Germanic art, artefacts and runes, BC-AD; news & discussion

[Orentil]

Spontaneously I would say at least 450 AD but let me check

PS: I found somewhere 'first half of the 5th century'

[JonikW]

Spontaneously I would say at least 450 AD but let me check

PS: I found somewhere 'first half of the 5th century'

You know as much as me but I think my amateur guess would be 350-400. The top two elements resemble motifs from the Migration Period, with the knots and swastikas. But they could equally have been designed by someone who had seen 4th century Roman mosaic floors in my view. Either way, fascinating.

[Orentil]

Another chair from Trossingen, Baden-Württemberg also mentioning the chair from Wremen with a dendrochronological confirmed date of 431 AD for a board (with runes) found together with the chair from Wremen.

https://www.academia.edu/37162095/Ein_Ho...von_Wremen

[JonikW]

Another chair from Trossingen, Baden-Württemberg also mentioning the chair from Wremen with a dendrochronological confirmed date of 431 AD for a board (with runes) found together with the chair from Wremen.

https://www.academia.edu/37162095/Ein_Ho...von_Wremen

Thanks for that. Who would have thought chairs could be so interesting? I'm not claiming my 350-400 guess is correct, but I can imagine a situation where a beautiful piece of furniture like the Wremen chair was in use for a couple of generations. I hope someone dates it as well as the associated board. It's a remarkable survival.

PS: I love the runes on the board but I wish they'd ramped up the definition on those images because I can't make out "futhark" there, beyond what I'll call a thorn (ᚦ). Of course seeing something in real life is always best.

[JonikW]

Not an artefact but I can't resist posting this here. I'm in Gdansk and have taken the train to Sopot to walk along the beach and look out at the Baltic sea. I've been here several times over the years but this is the first time I've had the good fortune to find a piece of amber. Another dream come true for me given how important amber was in early Germanic times and the number of times we've discussed it in various threads over the years. I'm very happy right now.

Tacitus in Germania is one of the historical sources of course. By way of reminder: "As you would expect of barbarians, they have never asked or discovered what it [amber] is or how it is produced. For a long time, indeed, it lay unheeded amidst the other jetsam, until our luxury made its reputation."

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[JonikW]

Very pleased to see the discovery of another very typical looking Thor's hammer potentially associated with the arrival of the great heathen army in Norfolk in 865.

But even more so to see a bracteate adding to the corpus of those finds in England. It's of the type closely based on Roman coinage and with very nice typically fifth century horseshoe stamps that were so beloved of the Anglo-Saxons and often used on copper-alloy brooches.

https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/23857777.th...-treasure/

[Ambiorix]

Hi all!

No new discoveries or anything, but just wanted to share a couple stray artefacts deriving from the Elp and Harpstedt-Nienburg cultures (or that will have been part of the respective cultures, based on chronology and location). In the case of the former archaeological culture, I happened to stumble upon the "Sonnenstein" (sunstones), three stones all found in Lower Saxony (specifically in Colnrade, Harpstedt, and Horsten) which probably date to the Bronze Age based on similarities with both British and Scandinavian petroglyphs dating to about the same time (I am fully in agreement with the assumed dating). Here is a photo of the Beckstedt sunstone, in my opinion the most visible of the uploaded photos of the sunstones on Wikipedia: 

As the German Wikipedia article(s) point out, there are artistic similarities with both Nordic and Atlantic traditions where concentric circles are incorporated into artwork, with cup and ring marks being especially close formally to the sunstones. The problem, however, is that most of the "concentric circles" that are incorporated into Atlantic petroglyphs are actually spiral shapes that tend to interlock with one-another, whereas these sunstones depict clearly delineated concentric circles emanating from a singular point in the middle of the rock, so I view this as very clear solar symbolism related either to the emanation of the sun's rays (or perhaps even the movement of the heavenly bodies and constellations, with the sun as the all-encompassing force around which all phenomena were organised, extrapolating from religious ideas propagated by the PIE forebears of these Bronze Age folks). In this context it is perhaps important to note objects such as Bronze Age shields from Denmark, as seen in the following link where the rings all radiate outward from the fess point and from bumps located around the outer portion of the shields: https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledg...e-shields/ Although there is no way of knowing for certain, considering the (probable) usage of these solar shields in religious ceremonies and the connection with the spring and summer seasons, I am tempted to imagine that these were either markers denoting centres of cultic activities (since Colnrade, Harpstedt, and Horsten are situated on the Hunte, a tributary of the Weser river) or perhaps protective community markers which would invoke the power of some sort of sun-god (in this context I have taken keen interest in an idea I have seen thrown around that Ingui-Freyr and Freyja were originally solar deities, of course having strong associations with fertility). In any case, the artwork neatly fits into the cultural milieu of Bronze Age Northern Europe; although the paper is quite outdated in several key regards (including the anti-migrationist stance RE: the spread of Bell Beaker innovations especially to Britain), I would like to share the following excerp from Fokkens, Fontijn, and Valentijn (2013), "Archaeology of the Dutch Twilight Zone" (https://www.academia.edu/6072124/Archaeo...light_Zone): 

