CHALLENGING THE PARADIGM OF VIKING-AGE ANIMAL-STYLE ART

Viking-Age art has long been equated with animal-style art, to the exclusion of human, figurative art. However, a closer examination of the corpus of art of the Viking world reveals that human figures were never absent, although they were sometimes subsumed into compositions dominated by abstracted, zoomorphic depictions. In the history of Scandinavian archaeology and art history from the nineteenth century onwards, such a great emphasis was placed on the typological classification and chronological study of the development of the animal styles of Viking and pre-Viking art that anything that did not fit that paradigm was often overlooked or disregarded as “foreign influence.” However, the corpus of Viking-Age art is being transformed with a flood of new finds as a result of metal-detecting, especially in Denmark and England. Although metal-detectorists have discovered objects with zoomorphic ornamentation, many of the recent finds display figurative subjects, and some of the new examples are three-dimensional depictions that reveal details of Viking-Age dress, coiffures, and accessories including jewelry and weapons. As more examples of this art come to light, we glimpse a view of Viking art and Viking-Age people that had previously been nearly unknown through visual sources. In particular, newly found artistic works depicting women carrying weapons should be seen in light of the so-called “female Viking warrior,” as confirmed by DNA analysis, who was buried at Birka in Sweden. In 1966, David Wilson declared that “animal art was the only art which really satisfied the Viking mind;” nevertheless, due to the recent finds, no one can assert that figurative art was merely a negligible afterthought among the Vikings.


Author(s): Wicker, Nancy (University of Mississippi)