itil (Volga). Never had I seen people of more perfect physique. They
are as tall as date-palms, have reddish hair and fair skins. They wear neither
shirts nor coats with sleeves. The men wear cloaks, with one end thrown over
the shoulder leaving a hand free. Every man carries an axe, a sword and a
dagger, and is never seen without them.
This agrees exactly with the archaeological evidence. It is always

agreeable to be complimented by foreigners, but before modern
Swedes become too smug over the good impression made by their
ancestors they should read the next chilling paragraph :
They are the filthiest of God's creatures. They never wash after discharging
their natural functions nor though they were
after sexual intercourse, just as
wild donkeys running loose . Each morning they wash their hands and
. ,
faces in the dirtiest water imaginable. A

maid brings her master a large bowl
of water in which he washes his face and hands and even his hair, which he
then combs out over the bowl. Then he blows his nose over it and spits into it
and makes no effort at holding back even the filthiest matter. When he has
finished the girl takes the bowl to his neighbour, who goes through the same
K 139
the bowl has done the rounds and the
performance. She continues until
whole household has spat, spewed, washed and combed his hair in it.
That isquite enough to go on with.

We can start by consoling ourselves
with the thought that this fastidious Muslim was more sensitive on the
score of cleanliness than was at all common at this time. And we could
used even by the kings of
go on to remind ourselves of the wash-basins
Europe as late as the eighteenth century. In any case the description
must surely exaggerate. It is unlikely to be complete fantasy, but
was filled with fresh water
probably w hat happened was that the bowl
r
for each customer, although the bowl itself remained the same. This
standards of hygiene.
procedure would be in keeping with prevailing
Ibn FacUan also described animal sacrifices to Viking idols made of
wood, attacks of illnesshe had witnessed and much else. Most
spectacular is his account of a funeral on the banks of the Volga :
I went where the (burial) ship was lying. It had already been
to the river
dragged ashore. Four corner posts had been planted upright as supports,
and placed round about were tall wooden figures of human aspect. Then the
ship was arranged on these supports. Meanwhile the men were going up
and
down saying words I did not understand. The dead man was still lying in a
shallow grave. Then they brought a bier and put it on the boat and covered
it with quilted plumped out cushions made of Byzantine brocaded silk
and head pillows of the same material Then the dead man was dressed
. . .
in trousers, hose, boots, tunic and khaftan made of gold material with gold
buttons, and in a cap of brocaded silk an9 sable. Then the body was placed
in the tent on board the ship, laid on the quilt and supported with the
cushions. Strong drink, fruit and sweet-smelling plants were set beside the
body, also bread, meat, and onions. Then they brought a dog along, cut
it in half and threw it into the ship. After this they placed all his weapons at
the dead man's side and brought two horses which they ran about until they
sweated, after which they hewed them up with their swords and flung the
meat into the ship. Then a pair of oxen were brought and likewise cut up
and the parts thrown into the ship. Finally they brought a cock and hen and
went through the same performance.
We must pause again a moment here. This description corres-

for
ponds in every detail with what has been discovered from the boat
burials at Valsgarde, and what is more we are given an additional
piece of information, not susceptible of archaeological proof: the horses
were whipped until they steamed with sweat. The chieftain certainly
\vent into the next world provided with the best of everything in the
140
THE VIKING RAIDS
one he left behind. He was even given a slave girl to take with him, a
volunteer sacrifice :
She was given into the charge of two other girls who were to watch her and
her. They would even wash her feet Meanwhile
go everywhere with . . .
she passed the days of waiting in drinking and singing, and was cheerful and
content.
The girl accompanied her master to the grave not

merely as his servant
but in a sense as his wife, for she went through a form of marriage with
the dead man. When she finally came on board the ship she divested
herself of her ornaments, sang, and submitted to all manner of rites
and ceremonies. She was finally put to death by stabbing and strangling.
The wood under the ship was set alight. Everyone brought a brand and
threw on the pyre, so that the fire swiftly took hold and the ship, tent, man,
it
woman and everything on board were reduced to ashes On the place

. . .
where the ship had been drawn up out of the water they built up a rounded
hummock and set a post of birchwood in the middle, inscribed with the
names of the dead man and the king of the Rus. Then they went away.
This description of a ship burial and cremation bears out the evidence
found in many of the Swedish graves and over five hundred Norwegian
graves. We actually know of several instances where a Viking was
cremated with a woman and the remains buried together. In future we
may be able to use osteological techniques to prove the presence of
those slave girls who 'divested themselves of their ornaments*. Queen
Aasa was buried with a slave woman and we know of other similar
cases.
Shocking though may appear to us, the Vikings saw

this practice
it in a different light.
slave, A
whether male or female, was rightless
and could expect no afterlife. Therefore to be allowed to follow one's
master into the next world was a great privilege. In all, Ibn Fadlan's
narrative is as rich and reliable a complement to the archaeological
evidence as could be wished.
These eastern Vikings or Rus took with them to their graves on the
Volga and the Dnieper the same double-edged swords, hatchets and
gew-gaws as their Scandinavian counterparts. This is known, for
example, from a large cemetery containing barrow graves at Gnezdovo,
not far from Smolensk, where a cremated boat-burial was excavated
by Soviet archaeologists in 1949. Numerous finds have also been made
at Kiev, which was the centre of an important Viking kingdom.
The Rus were actually the Svea, from the coastal area of north
141
Stockholm known as Roslagen. The local people are known as
still
'Rospiggar', a compound which

retains their original name as one
element. The Xestorian Chronicle, the most important account of early
Slavonic history, gives the following explanation :
These Warjagen (Vikings) are called Rus, just as others are called Svea,
Norwegians and Angles and yet others Goths And the Tjude, the Slavs,
. . .
Krivitje and Wesen said to the Rus Our land

: is large and rich but there is
little order in it. Come and rule over us.'
Needless to say, foreign rulers have nowhere and at no time been thus
solicited. The Rus canie as merchants and soldiers; they founded
settlements everywhere and soon commanded wide tracts of territory.

