Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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Both Cassiodorus and Jordanes thus allowed the Christian Ostrogoths and

their powerful kings in Italy to trace their descent from Scandinavia and a

pagan god; and this they did two centuries after this people had converted to

Christianity. In this, however, the Ostrogoths did not differ essentially from

other Germanic peoples such as, for instance, the Langobards in Italy in the

seventh century

or the Anglo-Saxons in England,

where Christian authors

legitimise their Christian people and Christian kings in a pagan prehistory.

The Scandinavian origin myth maintained by the Germanic peoples of early

medieval Europe was more than just a series of authors copying one another.

Myths played a vital role in the creation of a political mentality amongst the

new Germanic warlords and kings in Europe.

And this myth takes a special

turn when the example of the Heruli is taken into consideration.

The Heruli were one of the many Germanic peoples who are alleged to have

come from Scandinavia. Their own tribal history was never written – or at least

has not survived – so we know of them only from other sources. On the other

hand, this is one of the Germanic peoples whose fate is relatively well recorded

and whose connection with Scandinavia appears to be real. From as early as the

third century, after they had left their original homeland in Scandinavia, they

are referred to in written sources as auxiliary troops for the Romans both in

Europe and in Asia Minor, and on a raiding expedition through the Balkans,

along with the Goths amongst others, in 267.

Procopius, the Greco-Byzantine historian who lived c.490–555 ad and thus

was a contemporary of Jordanes, wrote profusely about the Heruli. After their

defeat by the Langobards in 512 they obtained the permission of the emperor

Justinian to settle in Illyria (in modern times the former Yugoslavia) although

many of them, in these circumstances, preferred to migrate northwards, back

to their original homeland. This led to a split, with one group remaining in

the Danube area while the other moved north. This migration is described in

some detail by Procopius (Wars vi.14, viii.36, xv.1–4). It is stated, for instance,

that ‘they reached the land of the Varnii [the Schleswig area], and then moved

rapidly through the land of the Danes to the sea and crossed over to Thule [the

Scandinavian peninsula], where they were received by the Gauts, who were

one of the largest groups there’.

Subsequently Procopius’ account traces how the southern group of Heruli

lacked a royal dynasty as the royal clan did not have many suitable members

(Wars vi.15, 27–33). A deputation was sent to the Scandinavian group to fetch

The history of the Langobards was ﬁrst written down in 643 when they ruled Italy. The story of the

Langobards and King Rothari’s genealogy form part of the legal text Edictus Rothari written about

thirty years later. See further Gasparri (1983) and (2000).

According to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed in 731), i.15.

Hedeager (1997), (1998) and (2000); Geary (2003); Hill (2003).

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a suitable candidate. When, however, the chosen one died, the deputation

had to set off once again, and then came back with Datius and his personal

retinue of about 200 young warriors. In the meantime the southern Heruli had

given up waiting, and had asked the emperor Justinian to choose a king from

amongst themselves. Justinian selected Suartus, and when the deputation with

Datius and his retinue arrived from Scandinavia it caused yet another split as

some pledged loyalty to the one and some to the other of the two kings. When

Justinian gave his support to Datius, the Scandinavian king Suartus and his

supporters left Roman territory and became allies of the Gepids in Hungary.

The historical tradition concerning the Scandinavian origin of the Heruli

appears, in other words, to reﬂect a deﬁnite piece of historical reality. The

question naturally is whether the same can be the case with the many other

Germanic peoples who claimed descent from Scandza. Naturally, the factual

element within these early European migration myths is much disputed.

What is crucial, however, is not to what extent these people once emigrated

in small groups from Scandinavia, but that their royal identity was linked to

Scandinavia and that their kings were divine because they descended from

Gautr or Odin/Wotan, with this ﬁgure’s clear association with the German

pagan religion and, maybe, the Scandinavian pantheon.

The much later Old English epic poem Beowulf may well also draw on

traditions that have roots in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries. Here there are possibly

ties between the ruling families of the Wylﬁngas, etymologically identical to

the Wufﬁngas, the East Anglian royal family, and the Wulﬁngs who are thought

to have lived in what is now south-western Sweden and south-eastern Norway

during the late ﬁfth and sixth centuries. Furthermore, there are archaeological

indications of kindred relations between the royal families of East Anglia and

Scandinavia in the sixth and seventh centuries, not least the connection revealed

between the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the ship burials from Vendel and

Valdg

arde in the mid-Swedish M

alar area.

scandinavian animal art

From the sparse written but rich archaeological material it is evident that

close contacts existed between the royal families of southern Scandinavia and

Heather (1998).