"In the Bronze Age proper, after 2000 cal BC, the differences between the north and the south became more clearly visible again, but in a slightly different constellation than before. Again there were two larger interaction spheres. The Nordic sphere included the north-west and the east and seems to ‘end’ at the peat marshes that had developed in the IJssel-Vecht basin. The Atlantic sphere included the centre of the Netherlands and the eastern part of the river delta, the southern sand plateaus and the Meuse valley (cf. Fig. 1) (cf. Fokkens 2009:86). Differences between the two spheres are visible not only in the styles of houses, of burial and ceramic traditions and bronze objects, but also in deposition practices and in the structure of arable land (Table 1). With respect to farms, different traditions are visible (cf. Arnoldussen 2008). The familiar three-aisled Bronze Age farms developed from 1500 cal BC onwards, both in the Nordic and in the Atlantic sphere. In the north and east we find the Elp and Emmerhout-type farms that are also well known from northwest Germany, Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland (cf. Arnoldussen 2008:200). Stable partitions are generally visible in these farms. These are not visible in the Oss type houses of the southern tradition, but we still think that stables were also part of these farms (cf. Fokkens 2005b). In the river area and in West-Frisia farms were surrounded by ditches to catch water running from the roof. Apart from that, a fundamental difference is the place of the entrance. Elp, Emmerhout and Oss farms have entrances located on the long sides, dividing between the stable and ‘living’ quarters. In West-Frisia and in the river delta houses have entrances on each short side, one for livestock and one for people, perhaps. This may indicate that the types were experienced differently, maybe even had different cosmological connotations. Round houses do not occur in the Netherlands (cf. Theunissen 1999; Arnoldussen & Fokkens 2008). These are part of the tradition in the British Isles(e.g. Bewley 1994), and possibly also in northern France, though these reconstructions are not very convincing (cf. Bourgeois & Talon 2009:46)” (pp. 534-535).

This [i.e., shared aspects of material culture] illustrates a few important aspects of identity: i.e., that it is contextual (e.g. Eriksen 1992); that it is a process better called ‘identifying’ (cf. Brubaker 2004); and that it is related to action (cf. Somers 1994:615-6). Apparently people did not have a cultural identity, but given the social context they identified more or less with their neighbours across the delta. And, depending on how they identified, they actually acted differently towards each other: certain traditions and items were shared while others were not. This, of course, need not be true just for social relations across the delta, but also for social relations on each side of it. That people shared in, e.g. Nordic traditions and consumed Nordic style objects does not mean that they had a Nordic identity. Rather they identified in such a way that, for instance, exchange of Northern metals was deemed possible. It does not mean that people identified fully: cultural differences between them still existed and might have been expressed, affecting the social relationship and consequently actions. And we should not only think of identities as a system of Chinese boxes (cf. Eriksen 1992:172; Jones 1997:100), as is often done (e.g. Kristiansen 1998, fig. 28). It is important to gain more insights into these processes of identification within networks, as they affected peoples’ activities and as such the dynamics of a network” (p. 536).

For what it's worth, I do think that the Elp and Hoogkarspel folks identified themselves with the Nordic network more generally, the difference being merely the face these were related microcultures situated within a macrocultural identity (a trade network, persisting into the Iron Age period and to some extent weakening after the full maturation and proliferation of Proto-Germanic speech, at least weakening for these northwestern folks). 

Moving onto the Iron Age, we have this earthenware mask found at Middelstum-Boerdamsterweg (taken from p. 659 of Fokkens (2005), The Prehistory of the Netherlands Volume 2): 


Link to book here:  The Prehistory of the Netherlands Volume 2 | Scholarly Publications (universiteitleiden.nl)

I know of no comparable masks in Jastorf or the Nordic Iron Age groups, so this find is quite remarkable - at a glance they remind me of some of the Mycenaean funeral masks or medieval Slavic masks (some of which I do know are forgeries), so I do wonder about whether they might be used in rituals revolving around communication with the dead (connected also to ancestor worship).