The Rurik 5 Sinhus and
Nestorian Chronicle tells of three brothers,
Truvor. This trinity of names is a characteristic fairy-tale touch, but
in form these names are purely Germanic, and northern Germanic at
that. The two younger brothers soon died but Rurik's descendants
ruled Russia from Kiev for centuries. And so it happened that Russia
got its name from the Swedish Vikings who came from the coastal
region near Stockholm and were called Rus.
In 957 Rurik's daughter-in-law, the princess Olga (if she was also
of Swedish descent her name would originally have been Helga)
visited Byzantiumat the invitation of the Emperor Constantine
Porphyrogenitus. The Rus who accompanied her came to that noble

city on the borders of the orient in a condition very from that
different
of their bewildered predecessors 120 years earlier. According to some
authorities the chief object of the visit was the baptism of the princess,
but the account left by the Emperor suggests that discussion of trading
relations with the powerful Kievan kingdom was also on the agenda.
The Emperor's journal deals with many topics and enumerates the
minutest details of court ceremonial.
On Wednesday 9 September there was a reception for the Russian princess

Olga. The princess entered with her kinsmen, the princesses, and with them
certain carefully chosen serving women ; Olga took precedence as the most
important lady present and the rest followed in order of rank. She stood
wailing at the place where the Chancellor usually stands to ask questions.
She was followed by ambassadors from the Russian princes and by the
merchants . . .
And of another day he says :
On Sunday 18 October a banquet was held in the Golden Palace and the
THE VIKING RAIDS
Emperor sat at table with the Rus and there was another dinner at the same
time at the Pentacubiculum of St Paul and the Empress sat there at table
with her children born in the purple, the wife of the heir to the throne and
the princess Olga. And the princess Olga was presented with 200 miliarenses,
her brother's son with twenty, the priest Grigorij with eight, her senior
ladies-in-waiting with twelve each, their slave women with six each, the
twenty-two envoys with twelve each, the forty-four merchants with six each
and the two interpreters with twelve each.'
The royal dynasties of Vikings who became Rus and established

themselves on the Dnieper are surrounded with an aura of grandeur
and high adventure. Olga's grandson Vladimir (the names in the
Chronicle soon become thoroughly Russian-sounding) came with his
Russian troops to aid the Emperor against the Bulgars, and was
rewarded with a princess born in the purple. He thus acquired as his
wife a genuine imperial princess, perhaps the same lady whom the
German emperor failed to win for his son, the future Emperor Otto II.
There is yet another marriage alliance to record. Anxious to extend
his power from Novgorod, Vladimir brought over reinforcements from
Sweden and married the daughter of Olaf Skot-Konung, the Swedishking.
The Rus strayed far afield in their wanderings along the great rivers
and lakes of eastern Europe. The Dnieper rapids have Swedish names,
and Swedish rune-stones speak of voyages to Jerusalem and Greece.
A marble lion once at Athens (now in Venice) proves that the Vikings
had seen him there, for in true tourist fashion they left their mark
inscribed on his flanks, a serpentine ribbon shape and some runic
characters (see plate 60). The burning southern sun has eroded the
inscription and made it impossible to decipher. Philologists think the
runes commemorate a dead comrade and also incorporate some
boastful remark such as 'We were here', or words to that effect.
By the tenth century it was no longer a question, in either eastern or

western Europe, of daring descents by small bands of freebooters
chancing their arm in foreign lands. Migration and colonization were
now undertaken as deliberate measures for the relief of serious over-
population. The situation was to repeat itself in the nineteenth century,
when the increase in population beyond the capacities of the meagre
moraine soil led many Scandinavians to emigrate to the USA. At both
periods there was a desperate need to conjure up fresh acres from which
to nourish energetic young men and women.
The Viking age was so filled with deeds of violence and bloodshed,
143
so fraught with episodes of outward drama and inward stress, that a
book dealing primarily with Germanic prehistory can do little more
than block in a few of the main features by which it links the prehistoric
period with the Middle Ages.
Scandinavian soil is very rich in finds of the Viking period, archaeolo-
gically speaking an exceptionally
rich period everywhere. Three or
four fresh versions of Germanic animal-patterns were developed during
the period, and examples of some of its finest art will be found among
the illustrations (see plates 61 and 62). The market towns on the Baltic
and German coasts have already been mentioned; the famous
'Jomsburg' has also left its mark on history.
was during the Viking period too that pagan mythology had its
It
final flowering, in the forms which have come down to us through

Snorri and the legends of gods and heroes. Wodan, Thor and Freyr
were now promoted to first place in the pantheon. Valhalla became the
hall prepared for the entertainment of valiant warriors in the next
world, envisaged with naive realism as a place of daily battles and

fresh meat, from the wild boar Sarimmer who enjoyed a daily
resurrection.
What is more, we have
the Icelandic family epics with all their
unparalleled poetic vigour. Through them we can enter the thought-
world of the Vikings as they face the great human issues of life and
death the immortal dead live on in their graves, the power of the clan
:
binds the living and the dead in a single fate, the Thing, the assembly
of freemen, is worthy of high regard and accepts no tyranny from
king or lord. These sagas enlighten us about the prevailing sexual
morality and help to explain the unusual independence and drive of
nordic women. Here we have a society whose intellectual and spiritual
growth was entirely spontaneous, uninfluenced by alien conceptions,
so that men's responses have a refreshing air of immediacy. Although
long since committed to medieval Christendom, German society and

itsprevailing ethic owed much to older, non-Roman purely Teutonic
habits and customs, whose nature is illuminated for us by the Viking
sources.
The brotherhood-of-arms, carefully cultivated, might yet be com-
bined with apparent perfidy, on occasions when the individual felt
impelled to assert himself against all-comers; treachery could lead in
turn to the final excesses of blood-feuds and murders. At the same time
the self-governing groups which set out to establish settlements on
foreign soil were a valuable constructive force.
144
THE VIKING RAIDS
Excavations over the past two decades have uncovered barracks
enclosed by sizable ring walls, set out with the mathematical precision
that musthave gone into the planning of campaigns (see plate 63).
also
Trelleborg was the first to be discovered, followed by Aggersborg,
Nonneborg, Fyrkat and another military camp enclosed in a ring-wall

on the Sylt.
In both East and West a powerful historical process was working
through the Viking raids, giving cohesion to these seemingly isolated
events. Most significant was the connection between the raids, the
newly evolving German Empire and the foundation of Norman states
in Normandy and Sicily.

Some reference must now be made to Viking voyages and discoveries
in the western oceans, where were subjected to conditions
their ships
very different from those encountered on the Russian waterways.

