Part 10

The zoomorphic patterns consist mostly of animal forms, which are treated in a freer manner than is usual in Celtic work. One of these occupying the reverse of a single bulb with prickly ornament, is shown in Fig. 74. The irregularity of the design, its want of balance and symmetry, and the tendency of the interlacements of the intertwisted members to break off in scroll-like terminations, are all features which are usually present in Scandinavian work, and as usually absent in the work of the pure Celtic school. The body of the beast, seen sideways, is outlined with a double line, as is usual in the Celtic style. Its head is thrown back, its mouth open and tongue protruding; a single tooth appears in each jaw. Its feet are furnished with two toes, and its tail and crest, convoluted with the body and limbs, terminate in irregular scrolls. The patterns on the bulbous terminations of another brooch (Figs. 71, 72, 73), have a curious resemblance to this one, while presenting points of difference. It is the same beast, almost in the same attitude, but differing in the treatment of the details in both representations. In Fig. 72 the body of the beast is covered with scale-like markings, and the same tendency of the convolutions of the crest to break off in scroll-like terminations is visible in both. The figure [Illustration: Fig. 77.—On the bulbous head of the pin (actual size).] on the bulbous head of the pin of this brooch (Fig. 73) differs from those on the bulbous terminations of its ring in being more bird-like than beast-like, and its convolutions more broken into indefinite scrolls and whirls. It is noticeable, however, that the crest, the eye, and the two-toed foot of this bird-like figure are the same as those of the beast which appears in the patterns previously described, and re-appears in conjunction with a more remarkable figure on another brooch (described pp. 81-82) in the Skaill deposit. The figures on its [Illustration: Fig. 78.—Axe-head inlaid with silver, from the Mammen How, Denmark.] bulbous terminations (Figs. 75, 76) are finely engraved. They represent the same beast which is figured on the others, with but slight variations of detail, but the bulbous head of the pin shows quite a remarkable deviation from the general form of these representations. Instead of the conventional beast, we see here (Fig. 77) a quasi-human figure worked up into a pattern of interlacements. The treatment of this anthropomorphic form is peculiar. It presents a bearded face, which is curiously elongated and triangular in outline; the nose is represented by a curved line, and the eyes are connected by double lines across the upper part of the nose. The hands are bound with interlacements, and the body is treated as the bodies of the beasts commonly used for zoomorphic patterns. This bearded, broad-nosed, goggle-eyed figure has no Celtic relations, but we meet with the same typical face in Scandinavia, occasionally placed in association with zoomorphic patterns, which are almost identical with those of the Skaill brooches in motive and style.

For instance, the motive and the style of the decoration of an iron axe-head (Fig. 78), inlaid with silver, which was found in a grave-mound of the heathen time called the Mammen How, near Viborg, in Denmark,[50] are almost identical with those of the engraved designs on the Skaill brooches. There is the same scale-covered beast, in the same attitude, rendered with the same conventionality of treatment, and the convolutions of the tail and crest which interlace with the limbs and body of the creature exhibit the same tendency to break off in scrolls. In the upper part of the axe we have the same triangular, broad-nosed, goggle-eyed face which also appears on one of the brooches from Skaill. The same face appears on the pendants representing Thor’s Hammer, which are occasionally found in hoards of personal ornaments of the heathen period in Scandinavia. They are usually of silver, sometimes parcel-gilt, and decorated with filigree work. One of these (Fig. 79), found in Skane, Sweden, bearing the typical face with the goggle-eyes and the bar between them, is here figured of the actual size.[51] The same face occasionally occurs on Runic monuments of the heathen time. It is seen on a stone 5 feet high by 3 feet broad, and from 2 to 16 inches thick, at Skjern, in North Jutland (Fig. 80), which is here reproduced from the engraving given by Professor Stephens, who thus describes the figure:—“In the centre is the head of Thor, wild and bearded. There is no manner of doubt that he is here introduced and invoked to bless and protect the deceased and his tumulus, grave-stone, and funeral-marks.” That the face is really intended for that of Thor appears to be demonstrated by its occurrence upon the small amulets representing Thor’s Hammer in silver, and by such monumental sculptures as that on a stone at Aby, in Sodermanland, Sweden (Fig. 81), where a similar face, though less conventional in treatment, occurs in association with a sculptured representation of a Thor’s Hammer. But it is quite immaterial to our present purpose to determine whether this peculiar type of face is more of a mythological conception than a conventionality of art. The point which concerns our inquiry is that we have localised the typical form definitely within the Scandinavian area, and demonstrated its association with the art of the monuments and the metal work of the Scandinavian heathen time.