E.g. philologically and historically: Weibull (1958); Svennung (1967) and (1972); Wagner (1967);

Hachmann (1970); Goffart (1980) and (1988); Gasparri (1983) and (2000); Heather (1989), (1993),

(1994), (1995) and (1998); Wolfram (1990) and (1994); Pohl (1994); North (1997); Hedeager (2000);

Archaeologically: Hachmann (1970); Svennung (1972); Hines (1984), (1992), (1993), (1994) and

(1995); Menghin (1985); Busch (1988); N

asman (1988); Heather and Matthews (1991) with refs.;

Kazanski (1991); Godlowski (1992); H

arke (1992a) and (1992b); Hedeager (1992b), (1993), (1998) and

(2000); Christie (1995); Bierbrauer (1994).

Bruce-Mitford (1979); Lamm and Nordstr

om (1983); Newton (1993), p. 117.

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those of the continent during the ﬁfth, sixth and seventh centuries. The Scan-

dinavian origin myth among the Germanic royal families/peoples, expressed

in contemporaneous written sources, is supported by the archeological evi-

dence, notably weapons, jewellery and not least the iconography.

All over

Migration-period Europe, in Scandinavia, on the continent and in England,

anew iconographical style appeared in the middle of the ﬁfth century. The

development of the earliest animal style was closely connected with south-

ern Scandinavia.

Aremarkably rich variety of ﬁgurative and geometric ﬁg-

ures, often with human features (masks) as part of the whole,

developed

in this area during the ﬁrst half of the ﬁfth century, known as the Nydam

style and Style i

(see Fig. 1). Finds on the continent and in England are

well represented from the latter half of the ﬁfth century up to the end of the

sixth,

when a new style, Style ii, emerges, homogeneous from Italy to the

Nordic countries.

Style ii is, like the ﬁrst one, remarkably uniform, and both

styles are found on jewellery and weapons from most parts of Europe

(see

Fig. 2).

From about the beginning of the ﬁfth century up until the seventh, the

Nordic ﬁgurative world was used as a symbolically signiﬁcant style amongst

the migrating Germanic peoples. It was imitated and elaborated, becoming an

impressive elite art style.

Style ii continued into the late seventh century, and

from then on it is no longer possible to deﬁne a common Germanic animal

style. Once Catholic Christianity had put down ﬁrm roots a new iconographic

style developed: one that blended insular with Frankish elements, and was

closely connected to the Irish/Anglo-Saxon mission which began in Friesland

in 678/9 and reached central and south Germany during the ﬁrst half of the

eighth century.

While this style was so indisputably linked with missionary activity, and

can be found on a lengthy series of different ecclesiastical objects, it is not

restricted to ‘church art’ alone. A wide variety of secular objects of precisely

the same kind as earlier were now decorated with this new Christian style:

dress accessories, riding equipment, stirrups, spurs, bracelets and so on, thus

signalled a new form of ideological legitimisation for their owners. Southern

Scandinavia, in particular, was not uninﬂuenced by the ideological attachment

to Latin Christianity of the European warrior elite and their powerful rulers.

Though Nordic animal style continued independently, with the disintegrated

animal ﬁgures being to some extent recreated to recover their zoomorphic

Hedeager (1998).

Roth (1979); Haseloff (1981) and (1984).

Haseloff (1986).

Salin (1904).

Roth (1979); Haseloff (1981); Hines (1984); N

asman (1984), map 10 and (1991), ﬁg. 8.

Salin (1904); see also Lund Hansen (1992), p. 187 with literature.

Karlsson (1983).

Speake (1980); Høilund Nielsen (1997).

Roth (1979), p. 86.

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Figure 1.Silver brooch with early animal style from Sealand, Denmark

(after Åberg (1925), ﬁg. 161)

character, the new style from the eighth century onwards absorbed some insular

elements, such as decorative plant motifs, but this was only brieﬂy.

In Scandinavia, where a pagan warrior elite and a fragmented state structure

persisted during the Viking Age, pagan myths and iconographic symbols –

the animal style – therefore continued to play an organising role in the cos-

mology of this warrior society up to the end of this period. Although still in

Karlsson (1983); Hedeager (1999a).

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Figure 2.Silver brooch with style ii from Hordaland, Norway

(after Åberg (1925), ﬁg. 169)

use, the Nordic animal style ceased to develop from around 1100.