From Norway ships set out for the Orkney and Shetland Isles, which
received their first permanent settlements at this time. These became
the base for the discovery of places yet more distant, the Faroes and
Iceland, although the honours of discovery have been contested, since
it seems that a few Irish hermits who were already in occupation took
their departure when the Vikings arrived with their heavy transports,
their women, cattle and sacks of seed corn. In those days discoveries
were often made from the open sea; a ship might be driven far off
course by a storm and land be sighted unexpectedly. This happened
to a man named Gunbjorn, who reported sighting land far to the west
of Iceland. Erik the Red followed this up and sailed far to the west of
Iceland and back. He
reported the discovery of a fertile shore, and
revealed his talents as a natural colonizer by naming the icebound
c
country Greenland, saying that if a country has a pleasant name

people will be anxious to go there'. In the summer of the following
year, 986, a fleet of twenty-five fully-laden ships left Iceland for
Greenland. Only fourteen of them arrived.
Now it happened that in the year 1000 Erik's son Leif was also
driven off course by a storm and discovered a fertile shore far to the
west of Greenland, where grew wild corn, grapes and timber, things
notoriously absent from Greenland and Iceland. Leif named this
hospitable region Vinland (Wineland). The Northmen had discovered
America, five centuries before Columbus. Plans were soon on foot to
explore the country more thoroughly. A fresh expedition made up of

1 60 men and some cattle set out with the intention of establishing a
settlement. They reached the coasts of Labrador and then turned
145
south, sailing perhaps as far as Newfoundland. Here they met with an
unpleasant surprise in the form of strange-looking men with reddish
brown and plaited hair. They called them Skralingar and did
skins
business withthem despite their hostility. This marks the limit of
northern expansion and migration. Constant forays into all the
countries of Europe had drained off the surplus population of the north
to such good effect that there could be no question of a permanent
settlement in North America. It is
fascinating to speculate what the
course of history would have been in both the Old World and the New
had fate decreed otherwise. What is certain is that men from Greenland
continued for some time to cross to America in search of timber. The
last recorded America took place in 1347. After that the alien
visit to
continent appears to have been quite forgotten.

It is worth mentioning here that the American rune-stone which
has received so much publicity in recent years is undoubtedly a forgery;
we can even demonstrate which books the forger consulted to help
him carry out his hoax.
From the Orkneys the Vikings made voyages south and west. The
islandswere the point from which they took their bearings, which is
why the most northern county of Scotland is called Sutherland or
southland, a name quite meaningless from the British point of view.
Viking graves, swords and feminine ornaments are found everywhere
along the peripheries of Viking expansion. The monument on the Isle
of Man known as Tynwald Hill is unique, a Thing-mound similar to the
royal mounds of Scandinavia. Here on 5 July of every year the new
laws are read; in earlier times the local king received the homage of
his subjects on this hill, and news of the accession of a new
English
monarch is proclaimed from it to this day. English conservatism has
seen to it that norse tradition is better observed on the Tynwald Hill
than even at Old Uppsala itself.
No part of England was left unscathed. In 872 the Vikings captured
London, and about 886 the Danish occupation of the eastern half of
England north of London was formally recognized in the peace between
King Alfred and Guthrum the Dane. The area concerned was called
the Danelaw, a name corresponding to
Roslagen, the military unit of
eastern Sweden. The Danes (together with
appreciable contingents of
Norwegians) continued to rule large parts of England until the middle
of the tenth century.
In the meantime Christianity had
gradually penetrated into
Denmark. The new teaching was discussed, and its finer debated,
points
146
THE VIKING RAIDS
but when the final changeover occurred with the king's formal conver-
sion it was taken so much for granted as to pass almost unnoticed. This
was in the reign of Harald Bluetooth, in the middle of the tenth century.
He erected a rune-stone at Jellinge, a unique memorial on which
paganism and Christianity meet (see plate 64). One face of the triangu-
lar stone block is almost completely covered with large runes, which
read:
King Harald had this memorial set up to Gorm his father and Tyra his
mother, King Harald who united Denmark . . .
On the second face appears a mighty beast in the coils of a serpent

and Norway'. On the third face is the
c
and, below, the inscription . : . .
figure of Christ,
in an attitude of crucifixion but without his cross, also
c
strongly bound; below it are the words . . . and made the Danes
Christians'.
But the adoption of Christianity terminated neither the wars nor the
Viking raids. Danish fleets were still to be seen on all the seas. Harald' s
son, the famous Sven Forkbeard, won great victories against England
and Norway. Each year the English paid over more money to buy
their immunity from pillage, staggering amounts of silver which were
used for fresh armaments. By 1014 Sven had the whole of England in
his hands, and London surrendered without a fight. But when Sven
died soon afterwards the struggle for power broke out anew.
Sven's son Harald took Denmark, his younger son Knut ruled in
eastern England and Wessex paid homage to Ethelred and Edmund
Ironside. Before Knut could be sure of his inheritance he had to endure
four years of bitter fighting, which culminated in the convincing and
decisive victory of Ashingdon. This was shortly followed by the unex-
pected deaths of Edmund of Wessex and Harald of Denmark, so that

by 1 01 8 Knut was sole ruler of Denmark and England. During the
c
peaceful years that followed he fully justified his soubriquet the Great'.
He expelled alien Vikings, arranged matters according to the Danish
model and was tireless in his efforts to build up and foster trade and
prosperity. Without much trouble he also made himself king of Norway
and even cast his gaze at Sweden.
As a good Christian Knut went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he
was an honoured guest at the coronation by the Pope in St Peter's of
the German Emperor Conrad II. So a norseman had at last come to
Rome, not this time to split open the bishop's head but to see Europe
united. On this unique Easter Day of 1027 the head of the Church,
147
the lord of the land and the ruler of the ocean stood side by side in a
trinity of air, earth and water*
In 1027 Knut was thirty-two years old. He died seven years later
and suffered the common lot of constructive minds and spirits. His
ideas were debased and strife and discord flourished anew.
But the Viking raids were now drawing to their end. The ablest
men of Denmark, Sweden and Norway had migrated overseas and
there was once again more than enough land and work for those who
stayed at home. The trading position had fundamentally altered with

the emergence of a new commercial power in the Baltic, the German
Hanse. Scandinavia was late in adopting Christianity. Although the
Swedish king Olaf Skot-konung was baptized in 1008, the pagan
temple at Old Uppsala was not demolished and sacrificial hangings
did not end until 1060. Important chieftains such as those buried at
Vendel and Valsgarde still clung to their pagan cemeteries until about
1 1 oo.There was a stubborn contest between the two faiths in both
Sweden and Norway, particularly in Norway. We know of these
disputes from numerous written authorities; in a sense this struggle
in the minds of men was the most momentous happening of the Viking
age. Christianity won, but the other religion was not without values
whose appeal can still make itself felt even after so many centuries. In
this present discordant world, where events and ideas are in constant
upheaval, our sympathy for the men and women of the Viking age is
perhaps more lively than that of generations whose days were passed
in tranquil and well-ordered times.
148
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Abbreviations
NMC Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen

SHMS Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm
UOO Universitets Oldsakssamling, Oslo
Plates
i a The chamber, approached by the passage at right angles, is roofed in

with heavy cover stones and surrounded by an earthwork. Photo NMG. :
ib SHMS. Photo ATA. See pp. 7-8.

