Fra antikristne symboler til »ophitisk kunstsmag«: Dyrestil i oldtid og nutid

From anti-Christian Symbols to Ophitic Taste Animal art in prehistory and now By Karen Høilund Nielsen Throughout the post-Roman period, zoomorphic decoration has been widespread in Scandinavia, while in certain periods the same has been the case over much of the rest of Europe. In the study of this period in more recent times the animal art has been treated as of great significance; indeed for a long time was the only material available for scientific study. This has had a profound influence on the history of such research, an influence which remains substantial today. The subject of animal art is not simply a matter of style, but also of typological, chronological, relational, social, mythological, religious and cosmological questions. The history of scholarship has been very different in relation to the two periods concerned, the Germanic Iron Age and the Viking Period. The styles of the Germanic Iron Age were defined at an early stage and have remained largely unaltered since. The Vikingperiod styles, by contrast, are still an issue of debate. As a result the two periods are treated separately, and in very different ways. Animal art may also be the focus of a contemporary written source. In 747 Boniface referred, in a letter to Cuthbert of Canterbury, to »superstition« embodied in costume in the form of wide bands of snakes along the edges. Precisely this can be seen in preserved textiles from Evebø and Mammen. Although Boniface clearly regarded animal decoration as heathen, it came to be deliberately used by the Church. As early a scholar as C.J. Thomsen recognized animal art as something special, and alluded to it as the Ophitic taste. Subsequently he distinguished an earlier and a later style: snake-motifs as opposed to dragon-motifs. The snake-motifs included, for instance, the D-bracteates, and the dragon-motifs of the Jellinge cup. Thomsen thus took the first steps on the road towards the comprehensive research into animal art that has subsequently been undertaken

Ulv, hest og drage: Ikonografisk analyse af dyrene i stil II-III

Wolf, Horse, and Dragon An iconographic analysis of the animals of Styles II-III By Karen Høilund Nielsen The fauna of animal Styles II and III can be identified by species to a certain degree, although not so many of the quadrupeds. Meanwhile the corpus of material is now so large that a systematic analysis should provide some insights into the matter. This systematic analysis is based on the occurrence, on single objects, of combinations of body-elements that are supposed to be relevant to the identification of species. Correspondence analysis is applied to the objects and body-elements and the result presents the general relationship between various types of body-elements, with a frequent tendency to clustering. The material is analysed separately for each of the following regions: Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England, and the Continent. A series of other details were also recorded: the number of legs, special head-types, and the relationship with earlier and later styles. The result for Scandinavia was a division of the material in seven sub-groups, probably involving three different species. The old terminology of Styles B, C and D is maintained, although the content may vary. B1 is the classical one-ribbon animal, and B2 to some degree the same except that the body-ribbon is now split in two and may diverge. The feet are in both cases usually fringed, the head looking backwards, and the jaws open. The C1 animal still has a body of two ribbons, and the head looking backwards, but the feet are framed and the jaws closed into a muzzle. The C2 animal is growing more triangular and the head is forwardlooking. From the D1 animal onwards we are back to the one-ribbon bodies, but the limbs are growing longer and thinner as is the body. The head is forward-looking, the jaws look more like a pair of pincers and the feet are becoming more claw-like. The eyes change into an oval (almond shape) rather than the usual roundtype. The body has an almost swan-like shape. The entire expression is now more aggressive. The primary change of D2 is the backwards- looking head and a body wound in different figure-eight loops. D3, finally, has its body in a swan-like fashion, but the body diverges markededly and its aggressive attitude is very significant. In the Anglo-Saxon material only B1 is identifiable. The other animal types seem to a large degree to be developments of the Scandinavian B1 animal. It is, however, possible to see some links with the Scandinavian C2 and D1/D3 creatures. On the Continent, the B1 animal and developments based upon it are predominant. The B1 animals, therefore, seem to be well known in all Style II areas, whereas the other Scandinavian animal types seem to be virtually confined to Scandinavia. Only a few traits in the Anglo-Saxon material may indicate some contact within the wider area of the style. On the Continent no adoptation of the aggressive attitude can be identified, although it does turn up in some of the Insular manuscripts. The study of legs shows that the animals in Scandinavia very rarely are seen with less than the expected two pairs of legs. In both Anglo-Saxon England and on the Continent one pair often goes missing. Additionally it can be claimed that form B1 has its roots in Scandinavian Style I, whereas it is impossible to show that the Anglo-Saxon and Continental B1 animals have their roots in the local Style I. In Scandinavia there is thus a continuous development from Style I to II; there is a development of the style as such, but always in a way that makes it clear that the artisan was well aware of the animal and its species and its anatomy. In respect of both Anglo- Saxon England and the Continent the Style II animal seems not to have any roots in Style I. Most of the Style II animals are variations of the B1 animal, and the artist is not very conscious of the animal’s anatomy let alone its species. This may reflect significant differences in the societies of the respective regions. Consequently, the identification of the animals only seems to be significant in respect of the Scandinavian material. The B1 and B2 animals can be identified as wolves primarily on basis of their teeth and their repeated appearance in set combinations with other animals, which may or may not have the teeth. Furthermore, the wolf is basis of many early Scandinavian names and is linked with the wolf-warriors: the Úlfheðnar. The C1 and C2 animals have muzzles and hoofs and bear a clear resemblance to other, more sculptural animals that are undoubtedly horses. They are less easily related to other sources, although many horses appear in Norse mythology, albeit few of them with any still identifiable function. Finally, the D1, D2 and D3 animals bear no resemblance to real animals. They are aggressive animals with long limbs and a long body. It is suggested that they are dragons or serpents. Such creatures are known from the surviving literature, but their appearance is not clearly documented. The wolf must have been a well-known feature all over Style-II Europe, whereas the horse and the dragon seem to be Scandinavian interlude. The origin of the aggressive attitude is unknown, and it may have occurred earlier in Scandinavia than in Britain. Its explanation, although unknown, could still be common