On this

premise, elements of style, not least iconographic ones, are presumed to have

It did not survive the meeting with a new belief system and the political and social implications that

this entailed. This can of course be explained through the idea that people – especially the elite –

had acquired different tastes and therefore preferred a new style around 1200 under the inﬂuence of

the church. More convincingly, however, it can be argued that the lack of potential for survival and

renewal of the animal styles in a Christian context had to do with its anchoring in a quite different

system of belief (Hedeager (2003)).

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been selected with a great deal of care, just as objects are very carefully selected

for use in ceremonies because they are embedded with special qualities and

are the bearers of important messages, communicating, for example, social

relationships, group membership and ethnic identity.

Style, then, must also

be seen as involved in the creation and maintenance of the socio-cosmological

order and as such participates in the legitimisation of power. Upholding style

can be regarded as a part of the elite’s strategy in the same way as the mainte-

nance of ritual functions, myths, legends and symbolic objects – in short, all

that embodies the group’s identity. Seen in this light, Germanic animal styles

acquire a new, more signiﬁcant function.

Even though there can therefore be little doubt about the signifying function

of animal ornament or its elite character, this does not explain what the animals

symbolise or why it was animal ornament in particular which took on such

great importance. However, the role of animal style as an inseparable part of the

pre-Christian material culture implies that the animals also had an indisputably

signiﬁcant position in the pre-Christian perception of the world.

If this is

the case then it might just be possible to come closer to some central, cognitive

structures in sixth- and seventh-century Scandinavia by focussing on these

animals and the iconographic depictions as such.

central cognitive structures in scandinavian societies

It is hardly surprising that the perception of the Scandinavian world underwent

changes during a period of 800 years, from the fourth to the eleventh century.

That the animal ornamentation did the same thing is a logical consequence.

Butinspite of any stylistic variations and new elements, there is one funda-

mental element that connects all the styles together, namely the animal.From

being a simple classiﬁcatory element, suitable for chronological and stylistic

classiﬁcations in traditional cultural-historical archaeology, the enquiry shifts

from investigating animal representation in this art and becomes a topic with

complex implications for cognitive archaeology. Representation is always more

than a matter of whether the animal’s naturalistic form is reproduced, and ani-

mal representation cannot only be explained in terms of artistic expression.

Representation operates within a particular set of cultural codes, and the ani-

mal representations therefore become part of the cognitive structures. And as

such, the styles are not just ‘art for art’s sake’, but also must be seen as a form of

Earle (1990), p. 73;DeMarrais, Castillo and Earle (1996).

Kristoffersen (1995) and (2000b); Glosecki (1989); Hedeager (1997), (1998), (2003) and (2004);

Gaimster (1998); Andr

en (2000); Lindstrøm and Kristoffersen (2001); Magnus (2001); Jakobsson

(2003).

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Scandinavia 509

cultural knowledge, settled into the constitutional context of society. Animal

representations must then be an expression for the way animals were perceived

and the signiﬁcance they were given.

The Nordic animal ornamentation does not merely incorporate animals, it

is animals, that is to say, it is entirely a paraphrasing of a many-faceted complex

of animal motifs. Whole and half animals, small and large animals, animal

fragments and anatomically complete animals, along with animal heads with-

out bodies and animal bodies without heads. This complex representation,

far removed from naturalistic animal depictions, reveals that the styles do not

attempt to mirror the animals themselves. Complex composed animals may

express a reality that is more precise, more revealing and more ambiguous,

than the naturalistic representation ever could. Here species are created that

cut across all categories by transgressing the boundaries of what is considered

‘natural’.

This ambiguity, where a ﬁgure on closer inspection is shown to rep-

resent something else entirely, reﬂects hidden meaning, where one level, so to

say, hides the other and makes the styles more powerful than otherwise would

be possible to achieve through the written or spoken word. Their complex-

ity suggests that these styles, structurally speaking, incorporate an overriding

abstract principle, reﬂecting social order and – perhaps subconsciously – also

the physical order of the universe.

Another characteristic of mainly the sixth- and seventh-century styles is

the representation of animal heads inside each other, as part of each other,

and to this complexity human representations are attached. Human bodies are

also reproduced cut into pieces, and human faces (‘masks’) are included in the

animal representations,e.g. bodies with human heads and human faces as part –

normally the thigh – of the animal or the bird. Thus, the renderings cross not

only the boundaries between various animal species but also the boundaries

between animals and humans.

It can be argued that the animal styles – consciously or unconsciously –

reﬂect cognitive structures in sixth- and seventh-century pre-Christian soci-

eties. Even when the structural levels in the styles include abstract and often

unconscious principles that reﬂect social and universal order, they are hardly a

conscious representation of the myth. The mythical level, on the other hand,

is represented through the obvious visual message, with the iconography and

oral rendering referring to the same ‘story’. This level can, however, be reﬂected

in the naturalistic and therefore immediately more accessible iconographic art

from these centuries. Two examples are to be mentioned.