:
2a Young woman in sleeping posture, legs drawn up ; her husband lies

opposite, their feet almost touching. At her back a dog, whose skull
has perished ; at her head, ready to hand, two pots and two stone axes
(whose wooden shafts have naturally decayed), and several other
objects. Linkoping Museum.
2b Found at Skettilljunga, Schonen. Cord-decorated pot two boat-shaped
;
axes with shaft-holes; two thick-necked axes; two hollow-ground

chisels in stone and flint. SHMS. Photo: ATA. See pp. 8-9.
3 Above from a large deposit at Stockhult, Schonen. Large collar, early

:
Bronze Age, remarkable for its clear-cut and austere spiral ornament.
Below examples of boxes worn attached to a belt by the small loops
:
attached to the rim (visible top left) ; from : Kabusa, Schonen ;

Sonnarslov i, Scheming; Slattang, Vastergotland. SHMS. Photo:
ATA. See p. 9.
4a Hallristningar at Kville, Bohuslan. Sketch by B. Kamph-Weisz.
4-b Two Kropfnadeln, found at Norre Fevang, Vestfold (left) and Aske,
Vestfold. UOO.See p. 26.
4c Above: found at Hejsta, Sodermanland discoid bronze fibula
:
Below bog find from Vaet Enge on the Gudenaa, Jutland crown-
: :
shaped bronze neck-ring. SHMS. Photo: ATA. See pp. 14, 22.
5a Bog find from Vebbestrup, North Jutland. NMC. See p. 16.
5b Alrum, Jutland. Photo: G. Hatt. See pp. 16, 58.
6a Orientation ESE-WNW. Skorbaek Hede; several successive houses
might be built on one set of foundations. The details of construction
have been identified as follows house walls, two rows of post-holes in
:
the interior of the houses, stamped clay floor on the west side of each
house, earth floor on the east, for the cattle; central hearth. In this
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
photograph house F is seen from the north, with stone paving at each
of the two entrances on the long side, the hearth in the centre of the
human living quarters and the post-holes for the animals' stalls. Other
houses can be seen in the background. Photo: G. Hatt. See p. 18.
6b Reconstruction based on the archaeological evidence discussed in the
text. Note the storage jar (left) and upright weaving-loom.
The
standing woman is
grinding meal. Photo: NMC. See p. 18.
7 This is the best preserved of the hundred corpses so far recovered from
& the bogs. In plate 7 the side found uppermost has been placed next to
8 the sheet (which is modern) so that what we see is the underside; the
corpse was thus originally lying on the right side. As can be seen,
although the limbs have decayed, head torso and feet are marvellously
well-preserved. The corpse was naked apart from a belt, leather
bonnet and the hangman's rope. Photo NMC. See pp. 20, 58.
:
ga Photo : NMC.
See p. 26.
gb Photo : NMC.
See p. 54.
i o Neck-ring bronze, with hinge, globular terminals and light decoration ;
:
bog find from Osmo, Uppland.

Scabbard silver, for double-edged sword, from Eggeby, Ostergotland,
:
imported from NW
Germany.
Fibulae: in bronze and iron; the three on the left have short coils,
spring clasps and angular or ornamented bows; the one on the right
has a longer coil and an animal head and claw as bow ornament.
Found at (reading from left to right) Pylsgaardsbacke, Gotland Ovre
:
;
Aaleback, Oland; Stora Dalby, Oland, and Ekehogen, Isteraas,

Halland. SHMS. Photo: ATA. See pp. 27, 58.
1 1 Found Ovre Aalback, Oland bossed shield with very wide border
at :
attached by large rivets; diameter just over one foot. The hand
grasping the shield, by the grip seen protruding left, was protected by
the small pointed boss nearby.
Swords very bent, as is often the case with cremation finds. Single-
:
edged, with several rivets in the grips, which formerly had a protective
covering of horn or wood. Their scabbards would be made of wood or
bark; none has survived, although iron clasps have frequently been
found.
Spearheads; long and slender, still unbarbed. SHMS. Photo: ATA.
See p. 28.
12 Although this is the oldest plank-built boat known in Europe, it is
possible that boards found at Valderhaug in Sunnmore belonged to a
plank-built Bronze Age boat.
Reconstruction and sketch: B. Kamph-Weisz. Photo: NMC.
See pp. 28, 54.
13 Photo NMC. See p. 33.
I4a At Lovel Vandmolle; strikingly reminiscent of the large chambers of
the late Stone Age.
150
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
I4b Burial ground at Bulbjerg, north of Aarhus. Photo: NMG. See

PP- 36-7-
15 The Roman tableware is in the
style of about AD 200 ; the set lacks its
saucepan. Note the handle and facial mask of the cauldron. The
glasses are facet-cut. SHMS. Photo ATA. See p. 39.
:
1 6 Photo : NMC.
See p. 40.
iya Silver with gilding, Roman-provincial (Pannonian) work. The
animal head on the handle end is stylized, like those on the older
snakeshead rings. NMG. See pp. 42-45.
iyb Detail from the so-called Hemmoor bucket found at Himlingqje in
1828.
18 Height: five inches. NMG. See pp. 45, 50.
iga The point of the pin can be seen right. The masculine name 'Widuhu-
dar' is scratched in runic characters on the pin-holder, invisible in the
illustration,
igb Here the runic name is Allugod (feminine) ; note the swastika. Both
ornaments are in silver with gilding. NMG. See p. 47.

2oa Glass cup with bull, from Nordrup Grave A. NMG. See p. 53.
sob SHMS. Photo: E. Oxenstierna. See pp. 45, 51.
21 The male god is almost ten feet tall. Found in a bog not far from a
cairn which shows distinct traces of burning and contains pottery
fragments, Landesmuseum Schleswig. See p. 56.
22a SHMS Photo ATA. See pp. 53, 57.
:
22b Hembygdsmuseet, Bunge. Drawing by B. Kamph-Weisz. See p. 58.

23 Discovered 1952. Aarhus Museum. See p. 60.
24 Bog find from Huldremose, Jutland. NMG. See p. 62.
25 Gilded silver-leaf in the so-called star-style: punctured patterns in the
shape of whorls, stars, fishes and triangles.
Left found at Mejlby, Jutland. Note also the animal figures, which
:
have been made separately and soldered on, quadrupeds and (top left)
a seahorse with furled tail. NMG. Right found at Ejersten, Vestfold.
:
Length: about five and a half inches. UOO. See p. 73.