As we do not have much artistic evidence left from the Elp and Harpstedt-Nienburg cultures beyond weaponry and cinerary urns (at least not that I am currently aware of), these finds are exceptional and illuminate the rituals and beliefs that were in circulation in the relevant areas during the Bronze and Iron Age periods. Perhaps I will revisit these in the future with more thoughts, but in the meantime I hope this will suffice!

[Orentil]

I didn‘t know these Sonnensteine, interesting. One point and eleven circles, i.e. twelve. A symbol for sun and year, solar and lunar?
PS:
The Harpstedt sun stone has 12 circles. However, the Horsten one 17. Hhm…

[JonikW]

I'm in Valencia and have enjoyed seeing a few things from the Visigothic period that might be of interest here. I haven't come across Visigothic art that often over the years so any insights from other members would be much appreciated.

The first objects of relevance I saw were two similar sets of amber beads on display in the Visigothic tombs area of the excellent La Almoina archaeological museum, a subterranean uncovering of the city's history (largely involving in situ excavated Roman remains but spanning several periods including the later Islamic). Here's one of those bead sets:



I don't know whether the Spanish Visigoths maintained any direct contact with the Baltic coast and Scandinavia (I also have no idea whether anyone truly does know) but these beads took me right back to the beach at Sopot. Those tiny additional glass beads in particular prevent the assemblage from looking full-on Germanic and give it a real Roman legacy-influenced vibe for me at least.

I also went to the Visigothic chapel in the crypt of St Vincent. The motifs on the carved stones there, shown below in two of my pics, to my eye closely resemble those on the Visigothic buckle that I snapped before in the Ashmolean Museum and posted some time ago on AG. (The buckle design, however, also seems to incorporate birds' heads, which we might particularly expect on an Early Medieval metal object rather than a stone one.) 

First, here are the four Visigothic carved chapel stones, with some human remains under the glass you can see in the floor, and an altar beyond them:



And here's a close-up of the carved motifs on the nearest stone on the left, for comparison with the Ashmolean Visigothic brooch design:



And now for the Ashmolean display and that comparable buckle design (you'll have to scan through the art of other Germanic peoples in the image to find it). I remember mentioning on AG that I think this is the perfect display for any museum aspiring to represent the Angles, Saxons, Franks and others at a glance. Pure genius. 



ADD: That looks very poor resolution, so here's the buckle on its own:



As mentioned, I'm no expert on Spanish Visigothic art but it appears to me to show some of the contemporary wider Germanic love of pattern motifs and "movement," in this case using foliate decoration as if viewed through a post-Roman lense of the kind used by the Carolingians and Christian Anglo-Saxons.

I'm also posting a separate Ashmolean Visigothic display and accompanying description to round off, including two radiate-headed brooches of a type used in various forms by many Germanic peoples, including to great effect by the Franks (please forgive the somewhat amusing reflection of my shoe in the second image):





After this trip, I'll definitely pay more attention to Visigothic artefacts in future. There's always something more to enjoy exploring in the field covered by this thread. :-)

EDITED to add a clearer image.

[Orentil]

Now you make me really jealous. I have spent three months during my doctoral thesis in this amazing city. Enjoy your stay! The brooch number 24 is indeed very typical Gothic, in German Blechfibeln. Often made out of silver but this one seems to be out of a copper alloy. Very similar brooches were already used in Poland before the Goths started their long journey to Spain. Thanks for sharing your impressions from Valencia!

[Orentil]

The first objects of relevance I saw were two similar sets of amber beads on display in the Visigothic tombs area of the excellent La Almoina archaeological museum, a subterranean uncovering of the city's history (largely involving in situ excavated Roman remains but spanning several periods including the later Islamic). Here's one of those bead sets:



I don't know whether the Spanish Visigoths maintained any direct contact with the Baltic coast and Scandinavia (I also have no idea whether anyone truly does know) but these beads took me right back to the beach at Sopot.