Footnote 50:

In this remarkable sepulture the body was found in a pit 6 feet beneath the natural surface, under the centre of the mound, laid in a chest constructed of oaken planks, axe-dressed, and fastened together with large round-headed iron nails. The chest had somewhat of the form of a closed bedstead, for it was supported by six posts driven into the soil at the bottom of the pit. On the bottom planks of this rough bedstead the skeleton lay extended on cushions filled with feathers, with the head to the north-east. It had been clothed in garments worked with gold thread, of excessive richness and beauty. The fragments preserved include portions of a girdle of silk, ornamented with fretwork and gold tissue; a mantle of woollen cloth, with a band of foliageous scroll-work interwoven with figures of human heads and hands, and further ornamented with figures of animals, and patterns worked in gold thread; and portions of cuffs or bracelets, also of silk, ornamented with gold thread. In the interior of the chest or bedstead, along with the skeleton, there were found the fragments of a sword and scabbard, with its mountings, inlaid with silver, and two axes, of which the one was plain, the other inlaid with zoomorphic patterns in silver, as shown in Fig. 78. On the lid of the chest there stood at the one end a cauldron of thin brass, two buckets, constructed of oaken staves hooped with iron, and at the other end lay a wax candle, 22 inches in length, which had burned for some time, probably during the funeral ceremonies.—La sepulture de Mammen, par J. J. A. Worsaae, in the _Memoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord:_ Copenhagen, 1870.

Footnote 51:

This and the two following figures are copied from Professor Stephen’s _Thunor the Thunderer:_ Copenhagen, 1879, folio.

The general result of this examination of the typical form and ornamentation of these bulbous brooches is that they are found to possess features that are Celtic, in combination with features that are distinctive of the art of the Scandinavian heathen time. The obvious inference is that the birthplace of the type is to be looked for in an area in which the population were partly Celtic and partly Scandinavian in their extraction. At the period indicated by the range in date of [Illustration: Fig. 81.—Runic Monument at Aby, with representation of Thor’s Head and Hammer.] these silver hoards,[52] and for a considerable time previous to the earliest date assigned to them, this was the character of the mixed race of the Gall-gael of the Western Isles, and it was also to a certain extent the character of the inhabitants of the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, though there the Celtic element was feeble and the northern element strong. But this is precisely the nature of the mixed art of these brooches. It is more northern than Celtic, and seeing that the deposit is found in the very area where this was the special character of the population, the conclusion seems irresistible that the type is the product of the area in which it is found. There is no evidence whatever of its having come from the east—no evidence of its having come from Scandinavia itself. The only other example of the type that has occurred in Scotland—the plain bulbous brooch of silvered bronze—which was found with a heathen burial in the island of Eigg (Fig. 43), also occurs within the area of the mixed population. A few specimens have occurred sporadically in England,[53] but there they are confined to the north-western area—that is, the portion adjacent to the insular territories possessed by the Norse colonists of the Western Isles. A few specimens have been found in Ireland, chiefly isolated, but in one remarkable instance associated with brooches and other metal work of pure Celtic types.[54] In Scandinavia itself they do not occur in such abundance as to suggest that they were common ornaments characteristic of the people or the time. While, therefore, they are partially Scandinavian in the character of their art, they occur so sparsely in the Scandinavian countries that they cannot be considered as products that are characteristic of that area, or indigenous to it, and their presence in such limited numbers in the archæological deposits of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, is not inconsistent with the conclusion that the type may have had its birthplace in the Scandinavian colonies planted in Celtic soil, between whom and the fatherland there was always such a closely-knit connection and continuous intercourse.

Footnote 52:

The approximate dates of the hoards are indicated by the coins found with them.

Footnote 53:

Besides the fragments that occurred in the Cuerdale hoard, two entire brooches of this type have been found in England—one near Kirby Lonsdale, in Westmoreland, 5½ inches diameter; and one near Penrith, in Cumberland, which is the largest on record, the ring being 8¼ inches in diameter, the pin 21 inches long, and the weight of the whole brooch 25 ounces avoirdupois.

Footnote 54:

One of these brooches occurred in the remarkable hoard of silver objects found in the Rath of Reerasta, Ardagh, in Limerick, in 1868. The hoard consisted of a silver chalice of exquisite beauty, one other vessel of bronze, three brooches of pure Celtic type, decorated like the chalice with interlaced designs in panels, in the best style of the art, and a fourth brooch of the bulbous or “thistle-headed” form.—_Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy_, vol. xxiv. p. 433.