26 See pp. 77-9.
Top left : found at Senoren, Blekinge, diameter three inches.
27 Probably
the earliest of all the gold bracteates, a faithful copy of a Roman
exemplar but with a style of its own, with the emphasis on the contours.
The Latin inscription is an imitation of the Roman model.
illegible
Top right from Lilla Jored, Bohuslan. An almost equally successful
:
imitation of a Roman imperial head, showing the hand raised in

salutation.
Bottom from Gerete, Gotland, diameter three inches (see also plate
:
28). An independent imitation, with the typical quadruped and head,

circle of small dots and swastika (centre right). The geometrical
border includes a row of human masks, separately moulded and
soldered on, and with s-shaped filigree wires. The loop itself recalls the
15*
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
bolster shapes of the gold collars, plates 296, 43 and 44. SHMS.
Photo: ATA. See pp. 83, 87.
28 See plate 27 above.
2ga From Haggeby, Uppland. On the other side there is a ship. SHMS.
Photo ATA.
:
2gb Photo: E. Oxenstierna. See pp. 85, 87.

30 Height about sixteen inches. This is the only wooden idol to show
:
traces of having been sculpted, in contrast to the 'stick* idols of the type
shown in plate 21. The powerful chin (possibly bearded), broad cheek
bones and large eye sockets are reminiscent of the best modern
sculptures. The figure is
holding some rounded object in its
lap.
NMG. See p. 88.
3ia The Ismantorp citadel is built on a natural limestone plateau.
Photo: ATA.
3ib Plan of the Ismantorp citadel. See p. 89.
32 The principal finds from the chieftain's grave, Snartemo. Sword
& (plate 33) : note the stamped plates on the grip, the deep-cut inter-
33 woven decoration on the upper part of the scabbard, the chip-carving
of the two cross-pieces and the two crouching quadrupeds with curved
beaks which form the pommel. All the characteristics of animal
patterning Style I are present. The stamped plates on the other side of
the grip are illustrated in plate 32, centre right: at the bottom is a
quadruped with all four quarters splayed from its backbone; it snaps
with furiously ravening jaws at a figure whose human head with its
pointed beard is easily recognizable in the top right-hand corner. The
topmost plate is upside down, perhaps so that it could be seen properly
by anyone holding the drawn sword. From the sketches (left) we can
see that the subject is two men back to back, their arms, thumbs and
hair interlaced. All the plates are exceptional in the impression of
frenzied power they convey. The magnificent buckle (plate 32 top)
is remarkable for its chip-carved tendrils, with hearts and
post-horns
alternating and here and there a running spiral band. The thong takes
the form of a quadruped whose rear paws are curled back to look like a
tail. This buckle could hardly have been used in the
ordinary way. The
faceted glass (plate 32, bottom left) was repaired in prehistoric times,
by a riveted silver plate decorated with a squatting human figure,
shown above. The pot (plate 32, bottom right) resembles wickerwork,
a common trait in Norwegian ceramic work of this period. UOO.
Sketches by B. Kamph-Weisz. See p. 93.
34 Displays features typical of Germanic animal patterning Style I. Two
monsters with ravening jaws menace a human mask. The shaping of
the heads and the back-curving of the hind-quarters to cover the
bodies is characteristic. The small spirals are a good example of
geometrical chip-carving, a technique derived from Roman provincial
models. NMG. See p. 94.
152
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
Found at Langbak, Akerhus. UOO.

Found at Etne, Sonnhordland ; Bergen Historisk Museum.
36 Universitets Historiska Museum, Lund. See pp. 95, 121.
37 Length seven inches. UOO. See p. 97.

:
38 Length: nine inches. See p. 98.

39 Above SHMS. Photo ATA.
: :
Below: sixth century AD. Photo: ATA. See p. 101.

40 These are dies found on Oland, used to make bronze metal plates for
42 the embellishment of helmets, scabbards and other articles. They ring
the changes on a very restricted number of motifs, and are found
principally in ship-burials in England and Sweden, although a few
have turned up in Germany. We still do not know how these naturalis-
tic scenes came to find a place in an otherwise purely ornamental
artistic tradition. It has only recently been realized that the left-hand
figure in Plate 41 has only one eye, and must therefore represent an
actor playing the part of Wodan in a ritual dedicated to the one-eyed
-
god. There is no doubt that the wolf's costume (right) is assumed
the man's body can clearly be seen emerging from the wolf's skin. The
figure in Plate 42a was for a long time taken to represent Wodan him-
self, but this seems unlikely since the rider is not shown in combat with
the serpent and the birds are not ravens ; the figure is perhaps meant to
be a horseman engaged in some ritual or forming part of a warrior
procession; or it may be some kind of charm. SHMS. Photo: ATA.
See pp. 104, 121.
43- SHMS. Photo : ATA.
44 See p. 106.
45 From Vendel XII, Uppland Length three and three quarter inches
;
:
Deep chip-carving, following the stylistic rules of Germanic animal

ornament, Style II wavy bands (the so-called running-dog pattern)
:
with backward-looking animal heads, in criss-cross symmetry and with

the figures interlaced. Two complete animal forms can be made out
from the chip-carving in (a) the large round eyes in the back-turned
:
heads are the easiest features to distinguish in the sloping bodies with
their great U-shaped beaks. SHMS. Photo ATA. See p. 109.
:
46 The actual grip was very rusted and has been replaced by modern
material. The oldest part of the sword is the gold pommel with its
inlay of red stones which must date from the sixth century or slightly
earlier; the massive ring in gilded bronze and the animal ornament
of the grip belong to Style II. The sword has been given a scabbard
from the eighth century (or slightly earlier). From this evidence it
seems that sword fittings might remain in use for a very long time.
This sword must have been held in high honour it was doubtless one
:
of the great swords, each with its special name and credited with
magic powers, which brought victory and strength to the man who
wielded it. SHMS. Photo: ATA. See p. 109.
153
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
47 The swords are seen in a modern metal frame. Left: another ring
sword (cf. plate 46), but here the ring is of bronze and the inlay work,
using only a meagre quantity of red stones, is of inferior quality, as is

common with seventh century pieces. This is in distinct contrast to the
fine gold work of the sixth century. However, the animal ornament of
the mouth-plate is beautifully done and note the man pinned to the
;
scabbard by a strap decorated with interwoven coils. Museet for

nordiska fornsaker, Uppsala.
Photo Lennartaf Petersens, SvenskaTuristforeningen.Seepp. 144, 153.
:
48 New reconstruction, made possible by recent discoveries and careful

excavations at Valsgarde: note the cheek-guard, the iron strips
protecting the neck, the bronze bird acting as nose-guard, the bronze
eye-brows and the pictorial stamped plates (cf. 40-42) above and
around the temporal bones. Photo: ATA. See p. 109.
49 The form is characteristic of the later Gotland stones. In the upper
section the hero rides into Valhalla, followed by a small man bearing
a wreath. A valkyrie offers him the draught of welcome from a horn ;
his dog runs on ahead. Suspended above the triumph is a battle-field,
9
either that on which the hero met his death or the heroes daily
combat in Valhalla. The lower section shows (top) the sailing ship
which offered alternative means of transport to Valhalla and which is
typically found on many of these stones, and (bottom) motifs from the
heroic sagas. (Left, perhaps Gunnar in the serpents' pit, below a court,
with cattle and gabled houses.) Photo ATA. :
50 Left: length, six inches. Eight complete animal figures interwoven in