I would not be surprised if there were still family ties to the Baltic coast if you remember e.g. the story about the Herulian princes and in general the mating networks. The amber beads remind me to the story of this unfortunate little girl dying at the age of 6 months found in Aschheim, Bavaria, the "find of the month October 2023" from the local museum. Heart-warming to see how they decorated her with a S-brooch and a necklace with amber beads.
https://www.aschheim.de/kultur-freizeit/...des-monats

[JonikW]

The first objects of relevance I saw were two similar sets of amber beads on display in the Visigothic tombs area of the excellent La Almoina archaeological museum, a subterranean uncovering of the city's history (largely involving in situ excavated Roman remains but spanning several periods including the later Islamic). Here's one of those bead sets:



I don't know whether the Spanish Visigoths maintained any direct contact with the Baltic coast and Scandinavia (I also have no idea whether anyone truly does know) but these beads took me right back to the beach at Sopot.

I would not be surprised if there were still family ties to the Baltic coast if you remember e.g. the story about the Herulian princes and in general the mating networks. The amber beads remind me to the story of this unfortunate little girl dying at the age of 6 months found in Aschheim, Bavaria, the "find of the month October 2023" from the local museum. Heart-warming to see how they decorated her with a S-brooch and a necklace with amber beads.
https://www.aschheim.de/kultur-freizeit/...des-monats

I certainly wouldn't be surprised either Orentil and I suspect the ties were there even if there's no surviving evidence of them. Agree about the Heruli being a case in point too after finding their way back home to the north generations on from their exodus. 

ADD: here's a Heruli link for anyone who wants reminding of the story. I agree with Peter Heather, one of the scholars who I always take most seriously in this field.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heruli

That Aschheim find is truly touching, as you say. The S-brooch reminds me of one I saw this summer (although they're different in style) along with a headdress pin and some glass beads. These were in the tiny but great museum at Beachy Head. They were all found in the Eastbourne area, look very Frankish and are roughly contemporary with your Aschheim find.

[JonikW]

As I just mentioned in the aDNA section, I attended a viewing of the Marlow Warlord’s artefacts today, the first time they’ve been assembled in one place since they were found.

I was invited to this event at the museum in Aylesbury because I’d contributed to the crowdfunding round to preserve his grave goods. It was a small gathering: a few archaeologists, the detectorists who made the discovery, the landowner, the farmer and his family and a couple of other people including me.

The artefacts were spread out on two tables and I’ll post images of them here. This was a high status burial of the late fifth century (around 500 at the latest I was told). That means it dates from long before the more obviously elite gold and garnet bling of the Sutton Hoo period.

We enjoyed a couple of talks with slides and I also got the chance to examine the artefacts in person and discuss them one-on-one with one of the main archaeologists involved.

The artefacts were displayed along with some replicas that have been commissioned. You can see the two copper-alloy vessels here, along with reproductions that were made by craftsmen in India. No one in Europe was willing to try copying the work but apparently there are still craftsmen in India who are proficient in the same techniques, so they accepted the commission.

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This fire striker is fascinating. The archaeologist said that most examples from the period have ends that curled upwards (I saw a few images during one of the presentations). I remember that Orentil and I once speculated on AG about potential fire strikers within the bracteate imagery. We’d struggled to find images of fire strikers from the Migration Period, but the ones that I saw illustrated looked similar to the Viking Age examples and so also resembled the enigmatic shape that appears on some of the bracteates.



This sword was a striking discovery. They think that the cross guard and the pommel area each had a thin inset of bovine horn set between the iron. The only parallel they were able to find after liaising with collections on the continent and in Scandinavia is a Nydam IV sword from southern Jutland, dating from 450 to 475 AD.



While the Nydam find was a sacrificial deposit involving a defeated army that could have come from beyond that region, the Marlow scabbard chape adds some interesting additional information on the potential origin of the sword assemblage.



The scabbard chape from the Marlow sword (shown with a replica) has its only known parallels in northern Jutland, where there are very similar examples with transverse lines that date from the mid to late fifth century. I was allowed to hold this chape in my trembling bare hands (the copper-alloy is so well preserved that there was no risk to the object). So all in all, they are confident that the Marlow Warlord’s sword and scabbard came from Jutland. You’ll notice an almost vertical cut at the bottom left, which they think may have been caused by a sword blow that perhaps also detached the knob at the base of the chape.

I was also able to hold and turn over in my hands this band that was once wrapped around the scabbard near the top (I forget the technical name). I could see clearly that the frontal, decorated section had been reused and attached to a later piece of copper alloy. I also spotted some faint marks in one corner of the reverse as I was examining it, possibly including a rune (although that could of course also be due to chance damage). I pointed them out to the archaeologist I was with and he confirmed they are already looking at them.