In passing finally from the examination of these brooches, it may be desirable to refer briefly to the materials composing the dress in which such gigantic ornaments were worn. The perishable nature of these materials precludes the possibility of obtaining such specimens of them as would suffice to show the form and appearance of the garments themselves. But there are occasional instances in which the natural circumstances of the deposit have been more than usually favourable to their preservation, and there may be cases in which exceptional carefulness in the examination of these circumstances may preserve not only the texture but even the form and appearance of the garment. I have already alluded to the fact that small portions of the dress from a grave of the Viking time in the island of Eigg exhibit distinctly the texture of the woollen fabric, and retain portions of its mountings of fur. Similar discoveries in Denmark and Norway have established the truth of the Saga narratives, which testify to the excessive richness of the ornamentation, and the costly nature of the materials of the dress of this period.

The fact that a few examples from Scottish graves have shown the possibility of obtaining even from these perishable materials the tangible evidence of the form and fashion of the garments that clothed the men and women who made and wore these ornaments, gives room for hope that with increasing interest and greater care the products of future investigations may complete this evidence. In the meantime we have but one piece of dress which retains its form, and which may with some degree of probability be attributed to the mixed population of the Scandinavian colony. It is a hood of a coarse woollen fabric (Fig. 82), woven with a peculiarly twilled texture, and decorated with a long fringe of pendent and knotted cords, formed by twisting the doubled end of a thread with two contiguous threads of the warp. It was dug up in a peat moss in the parish of St. Andrews, in the mainland of Orkney, many years ago, and came into the possession of the late Mr. George Petrie of Kirkwall, after whose death it was acquired for the National Museum, along with his general collection. It measures 32 inches in height and 17 inches in greatest width. The border to which the fringe is attached is 3 inches in width. The fringe itself is 15 inches in depth. The fabric of which the body of the hood is composed is worked in alternate stripes, presenting at their junction the appearance shown in the woodcut (Fig. 83 83 ). The fringe of two-ply cords (Fig. 84), which is its most peculiar feature, presents a striking similarity to the fringe (Fig. 85) of a portion of the dress of a woman whose body was discovered in 1835 in digging peats in the Moss of [Illustration: Fig. 83.—Portion of the Fabric of the Hood.] Haraldskjaer, in Jutland. The body, which was stretched on its back, was pegged down in the moss by hooked branches of trees driven into the peat so as to fasten down the legs and arms at the knees and elbows, and further secured by other branches placed across the breast and abdomen, and staked down at the ends. The dress was well preserved when first discovered, but only a few fragments were saved, and among them is a portion with a fringe of two-ply cords (Fig. 85), bearing a suggestive similarity to the fringe of the Orkney hood. This similarity, so far as it has any value as an indication of relationship, links the Orkney specimen with the Scandinavian, and thus gives apparent ground for the inference that the hood may belong to the period of the Scandinavian colonisation of the islands, and that, like the brooches, it may represent a typical variety of head-dress peculiar to the colony.

The typical form of neck ring and arm ring (Figs. 64, 65), which is associated with the bulbous brooches in these hoards, composed of hammered rods and intertwisted wires of silver plaited manifoldly, and formed into a circlet by soldering the ends, does not occur again in Scotland. But it has obvious relations with a group of personal ornaments in gold, which present similar features of form and construction. They are of smaller size than the silver rings, all that are known being obviously finger-rings.

Two of these (Fig. 86, Nos. 2 and 3) were dug up in the month of August 1879, in a field near the shore of the Loch of Stenness, in Orkney, and are now in the National Museum. The largest is formed of two double twists of gold wires, hammered round, and tapering to the small ends, which are connected by a lozenge-shaped bezel. The smaller of the two is composed of three strands of gold wire, similarly shaped by the hammer alone, and intertwisted, and the small ends soldered together. With them there were also found two plain flat hoops or circlets of gold, of about an inch in diameter, ¼ inch wide in the widest part, and tapering to the ends, which are unjoined (Fig. 86, No. 1).

There is also in the Museum a hoard of gold objects of this character, consisting of six finger-rings of plaited wires, a plain solid ring formed of a tapering rod (Fig. 87), with the ends unjoined, two portions of plaited rings cut off, and two portions of plain solid rings similarly cut. Two of the plaited rings (one of which is shown in Fig. 87) are formed of three wires each, intertwisted, and the ends soldered together; the wires or rods are simply rounded by the hammer and tapered to either end. The other four rings are slightly larger. They are composed of eight wires, each similarly fashioned by the hammer alone, and ingeniously interplaited, so that two strands of the plait form a ridge all round the convexity of the ring, the ends united and worked flat to form a bezel. Unfortunately we are unable to localise this hoard more closely than that it was found somewhere in the Hebrides.