Germansk dyrestil (Salins stil I-III): Et historisk perspektiv

Germanic Animal Art (Salin’s Styles I-III) A historical perspective By Karen Høilund Nielsen & Siv Kristoffersen The study of animal art has been a strong tradition within archaeological research in northern Europe and Scandinavia. The history of this field of research provides a perspective that helps one to understand the development of archaeology as a whole. Many scholars have contributed to the study of Germanic animal art, and an attempt is made to highlight the most important of these. This stands alongside an attempt to present the study of animal art in its entirety, in order to reveal the various research traditions. This is accompanied by a focus upon the individual scholars and their involvement in various debates, both of a methodological or theoretical character, and in respect of interpretation. The history of the subject is divided into five principal sections. Under the first, Animal art becomes a science, the slender beginnings under C.J. Thomsen and Oscar Montelius are discussed, as well as the man who truly put the issue on the map, Sophus Müller. His thesis of 1880 considered most of the questions that have since remained live. The study of animal art became a scientific academic discipline, and attention was focussed upon understanding of the societies that produced these styles. It was Montelius, however, who set the standard for the next generation, which consisted of Typologists and Art Historians such as Bernhard Salin, Nils Åberg, Sune Lindqvist and Haakon Shetelig. In their time, animal art became the central focus of research concerning the late Iron Age and early Middle Ages. They laid a foundation that is very much the one we work upon today. A large corpus of material was presented, covering most of the area in which animal art is found. The analysis of the style was divided between two different schools, one of which worked with individual style-elements and the other with whole compositions. The division into Styles I-III stood firm, and a sub-division of Style II was being developed. The origins of the styles remained a matter of discussion, however, even though the general view attributed Styles I and II to a Continental source. New finds such as those from the Vendel burials and the Oseberg ship grave affected the discussions. Under The Second Generation – Regionalism, scholarship became more inward looking, with an emphasis on the publication of new excavations and attempts to look at the meaning of the finds in their local areas. In one way this ushered in a sort of regionalism. Finds such as Snartemo and Valsgärde were important in this phase. The leading figures were Wilhelm Holmqvist, T. D. Kendrick, E. T. Leeds, Eva Nissen Meyer, Bjørn Hougen, Greta Arwidsson, Pär Olsén and J.-E. Forssander. Holmqvist was one of the few who continued to work with styles generally on a European scale. Regional studies were otherwise undertaken for Anglo-Saxon England, Norway, and parts of Uppland. While Holmqvist, as also Nissen Meyer and Hougen, kept faith with Salin’s stylistic groupings, the analyses of the finds from England and the Valsgärde burials saw some breaking away from this line. The social aspect was emphasized by Nissen Meyer, Holmqvist and the Uppsala school. This also involved increasing attention to the religions, social and political contexts. There was growing focus on Scandinavia as the most informative area in respect of animal art, as Holmqvist argued that Style II had been created there, while Leeds came to the conclusion that Anglo-Saxon Style I must have come to England from Scandinavia. The study of animal art and archaeology itself changed character with the Second World War. The scholars who then led the field had one thing in common – consciously or not, an anxiety over the potential misuse of their ideas. This led to positivism and logical positivism together with New Archaeology, and insistent demands that only that which could be measured, weighed, or directly observed could used as evidence became central. Objective scholarship was the target. Under the heading The Lost Innocence and Puritanism belong the scholars Bertil Almgren, Mats P. Malmer, Mogens Ørsnes, Egil Bakka, Günter Haseloff and Helmut Roth. The extensive excavations at Helgö brought production into the range of topics and the animal art of eastern Scandinavia was presented in Aarni Erä-Esko’s dissertation. In Germany the contents of the animal motifs were discussed in relation to the iconographical tradition by scholars such as Herbert Kühn, Hayo Vierck and Helmut Roth. The relationship between Germanic animal art and Late Roman arts was the subject of works by Horst Wolfgang Böhme and Sonia Chadwick Hawkes. In the section Symbolism and the New Culture Historians the »young Turks« join in, style-specialists who have made their mark from about 1980 onwards. These have attempted to a greater or lesser degree to bring out new aspects of the study of style and to place it within a different framework. This has gone hand in hand with increasing interest in theoretical archaeology and greater attention to symbols and the role of material culture in the mental and social spheres. Such work provides a basis for a quite different conception of the place of animal art in Iron-age society. In England it has been David Leigh and George Speake who have built further upon the classical traditions of style history. In Scandinavia we see individuals who broke radically away from the existing situation such as Arne B. Johansen and Lennart Karlsson. Throughout the period in which the animal styles have been discussed, attempts have been made to place the decorative art in the context of the development of Iron-age society, and one scholar who has particularly sought to integrate the style into the political and social development of the age and to link this with religion and cosmology is Lotte Hedeager. Complementing the theoretical impulses of this phase, Karl Hauck has been a highly influential figure. Hauck works in the tradition of German art history with iconographical analysis and investigating the iconographical context. Motif-interpretation of this kind can be found in the work of several scholars, such as Bente Magnus. For a long time scholars disputed over the origins of the styles, especially Style II – now it has become a basic premiss to see the animal styles as something essentially Nordic. This has opened the way for the study of style to take on a significance beyond typology or chronology, an opportunity which has slowly, hesitantly, but increasingly been taken up. This has led to the situation in which Germanic animal art is seen as a gateway to lost myths, beliefs, cosmology, political divisions, and more: quite simply the gateway to the immaterial world that archaeologists have long regarded as essentially untouchable. In the work of the most recent generation of researchers in this field, the animal art itself, modern social theories, and the progressive German tradition of art history have come together. The latter has been lurking in the wings all the time, but it has taken three-quarters of a century for archaeologists to embrace it