pairs form two main symmetrical patterns. At top and bottom of this
large central area is a pair of beasts, hi a finer interlace which contrasts
with the main pattern. In the centre is a bird, flanked by two unpaired
beasts. The grand total of creatures is thus fifteen. The border is filled
with groups of firmly-incised knot patterns of great variety and skill.
The decoration is thoroughly Swedish, and an extension of animal
pattern Style II, but the rectangular form and the method of dividing
up the space are Irish in inspiration. Irish monks were already using
rectangular fittings for their books and reliquaries before the form was
adapted, as here, to pagan buckles. Universitets Historiska Museum,
Lund. Photo: ATA.
Right triangular scabbard for a single-edged sword. Here we have
:
another variant of animal pattern Style II; the knotted interweaving,

however, is similar to that on the buckle shown left. SHMS. See
p. 115.
51 In the foreground the western and largest mound, followed by the
central (and smallest) and eastern mounds, with the Thing mound
slanting obliquely away from it, visible in the aerial picture (b).
Aerial photo: Foto Aero Material A/B F 180.
Ground photo: Svenska Turistforeningen. See p. 116.
154
NOTES ON THE PLATES
Plates
52 SHMS. Photo : ATA. See p. 121 .
53 British Museum, London. See pp. 123-4.

54 British Museum, London. See
pp. 123-4.
55 The description is from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.
Photo: ATA. See p. 126.
56 Ship Museum, Bygdoy. Photo: UOO. See p. 131.
57 The Oseberg wood-carver even lavished his decorations on sleigh

shafts. UOO.
See pp. 133, 144.
58 British Museum, London. See p. 134.
59 Haithabu was planned like Birka, with a semi-circular defence wall

and upper citadel; the cemetery, however, is much smaller. The
section of wall shown is from the neighbourhood of the north gate.
Photo: Landesmuseum Schleswig. See p. 135.
60 Photo Svenska Turistforeningen. See p. 143.
:
6ia UOO.
6ib Length, about four inches. NMC. See p. 144.
62 The head formed one of the corner-posts of the sleigh, which is
unbelievably rich in animal ornament of quite exceptional and
unbridled cruelty. UOO. See pp. 134, 144.
63 Photo : NMC. See p. 145.
64 Photo : NMG. See p. 147.
155
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As a work of comprehensive scholarship and original research, the book by

Brondsted takes first place. However, it deals only briefly with the Viking
era. Lauring is a journalist by profession.
J. Brondsted, Danmarks Oldtid, 3 vols., 1938-40.

P. Lauring, De byggede riget, 1954 Vikingerne, 1956.
H. Arbman, Torntiden', Sveriges Historia, Tiderna I, Stockholm 1947.
J. E. Forssander, 'Sveriges forhistoriska bebyggels', Svenska Folket, Tiderna I,
G. Ekholm, Forntid och fornforskning i Skandinavien, 1935.

H. Shetelig, Det norske folks liv og historie, 1930.
A. Holmsen, Norges Historie /, Fra de eldeste tider til 1660, 1949.
Statens Historiska Museum, Tiotusen aar i Sverige,
1945.
W. Holmqvist, Sveriges Forntid ocfi Medeltid Kulturhistorisk Bildatlas, 1949.
)
H. Jankuhn, Denkmaler der Vorzeit zwischen JVbrrf- und Ostsee, 1957.
For the history of settlements in the early Iron Age, see :
B. Hougen, Fra Seter til Gaard, 1947.

Th, Mathiassen, Studier over Vestjyllands Oldtidsbebyggelse 1948. 9
H. Jankuhn, in Archaeologia Geographica III, Hamburg 1952.

G. Hatt, Oldtidsagre, Copenhagen 1949.
The Ownership of Cultivated Land, 1939.
P. V. Glob, Ard og plov i Nordens oldtid, 1951.
A single large find of the pre-Christian Iron Age :
G. Rosenberg, Hjortspringfundet, 1937.

O. Klindt-Jensen, Bronzekedelenfra Braa, 1953.
K. E. Sahlstrom and N. G. Gejvall, Gravfdltet paa Kyrkbacken i Horns socken,
W. Gotland, 1948.
A single large find of the Roman Iron Age :
K. Friis Johansen, Hoby-Fundet, 1911-35.

S. Mtiller, Juellinge-Fundet og den romerske Periode, 1911.
The Himlingqje finds have been fully published in journals.
Catalogue and distribution maps of all Roman finds in the north :
H. J. Eggers, Der rb'mische Import im freien Germanien, Atlas der Urgeschichte I,
Clothes among the bog finds :
M. Hald, Olddanske Tekstiler, 1950.
157
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Other important publications on the bog finds :
S. Miiller,Det store Solvkarfra Gundestrup i Jylland, 1890-1903.

C. Engelhard, Thorsbjerg Mosefun d, 1863.
Nydam Mosefund, 1865.
Kragehul Mosefund, 1866
Vimose Fundet, 1869.
H. Arbman, 'Karingsjon', Studier i hallandsk jdrnaalder, 1954
The great finds and groups of finds of the migration period :
E. Oxenstierna, Die Goldhorner von Gallehus, 1956.

M. Mackesprang, De nordiske Guldbrakteater, 1952.
9
O. Janse, Le Travail de I Or en Suede,
1922.
B. Hougen, Snartmofunnene, 1935.
Art in the migration period :
B. Salin, Die altgermanische Thierornamentik> 1904, 2nd ed. 1936.

W. Holmqvist, Germanic Art during the First Millenium AD, 1955.
Major Vandal period

finds in the :
Hj. Stolpe and T. J. Arne, Grafaltet vid Vendel, 1912; La Ntcropole de Vendel,
1927.
S. Lindqvist, ed. Ada Musei Antiquitatum Septentrionalium Regiae Universitatis
Upsaliensis.
Uppsala hogar och Ottorshogen, 1936.
Gotlands Bildsteine, I-II, 1941-42.
Major and groups of finds of the Viking era:

finds
A. W.
Brogger, Hj. Falk, and H. Shetelig, Osebergfandet, I-II, IVV, 1917.
H. Arbman, Birka /, Die Grdber, 1943.
A. Geijer, Birka III, Die Textilfunde, 1938.
H. Jaiikuhn, Haitkabu. Sine germanische Stadt der Friihzeit, 3rd ed. 1956.
A. W. Brogger and H. Shetelig, Vikingeskipene, 1950.
P. Norlund, Trelleborg, 1948.
M. Stenberger, Die Schatzfande Gotlands der Wikingerzeit II 5 1947.
H. Arbman and M. Stenberger, Vikingar i
Vdsterled, 1935.
H. Arbman, Svear i Osterviking, 1935.
Special topics :
A. Oldeberg, Metallteknik under fdrhistorisk tid, I-II 3 1942-3.