Morphy (1989), p. 2.

Morphy(1989), p.5;Ingold ( 2000), p.130; Kristoffersen (2000b), p.265; Lindstrøm and Kristoffersen

(2001); Jakobsson (2003); Hedeager (2004).

Roe (1995), p. 58.

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Figure 3.Gold bracteate from Lilla Jored, Sweden (after Hauck (1985–89),

no. 107)

First, special attention may be paid to the gold bracteates. Although their

motifs and designs are unmistakably Nordic, the bracteates have their origin

in late antique art and Byzantine emperors’ medallions

(see Fig. 3). Several

of the depicted scenes appear to be an illustration of central myths in Nordic

mythology,

for example Balder’s death

(see Fig. 4) and Tyr, who, in order

to save the world, offered his right hand in the mouth of the Fenris wolf

(Snorra Edda, chs. 24 and 33)

(see Fig. 5). Both appear to belong to the

central myths of the ﬁfth and sixth centuries.

The majority of the bracteates,

however, reﬂect what has been interpreted as Odin at the height of his power,

i.e. on his journey to the Other World in disguise as a bird (see Fig. 6). A

large animal, a hybrid between a horse, a moose and a goat, escorts him.

From its mouth it is not uncommon to see the sign of a breath. That is to

Hauck (1985–89).

Hauck (1986).

Ellmers (1970), p. 210;Hauck (1978), p. 210 and (1994).

Oxenstierna (1956), p. 36;Ellmers (1970), pp. 202, 220;Hauck (1978), p. 210.

Hedeager (1997).

Scandinavia 511

Figure 4.Gold bracteate from Fakse, Denmark (after Hauck (1985–89), no. 51)

say, the animal is animate. Birds and snakes often follow on the journey. The

shape-shifting (‘shamanistic’)

element in this rendering seems convincing: a

‘human’ in bird disguise and animal followers (the snake, the bird and the big

four-legged animal) are fundamental components in the iconographic universe

of the bracteates.

That the origin of the bracteates stems from the late Roman

emperors’ medallions only conﬁrms the strong symbolic importance which

resides in comparing the Roman emperors to the Asir kings.

Everywhere in

the Old Norse texts Odin appears in the guise of others; he crosses the boundary

between human and animal, between male and female. He is in control of the

speciﬁc magical power called sei

∂r, i.e. shape-shifting, and this speciﬁc skill is

what makes him king of the Asir.

Price (2002) has examined the ritual practices of the north in relation to the ‘shamanistic’ culture of

the S

ami people with whom they shared much of the Scandinavian peninsula.

Hedeager (1997), (2003) and (2004).

Axboe (1991); Andr

en (1991).

E.g. Hedeager (1999a); Price (2002); Solli (2002). The indisputable nexus between sei∂r, ecstasy

and soul-journey is identical to the religious complex known as ‘shamanism’: Str

omb

ack (1935),

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Figure 5.Gold bracteate from Trollh

attan, Sweden (after Hauck (1985–89), no. 190)

Second, from the Migration period to the Viking Age depictions of humans

in animal form can be found, primarily attached to the rich warrior equipment

from the sixth and seventh centuries, e.g. Vendel and Valsg

arde in the mid-

Swedish M

alar area and Sutton Hoo in East Anglia. Most commonly portrayed

is the so-called wolf warrior,

but the warrior in a wild boar skin or disguise

can also be found.

And the helmets have a complete animal symbolism

in themselves, with either a boar or an eagle on the crest, or as part of the

helmet’s composition.

These splendid helmets consist then of three animals,

(1970); Ohlmarks (1939); Brøgger (1951); Buchholz (1971); Ellis Davidson (1988); Eliade (1989), etc.;

cf. also Polom

e(1992), who argues against such an interpretation. See the comprehensive studies

by Karl Hauck, where the motifs on the A- and C-bracteates (Mackeprang (1952)) have been inter-

preted as representing one and the same person, most probably Odin (Hauck (1974); for an exten-

sive bibliography see Hauck (1985–89)). Odin is depicted as magician and shaman (Hauck (1978),

p. 211).

Høilund Nielsen (1999), p. 332.

Hedeager (2004), ﬁg. 16.

Bruce-Mitford (1979), p. 35;Glosecki (1989); Hedeager (2004), ﬁg. 22.