I also saw the base of a Kempston type glass beaker, which they’ve pieced together. They have many more fragments, some less than 1mm in thickness, that they’re unable to reassemble. The thinness of the object and the difficulty of transporting it lead them to believe it was produced in Kent. There’s a real hotspot of production there (I saw a map that included the continent) and they have discovered that they were produced from recycled Roman glass.

Finally, the warlord was buried with two spearheads. These beautiful objects, seen here with two reproductions, could date from quite a wide period but around the year 500 at the latest.

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Intriguingly, there was no shield in the Marlow burial, a fact that marks it out as unusual. That’s also regrettable because the bosses are diagnostic and can be accurately dated. Anyway, all in all a dream day out for me while my family wandered patiently around Aylesbury.

Very impressive exhibit, thanks for sharing JonikW! I must admit I was pretty excited seeing the fire striker since much of my work revolves around stone tool production and usage  the connections with both northern and southern Jutland are unsurprising yet fascinating, especially considering what one might presume to be an Anglian family background to the warlord and the close geographic proximity of Angles in the Jutland Peninsula with Jutes to the north - did you get a good look at what the potential rune(s) could have been, or does the faintness of the marking(s) make it impossible to note anything other than the fact there might be markings there? Here I am thinking especially of the association of individual runes with specific words (so not just operating as a straightforward representation of a sound value but also as visual representations of concepts), an often forgotten about fact (in fact, IIRC, Jackson Crawford even disputes the notion altogether for whatever reason).

Good question Ambiorix and I should have said. What I saw were some vague markings ending in what was identical to a clear ᛋ rune, in that exact shape rather than the one with a downward slanting middle line of the kind we might expect to have seen immediately after the time of the elder futhark ᛊ variant.

Something exciting that I'd completely forgotten until looking back through some books today: I'm interested to see there's a precedent for the ᛋ shape of the younger futhark s rune at an earlier time, in the late fifth century, but as an allograph (variant form) of  ᛃ rather than of s itself.

The ᛋ = ᛃ in question appears on the Kragehul I lance shaft, found on Funen/Fyn, Denmark. If you follow the link you'll see the rune making an appearance twice on the far right hand image of the three parts of the inscription. So this is from the edge of the Anglian cultural area and likely dates to the second half of the fifth century.

This takes me back to the ᛋ shaped mark I saw on the Marlow Warlord's sword fitting near the start of this thread, which of course I can't be certain wasn't just a chance marking that happened to exactly resemble a rune form alongside other shapes that were less clear. I'm kicking myself for not having taken a picture now…

Given that a fifth century s would be most likely to appear as ᛊ or a form of ᛋ that had a downward slanting middle stroke rather than the upward slanting one shown in ᛋ (sorry I can't find a downward slanting one that I can copy and paste), this Kragehul artefact removes my own main personal objection to the Marlow markings actually being runes. In fact ᛊ itself for s rather than ᛋ for ᛃ also appears on the Kragehul inscription as you can see for yourselves. 

It's also interesting that both Kragehul and Marlow are Anglian and roughly contemporary with each other. I look forward to the full publication of the Marlow Warlord finds and hope the sword fitting markings are given a proper discussion. From what I remember being told, it should happen quite soon.

[Orentil]

Not to many new aspects on the Vindelev bracteates, but interesting how they "unfold" digitally

https://www.dtu.dk/english/news/all-news...a47389627f

[Rodoorn]

Not an artefact but I can't resist posting this here. I'm in Gdansk and have taken the train to Sopot to walk along the beach and look out at the Baltic sea. I've been here several times over the years but this is the first time I've had the good fortune to find a piece of amber. Another dream come true for me given how important amber was in early Germanic times and the number of times we've discussed it in various threads over the years. I'm very happy right now.

Tacitus in Germania is one of the historical sources of course. By way of reminder: "As you would expect of barbarians, they have never asked or discovered what it [amber] is or how it is produced. For a long time, indeed, it lay unheeded amidst the other jetsam, until our luxury made its reputation."

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Great find!

Reminds me of the role it played in IE-cultures, sun cult. Once in a while big pieces are found on the Frisian Isle, here a find from a few years ago on Ameland:



In EBA it was already popular in what I call   pre-germanic societies, VandKilde:



Drenthe is connected by the Hunze with the Wadden Sea and the Isles (it mounds between Ameland and Schiermonnikoog). This is a BA necklace from Exloo in Drenthe:


And- fully on topic- "the princes of Zweelo" with a necklace full of amber, an Anglo-Saxon find in Drenthe too: