The Vikings by Roesdahl Else

Author:Roesdahl, Else
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-14-194153-0
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1998-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Östman’s rune stone on Frösö in Jämtland, Sweden. Part of the inscription reads: ‘he had Jämtland made Christian’. The stone was raised in the middle or second half of the eleventh century, and is the most northerly rune stone in Sweden.

ART AND POETRY

The art of the Vikings was full of vitality, imagination and self-confidence. Decorative and pictorial art as well as poetry flourished throughout Scandinavia and had a character all their own.

As an art form, poetry survived the longest. Even in the first half of the thirteenth century it was treasured in court circles in Scandinavia. Icelanders were particularly skilful poets then, and Snorri Sturluson’s book about the art of poetry, Edda, written around 1220 gives a key to understanding the complicated conventions of scaldic poetry. Without Snorri’s explanations, much of it would be incomprehensible today.

There is no such key to the equally complicated conventions of decorative and pictorial art, so although we can appreciate them visually, we only rarely understand their meaning. Having said that, much of the art was presumably purely decorative, fascinating in its elegant interplay of lines and its forcefulness.

DECORATIVE AND PICTORIAL ART

Viking Age art was flamboyant in its use of contrast and colour, yet formal. Great care was lavished on details as well as the overall design. On high-quality pieces the ornamentation is often so minute that it can only be seen at close quarters.

Ornamentation survives on a wide range of functional objects: clothes, brooches, ships, weapons, sledges, harnesses, buildings, memorial stones, wall-hangings, cups and much else. Three-dimensional art occurs most often in the form of heads, usually animal heads embellishing objects of varying sizes, such as wagons or caskets. The most common materials must have been textiles and wood but very little of these survives. The pictorial tapestry and the many carved wooden objects from the Oseberg grave, together with the wood carvings from the second half of the eleventh century, re-used in the twelfth-century church at Urnes in western Norway (Plate 23), demonstrate what has been lost. Apart from those on Gotland, memorial stones were not decorated until after the middle of the tenth century, probably taking Harald Bluetooth’s Jelling stone as a model. There are quite a number of decorated stones from the late Viking Age, some in Denmark and Norway, but most in Sweden. Plenty of small decorative metal objects survive, especially in graves and hoards, from throughout the Viking Age and from nearly all of Scandinavia. Gold and silver items were obviously greatly treasured and presumably set the fashion, but carvings in walrus ivory, whale bone and elk horn were also prized. The most magnificent examples of such carving are the Bamberg and Cammin caskets, which were further embellished with gilt bronze mounts and survived as reliquaries in churches in Germany and Poland. The large, house-shaped Cammin casket disappeared during the Second World War, but descriptions, photographs and good casts survive. Bone and amber, as well as jet from the north-east of England, were also carved.

The effects of relief, of

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