Another hoard of somewhat similar character was found in June 1863, in the island of Bute, about 300 yards distant from the old church of St. Blane, in Kingarth. The hoard, [Illustration: Fig. 88.—Ingot of Silver (actual size).] which was deposited beneath a large stone, consisted of two gold rings, three long, narrow fillets of thin gold, a small ingot of silver (Fig. 88), weighing 228 grains, and a number of silver coins, of which twenty-one were pennies of David I. of Scotland, three of King Stephen, and one of King Henry I. of England. Of the two gold rings, one (Fig. 89, No. 1) is a plain solid ring, formed of a rod rounded by the hammer, and tapered to both ends, and the ends unjoined. The other, shown in Fig. 89, No. 2, is composed of three similarly-hammered rods or wires twisted together, and the ends joined into a lozenge-shaped bezel. The largest of the three fillets found with them is (Fig. 90) 17 inches in length, and about 3⁄16 inch wide in the centre, tapering to both ends until it expands into a small terminal loop. The others are similar in form. They are scarcely thicker than stout writing-paper, and the largest, though 17 inches in length, weighs only 55 grains. Their ornamentation consists of zig-zag running patterns, and beaded work in _repoussé_.

It is thus evident that this typical form of construction of personal ornaments in the precious metals by interplaiting and intertwisting slender rods of metal, rounded and tapered by the hammer alone, and their ends soldered together, comes down at least to the twelfth century, and appears in associations in which there is no suggestion of an Oriental origin. Its area, so far as our present knowledge enables us to define it, appears to be limited to the northern and western isles, no well-authenticated instance having been recorded from the mainland of Scotland. On the other hand, the area of the type extends eastwards into Scandinavia, but there the type itself is regarded as one which is not indigenous.

The type of penannular arm ring, which is of rounded or quadrangular section, with tapering or slightly flattened ends, of which so many examples were associated with the twisted rings and bulbous brooches in the Skaill hoard, has not occurred in any other metal than silver. Like the other types associated with them, they have not been found in Scotland beyond the area of the Scandinavian colonisation. Within that area, however, they appear not unfrequently. Wallace records the discovery of a hoard of nine in one of the mounds at Stennis, in Orkney. Another hoard, of which the precise number is not given, was found in 1774 at Caldale, near Kirkwall, with a horn containing 300 silver pennies of Canute the Great. In 1830 six or seven were found at Quendale, in Shetland, with a horn full of Anglo-Saxon coins of Ethelred, Ethelstan, Edwy, and Edgar.

In 1850 a hoard of at least six were found in the island of Skye, but in circumstances of which there is no record.

In 1872 a hoard of eight were found in a cist of stones in or close to an ancient burying-ground near where the burn of Rattar enters the Pentland Firth, in Caithness. One of these is shown in Fig. 91.

All these are similar in form to each other, and to the rings of the same type found in Scandinavia in association with the other types of silver ornaments previously described. They are more frequently plain than ornamented, and when ornamented their decoration consists simply of a series of impressions formed by a triangular punch, with one, two, or three dots in the field. This species of ornamentation is only found on these silver ornaments in Scotland, but in Scandinavia it is common to them and to the oval bowl-shaped brooches of brass which were the characteristic personal ornaments of the closing period of the Scandinavian Paganism.

It follows from this enumeration of the characteristics of form and ornament exhibited by the different varieties of these silver ornaments which have been deposited in hoards within the area of the Scandinavian colonisation of Scotland, that they possess a character which is distinctive and peculiar, being neither wholly Celtic nor wholly Scandinavian, but owing its individuality to an intermixture of characteristics derived from forms and systems of ornament which are peculiar to each of these racial areas.

The deposit of such hoards of ornaments and coin is a custom more characteristic of the Scandinavian than of the Celtic area. Deposits of this character may have been placed in the soil for simple concealment at any time, but they are much more frequent in this particular period than in any other, and there was a motive connected with the Pagan faith of the people which may have operated to increase their abundance. We learn from the Saga of Egil Skalagrimson that there was a belief among the Pagan Northmen that treasure thus buried during their lifetime would be available for use or display in the life to come.

But whatever may have been the manner or the motive of their concealment, the fact, which is of special importance for the purpose of the present investigation, is that they are for the most part relics which, by their forms and the characteristics of their art, are but feebly linked with the forms and art of the Celtic area in which they are found, and strongly linked by their art characteristics with the art of the Scandinavian Paganism, which was contemporary with the art of the Christian Celtic school. The soil in which they are found is within that area of Scotland which was occupied by a mixed population, composed of the two races whose special art instincts are visible in the mixed art of the objects—the dominant race, moreover, being that whose art is dominant in their decoration.