M. Stenberger, ed. VaLlhagar: a Migration Period Settlement in Gotland, Sweden,
I-II, 1955.
Scandinavian runic writings have been

published in the following issues :
I-IX, 1900-1957.
Sveriges Runinskrifter,
L. Jacobsen and E. Moltke, Danmarks
Runindskrifter, I-II, 1941-42.
Norges Indskrifter med de aeldre Runer, I-III, 1905-24,
Xorges Indskrifter med deyngre Runer, I-III, 1941-54.
158
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Some major or recent area surveys :
O. Almgren and B. Nerman, Die altere Eisenzeit Gotland?, or Die Volker-

wanderungszeit Gotland*, 1923-35.
E. Nyl6n, Diejungere vorromische Eisenzeit Gotland*, 1955.
wanderungszeit Gotlands, 1923-35.
M. Stenberger, Gland under dldre jarnaaldern, 1933.
E. Oxenstierna, Ostergotlands altere Eisenzeit, 1958.
Die Urheimat der Goten, 1945-48.
Ella Kivikoski, Die Eisenzeit Finnlands, I-II, 1947-51.
H. Shetelig, Vestlandske graver fra Jernalderen, 1912.
S. Grieg, Listas Jernalder, 1938.
E. Albrectsen, Fynske Jernalsdersgrave I 3 1954.
K. Larsen, Bornholm i Aeldre Jernalder, 1949.
H. Norling-Ghristensen, Katalog over aeldre romersk jaernalders grave i Aarhus
Ami, 1954.
See also a large number of important papers in the following journals :
Ada Archaeologies Copenhagen.

Aarboger for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie, Copenhagen.
Fra Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark, Copenhagen.
Kuml, Aarbogfor Jysk Arkaeologisk Selskab, Aarhus.
Fornvanrm, utgiven av KungL Vitterhets-, Historie- och Antikvitets-Akademien,
Stockholm.
Viking, Tidskriftfor norron arkeologi, Oslo.
Universitetets Oldsaksamling. Aarbok, Oslo.
Universitetet i Bergen. Aarbok, Bergen.
Finska Fornminnesfdrmingens Tidskrift, Helsingfors.
Finskt Museum, Helsingfors.
Suomen Museo, Helsinld
This short bibliography lists some standard works and more recent books,
without aiming to be systematic or comprehensive. The literature on the pre-
historic north is widely dispersed among journal articles, large publications
of finds, or research works, and is not easily accessible.
159
INDEX
Aasa, Queen, 133-45 H 1 Bronze Age, 9-10, 13-5, 19, 21-2, 28,
Abdurrhaman (Emir of Seville), 138 36,53558,62-3,125, 130
Adam of Bremen, 1 1 7 Burgundians, 42, 74
Adils, 103, 107, 121 Bygdoy Museum (Oslo), 131
Aethelhere, 124-5
Aetius, 76 Caesar, Julius, 31
Ahelmil, 91 Carus, 73
Alaric, 75 Cassiodorus, 90-1
Alemanni, 42, 75 Celts, 25-7, 31, 36, 41, 63-5, 79-81, 86
Alexander the Great, 84 Charlemagne, 127
Alfred, King, 146 Charles the Bald, 137
Al-Hakam, 138-9 Charydes, 35
Amalaberga (Theodoric's daughter), 91 Chatti, 42
Ambders, Marina, 77 Ghauci, 42
Anastasius, 89, 91 CHEIRISOPHOS EPOI, 34
Angles, 42, 64, 124-5, 142 Cherusci, 30, 42
Anglo-Saxons, 96 Christian iv, 77
ANSIO DIODO (Ansius Diodorus), 40 Christianity, 76, 112, 124, 127, 136, 138,
ANSIUS EPAPHRODITUS, 38 144, 146-8
Anthemius, 89 Cimbri, 29, 35, 65
Arcadius, 88 CIPIUS POLYBIUS, 38
Arminius, 30-1 Clovis, 76, 79, 91
Attila the Hun, 76, 102 CN TREBELLIUS ROMANUS, 33
Augustulus, Emperor Romulus, 76, 89 Comitialis of Rheinzabern, 51
Augustus, 32, 34-5 Conrad n, 147

Aurelian, 73 Constantine n, 73
Constantine the Great, 73, 115
Basiliscus, 89, 120 Constantius n, 73
Bavarians, 42 Craftsmen and kings, 77-108
Beowulf, 96, 101, 103-7, I2 3
Bergio, 90 Darwin, Charles, i
Berig, 29-30 Drusus Germanicus, 35
Bluetooth, Harald, 147
'Boat-axe culture*, 8 Early village communities, 13-30
Bracteates, 84-8, 94,99 Edda (Snorri), 54-5, 80, 85
British Museum, 123-4 Egil-Ongentheow, 103-4, 107, 121
161
INDEX
Enteb011e folk, 7 History of the Franks, 105
Erik the Red, 145 Hlewagast, 79-80, 83, 85, 94
Erikson, Leif, 145 Horec, King, 138-9
Ethelred, 147 Huns, 75-6, 90, 93, 102, 114
Evagre, 91 Hygelac the Ge'at, 104-7
Fadlan, Ibn, I39-4 1 Iliad, The, 34

Felix, Arabia, 35 Iron Age, 10-12, 14-18, 22-6, 28, 33,
Fervin, 91 36* 53-4> 56-9> 62-4, 66-7, 7> 81, 96,

Finnaithae, 91 102, 116, 125, 129-30
Flatlund, Onund, 56-7 Ironside, Edmund, 147
Forkbeard, Sven, 147
Franks, 42, 75-6, 79, 105, 127, 137 Jeremiah (Old Testament), 127
42
Frisians, Jesus Christ, 35, 105
Funnel-Necked Beaker culture, 7 Jordanes the Goth, 29, 90, 92, 105
Justinian, 889
Gauthigoth, 91, 105 Justinus i, 89
GSatas (Gotar), 91, 103-7, no, 118, 120 Jutes, 105
Geirstad-Alf, Olaf, 133-4
Gepids, 74 Kalevala, 126
German Empire, 145 Khordabdah, Ibn, 128
Germmia (Tacitus), 32, 39, 54, 60 Kirsten's horn, 77-9, 81-2, 86, 88
'Germans', derivation of, 31 Knut the Great, 147-8