En gravplads fra Okholm

Ved Okholm, lidt vest for Vester Vedsted, blev der i 1960erne udgravet en urnegrav fra slutningen af 500-årene. Urnen og dens indhold gennemgåes, og det foreslåes, at en række af denne tids grave er fejldateret til tidlig vikingetid. Okholm-graven vidner om forbindelser til store dele af Europa - i særdeleshed det frisiske område. Der argumenteres for, at en frisisk befolkningsgruppe - måske som følge af den frisiske ekspansion på dette tidspunkt -  delvist har koloniseret området, evt. i tilknytning til en høvding i lokalområdet

Et ornamenteret fibel-fragment fra Enderup ved Hviding

Et ornamenteret fibel-fragment fra Enderup ved Hvidin

Viumgård: A Germanic Iron Age cemetary in Salling

Viumgård  A Germanic Iron Age cemetery in Salling Cemeteries from the Germanic Iron Age (4th-7th century AD) are a rarity in southern Scandinavia, and those dating from the transitional period between Early and Late Germanic Iron Age are extremely seldom. Nevertheless, a rescue excavation at Viumgård in Hjerk parish in 2008 uncovered a small cemetery containing cremation and inhumation burials from this transitional period, or more precisely the period AD 400-575 (figs. 1-2). Furthermore, four of the inhumation burials were furnished with beads that included several imports of types well known from Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent. The excavation revealed nine cremation burials (table 1) and eight inhumation burials dating from the Germanic Iron Age, as well as an urn burial that may also be from this period (fig. 3). No funeral pyre site was found, but seven of the burial pits contained cremated bones and pyre debris. In one case, a burial pit had been carefully dug into an older inhumation burial. In two other cases cremated bone had been carefully redeposited in inhumation burials. Small amounts of cremated bone and pyre debris were also found in the fill of two further inhumation burials. The urn contained cremated bone. Most of the cremation pits were circular, but some resembled the inhumation burials in size and shape (fig. 4). Their orientation varied. The cremated bone was predominantly of human origin, representing various ages and both genders, but a few animal bones were also identified (table 3). Most of the eight inhumation burials were orientated W-E with the head to the west. One inhumation burial was surrounded by an oval ditch. No traces of the inhumated human remains were preserved (figs. 4-6, table 2). Three female inhumation burials were furnished with beads and brooches (figs. 7 and 10). Two contained traditional brooches (small equal-armed brooches in grave A45 and hybrid beak brooches in grave A2), while grave A3 had a single annular brooch of Anglo-Saxon type. The beads in grave A3 were of local types and hung from the brooch placed at her right shoulder. The beads in grave A45 (including a few foreign types) were on a string at the front of the dress. The bead ornament in grave A2 was composed of four rows and contained several foreign bead types (fig. 9). Fragments of textile from grave A2 were identified as rather coarse woollen twill (fig. 8), while those recovered from grave A45 constituted warp-faced woollen tabby, in which the brooches were fastened, and woollen twill from another garment or blanket (fig. 11-12). The artefacts from the burials were classified and analysed for their chronological potential (figs. 12-28). The brooches and beads were central in this respect. The brooches comprise cruciform brooches (fig. 13), small equal-armed brooches (fig. 14), a hybrid type of beak brooch (fig. 15) and an annular brooch of Anglo-Saxon type (fig. 16). Apart from the latter, they all form part of a well-known chronological sequence. Glass beads have not really been taken into consideration in the chronological debate in southern Scandinavia – except in relation to the Late Germanic Iron Age on Bornholm. The beads found at Viumgård are crucial to dating the period around the transition from the Early to the Late Germanic Iron Age. Several of the bead types are well-dated in continental and, especially, Anglo-Saxon contexts, also regarding absolute dates (figs. 18-20, tables 4-5). The beads from grave A3 are typical for burials from the Early Germanic Iron Age, while those from grave A45 represent a combination of well-known types from Early Germanic Iron Age contexts and examples from Brugmann’s Bead Group B1. The bead ornament from grave A2, comprising four rows of beads, shows an entire chronological development in glass beads. The beads of the first (innermost) string closely resemble those from grave A45 and consequently include examples of Bead Group B1 – all in yellowish shades. In the second string, beads belonging to Bead Group B2 are introduced, all in shades of yellow and red. The beads of the third string still belong to Bead Group B2. Their shades are blue and white. The orange beads of the fourth (outermost) string belong to Bead Group B2/C and are in shades of red and orange. Large numbers of red and orange glass beads are characteristic of the early part of the Late Germanic Iron Age (fig. 21). Together with other burial finds where small equal-armed brooches are associated with glass beads, grave A45 show that this brooch type is always combined with beads usually seen in the Early Germanic Iron Age or, in some cases, with well-dated imported beads (fig. 29). Beak brooches, on the other hand, are mostly found together with red and orange beads, as seen in the outermost string of the bead ornament from grave A2. Existing chronological schemes place the emergence of the small equal-armed brooches and the beak brooches in the same phase (1A). Based on the grave assemblages from Viumgård, new analyses have now shown that there is a phase prior to phase 1A, as previously defined. As a preliminary solution to this situation, phase 1A has now been divided into two sub-phases – the first with the small equal-armed brooch as a leading type, while the second is characterised by the beak brooch, together with the first red/orange bead assemblages. The emergence of the small equal-armed brooch is contemporary with that of Bead Group B1, which has a start date of AD 510/545. Similarly, the introduction of the beak brooch is contemporary with the emergence of Bead Group B2/C, dated to AD 555/585. Based on the artefacts furnishing the burials, the southeastern part of the cemetery is the oldest, beginning in about AD 400 (fig. 30). Most of the cremation burials are furnished, but with only one or a very few artefacts (fig. 31). Inhumation was introduced much later: Grave A45, with its surrounding ditch and a location northwest of the old cemetery, was probably the first. Most of the inhumation burials are located around grave A45 and are all either contemporary with this or later (fig. 30). The grave furnishing here is different, i.e. more hierarchical (fig. 31). The earlier cemetery was still in use and a few late inhumation burials were found here too. It is uncertain whether this was due to a branch of the family buried in the old cemetery breaking away and moving to the new cemetery, with a new burial tradition, or whether the new cemetery belonged to a new family (with a member of Anglo-Saxon origin) who moved into the area. What is certain is that it happened at a crucial time – coinciding precisely with a significant shift in society, which sees expression in a profound increase in the number of small equal-armed brooches and beak brooches found at specific settlement sites. Perhaps it also reflects that the tradition of wearing brooches was extended to a much wider group of the female population, also as a result of social changes? Both cemeteries went out of use in the second half of the 6th century. The number of metal-detector finds from Museum Salling’s area has increased significantly in recent years, including at a site quite close to Viumgård (fig. 32, table 6). While only a single cruciform brooch has been found there, numerous small equal-armed brooches and beak brooches have been recovered, and these probably also reflect the social changes that took place. Vium is an old sacral place name. The location of the cemetery and the settlement, and the metal-detector finds from the area to the south of the cemetery, all in close association with one of the peninsula’s main watercourses, may indicate that Vium was a kind of central place. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Medieval thing was also held not far away from Vium. The metal-detector finds and the developments evident at the cemetery may suggest that establishment of a central place took place in the first half of the 6th century. However, to obtain a more detailed picture of the developments at Vium, and the type of site it represented, further research is needed in the future. Karen Høilund Nielsen Beder Inge Kjær Kristensen Museum Salling Kurt Glintborg Overgaard †                        &nbsp