Glycerius, 89 Krabbe, Gregers, 78
Goths, 29, 42, 47-8, 51, 71, 74-5, 92, 105 26-8
Kropfnadeln, 12,
Gratian, 75, 87
Grauballe man, 59 Langobardi, 42, 75-6, 91
Gregory of Tours, 105 Lassen, Erik, 78
Gustavvr, 7, 119 Leo n, 89
Guthrum the Dane, 146 Lincoln Park (Chicago), 132
Liothidia, 90
Haariager, Harald, 108, 134 Lodbrok, Ragnar, 137
Hall, Clark, 101, 104-5 Louis the Pious, 128
Hallin, 90
Hdllristnmger, 9, 28, 130 Marobodus (king of the Marcomanni),
Harald of Denmark, 147 30> 33
Hasting, 138 Migration period, 77-108
Hatt, Gudraund, 15 Mixi, 91
Heidenreich, Niels, 78-9, 100 Montelius, Oscar, 1-3
Heimskringla (Snorri), 103 Muktedir, Caliph, 139
'Hemmoor bucket9 , 43, 45, 51, 125
Hermanric, 75 Naharvali, 82
Hermunduri, 42 Nestorian Chronicle, 142-3
Heruls, 76, 86, 91-2 Numerianus, 73
Hildebrand, Bror Emil, 119
Himlingoje find, 45-7, 50-1, 65, 72, 83 Odoacer, 76
Historical Museum of Stockholm, 24 Oehlenschlager, Adam, 79
162
INDEX
Olga, Princess, 142-3 Svea (Suiones) kingdoms and culture,
Orosius, 65 68-70, 90, 102-8, 109-26, 129, 133,
Ostrogoths, 75-65 105 141-2
Otingis, 91 Svendsvatter, Kirsten, see Kirsten's horn
Otto n, 143 Swart, Peter, 117
Peat bogs, contents of, 53-66 Tacitus, 32, 35, 39, 54, 60-1, 65, 68-9,
Persians, 62 73,82
Persson, Anders (Par), 100, 106 Teutons, 29
Pliny, 17, 32 Theodoric the Great, 76, 90-2, 105
Porphyrogenitus, Emperor Constantine, 'Theophilus, 128
142 Theustes, 90
Pretty, Mrs E. M., 123-4 'Thing mounds', 117-8, 137, 144, 146
Probus, 73 Thjodolf of Hvin, 103
Procopius, 91, 105 Thracians, 62
Ptolemy, 32 Thuringians, 42, 90-1
Pythias of Marseilles, 19-20, 32 Titus,47
Tollund man, 58-60
Roduulf, 92 'Typological method* (Montelius), 1-2
Roman influences, 31-52
Runic alphabet, invention of, 47-50 Uppland ship burials, 109-16
Rurik, 142
Rus, 139-43 Vagoth, 90-1, 105
Valens, 75
Sachs, Hans, 80 Valentinian m, 90
Sarmatians, 51 Vandals, 29, 36, 42, 71-2, 74-5
Saxons, 42 Varus, 31
Schleswig Landesmuseum, 64 Vasa, Gustavus, 117-8
Scot-Konung, Olaf, 143, 148 Veidekonge, Gudrod, 134
Scralingar (American Indians), 146 Vendel-crow, Ottar, 120-2
Scythians, 51, 62 Vikings, 61, 85, 88, 108, in, 114, 117,
Semitones, 35 127-48
Sernander, Rutger, 12-13, 21 Vinland (America), discovery of, 145-6
smus, 35 Visigoths, 75, 105
Snorri, 55, 80, 85, 103, 121-2, 133, 144
75
Stilicho, Warni, 91
Stone Age, 5-10, 37, 53, 99, 129 Wilhelm i, 109
Strabo, 19-20, 32 Wilhelm n, 96
Strindberg, August, 2
Suehans, 90 Tnglinga (Snorri), 121
Suevi, 42 Ynglingar, 103, 108, 124-5
Sutton Hoo find (Suffolk), 123-5, *3 l Tnglingatal, 103-4, IQ 6
163

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Ancient Cultures

Eric Graf Oxenstierna

Translated by Janet Sondheimer

THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY

1957 by J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachf. GmbH, Stuttgart

English translation 1967 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-27324

Printed in Great Britain

1 SCANDINAVIA IN THE STONE AND BRONZE AGES 5

3 THE GREAT ENCOUNTER 31

The prehistorians of northern Europe were slow to begin to dig.

the wake of Napoleon's armies; the secrets of Babylon, Persepolis and

Germanic prehistory still remained largely in the hands of anti-

may be illustrated by the motor-car, which was originally constructed

forgetting that to the layman it is immaterial whether an ornamental

pin one- or two-spiralled, whether it has a scroll top, whether

shut or open, and even whether it has a turned-over base.

by their younger brothers, the technologists and atom-splitters whose

from the political influences of the pre-war period. German archaeolo-

recognition that the social sciences are indispensable to a nation's

the southward passage of the melt-waters was marked by barren moraine

immigrant groups and peoples.

reindeer antler, bone, wood. It is difficult to say which groups of finds

should be attributed to the 'northern races ; entire populations must

post-glacial period the landscape rapidly

highly important step forward in beginning to cultivate his own food.

potsherds from at least 1,500 separate vessels, together with innumerable

dary must have confronted one another if not as enemies at least as

people were Lido-Europeans. This in turn may make it possible to draw

beginnings about 1500 BC through the thousand years of its duration.

in the Stone Age, as was convincingly demonstrated a few years ago by

problems for further research.

copper and tin must have been imported.

mastered, and so we commonly describe as the lron Age' that period

named after the settlement site of about 500 BG discovered at Jastorf. In

Artistically the introduction of the new

small graves in Jutland, along the Norwegian coasts, at Schonen and

islands and the entire Scandina-

The Swedish Rutger Sernander had already realized the

period, which began about 3000 BG was followed by a marked swing to

forced out by the great deterioration in the climate which Sernander

scanty material found had added nothing of significance. The discussion

grass, is seen to retreat; in the Norwegian highlands the tree-line is

Salzkammergut, that is to say precisely those areas oil the borders

of fertile zones which would be particularly susceptible to climatic

spend the winter in the open. There are nineteenth-century records of

elements as soon as the cattle could no longer survive an outdoor

impressive barrows no longer had any superiority. What counted now

along the hill-tops in their hundreds, occupying a prominent position

world, fine wooded country was being degraded into impoverished

rectangle after another. Such large and apparently haphazard patch-

in the Iron Age, only to move elsewhere a few centuries later.

broad or narrow, short or long, these prehistoric fields were always

19405. It is only possible in places where the upper stratum of humus is

Criss-cross ploughing presupposes large square fields and a hook-

customary to a part or even the whole of a plough to the gods,

and to deposit the offering in a swamp.

1951 they proved astonishingly numerous. Some of the complete