Welcome to the Penultimate in Our Bringing Vikings Back to the East Midlands Lecture Series

Welcome to the penultimate in our ‘Bringing Vikings back to the East Midlands’ lecture series. Today I’m happy to welcome Doctor Sue Brunning from the British Museum. I’ll begin first by saying “Midlands Viking Symposium”: if you want more Vikings in your life after the lecture series has finished,on the 28th of April here at Nottingham, we shall have the Midlands Viking Symposium, and you should all have had aflyer and if you don’t you can grab one on the wayout. So today’s speaker is Doctor Sue Brunning; Sue is curator of the British Museum'sEuropean Early Medieval Collections, inthe Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory.She tells me that she basically has responsibility for everything but the Vikings! She's currently working on amonographbased on her PhD about swords inNorthern Europe, and she's also writingup the Bedale sword-hilt, the subject of today's lecture for publicationin the British Museum's forthcoming bookabout the Vale of York Hoard, which willalso include other more recently discovered hoards, so I think that one’s going to be worth lookingfor, so I’ll pass you over to Sue Brunning.

Thank you very much and thank you alsoto the organisers of this spectacularseries, it’s been fantastic, for inviting me tojoin in the fun, so it's really lovelyfor me to be here today and to see sucha full room with everybody engaged withearly medieval archaeology, which is justtop-notch. So welcome everybody. So yeah I'm delighted to be part of thisthis program for this kind of festivalof Vikings that's happening in Nottingham themoment, it's really good fun and ofcourse there's the exhibition over theway that was developed in association withYork Museums Trust and the British Museumwhich is obviously where I work. And overthere one of the star attractions is theBedale Hoard,there's the location of where the hoardwas discovered in 2012 by metaldetectorists, and where we are today inNottingham. Some of you may remember whenthis was in the news; it made quite a bigsplash in the news at the time that itwas discovered and Yorkshire Museum launched a fundraising campaign to acquire thetreasure, which they did in 2014. Thehoard was probably buried in the late 9th to early 10th centuries. It contains a group of silver ingots,complete and cut up neck- and arm-rings (what we refer to as hack silver), and alsoparts of a swordwhich you can see circledthere. Now ingots and pieces of jewellerythat have been cut up are quite typicalin Viking period hoards from Britain, butthe presence of a sword is unique. Now,the sword fittings themselves are almostunique, being an incredibly rare example of this time of a sword that has golddecorations attached to it. So whatis this particular sword doing in thisparticular hoard? Now,my talk today willsharemy progress in researching the Bedale sword fittings for publication, as has already been mentioned. So I'm going todescribe the pieces, contextualize thema little bit, and propose someinterpretations for their inclusion inthe hoard. I'm also going to talk alittle bit about what I think the swordmight tell us about ‘value’, the value inbroadest sense, of swords in earlymedieval Britain, a little bit moretowards the end. The Bedale sword fittings include an iron pommel, iron upper and lowerguards, four gold grip mounts in the form ofrings (in the middle there), and six goldrivets that are probably associated withthe sword itself, and all of these partscome from the hilt or the handle of thesword, which is the part that's held inthe hand. There was no blade discovered in thehoard,so it seems likely that the hilt wasremoved for deposition and the blade went off somewhere else, but that's another storythat I won't be delving into today. Mineral preserved textiles and wood wereadhering to the surface of the hiltfittings which seems to suggest thatthey were wrapped carefully in clothbefore being placed perhaps in a boxalong with the rest of the hoard, andthen everything buried in the ground. The pommel is of this particular shapethat we often refer to as tri-lobed, thatbasically means it has these kind ofthree knops as you can see quite clearlyhere, and a rather nice curved base. Asyou can see it's decorated extensivelywith thin gold foils in a sort ofarrangement around on top of the surface of thepommelthere, and the design on both sidesof the pommel appears to bethe same,although as you've seen with the previous slide,that's kind of slightly obscured, but itlooks like it conforms to the same layout, soperhaps a symmetrical design on both sides. The design centres around a disc in themiddle here, which you can see, and thatcontains a rather acrobatic animal inthe late Anglo-SaxonTrewhiddlestylewhich I'll come back to a little bitlater on. The rest of the pommel is decorated with plant stems and leafymotifs and these differently shapedpanels and little applique shapesthere, a few of them just pointed outfor you there, that you can see, theseleafy shapes and plants, sort of tendrils. The lower edge of the pommel is sheathed in a gold sheet and that's containinginterlacing animals a lot like the onethat we see in the central disc inmiddle of the pommel. The curved upper guard is decorated with very similarmotifs that we see elsewhere on therest of the pommel here, and these are arranged in gold foils thatcreate this kind of rectangular motifthat’s made up from a lozenge in themiddle and then these four triangles onthe outside, so kind of like an exploded sort oflozenge-rectangular motif there. Even the underside of the pommel and theguard is decorated, again with theseleafy plant-like stems just like we'veseen on the rest of the pommel. Now the lowerguard was probably also decorated inthis way with these applied gold foils, but it’svery highly corrodedand encrusted again with these mineralised materials so we can’t really see –you can just see sort of like little areas where there might be little pieces of gold foil poking out fromunderneath. The four gold rings that were foundassociated with the hilt are probablyfrom the hand grips, so they're probablythe part from directly underneath wherethe hand is holding. We also see hereon the side the six very tiny goldrivets which may have fixed additionalfoilsperhaps to that hand grip around where the rings were encircling;and the hand grip was probably made of some kind of organicmaterial like bone, or antler, or hornwhich is quite typical for swords ofthis period. Now,the overall shape ofthe hilt is quite a distinctive shapewith a sort of lobed top and the curvedguards; this is quite familiar tous and it's categorized under a title thatwe were first to quite glamorously as‘Petersen's type L’, which is named afterthe Norwegian archaeologist whocategorized swords from this period thatwerediscovered in Norway, and thisparticular type is known for havingthese three lobes on the pommel and these curved guards. NowPetersen type L swords areoften decorated withsilver foils or plating like the ones that youcan see on this slide. I know they'reblack and white so they obviously dolook like silver but you can take myword for it, all of those sort of metallicdecorations that you can see on these swords are silver rather than gold. Now, many of these swords also have aseries of grip mounts, so that's what I wasreferring to as the part that's being heldin the hand; you can see the rings in themiddle between the lower guard andthe pommel on these examples here. Andthese are often decorated in the same way tomatch the other fittings on the rest ofthe parts of the hilt. Usually we findtwo of these mounts, some of these swordshave three, and occasionally there aremore, so the sword from Gilling West,which I believe is also over in theexhibition at the moment, has five ofthese mounts. Now, the decoration on theseswords, when they are decorated, is usuallyin the Anglo-SaxonTrewhiddlestyle whichis a name that we give to a particularstyle that we find at this period, whichis distinguished by quite characteristic panels of plant ornament,animal ornament, geometric ornamentarranged in these little panels; and thisparticular style dominated Anglo-Saxonart during the 9th century and intothe early 10th century in parts ofnorthern England. So this kind ofstylistic dating, accordingto what we can see that's decorating theparticular sword, along with thearchaeological contexts of the type ofsword, these Petersen type L swords, hasdated the type of sword overall to themid-9th to 10th centuries and it alsosupports the somewhat prevailing view (that's being questioned alittle bit more now), this sort ofoverall view that these types of swordsare probably Anglo-Saxon in origin; andthe dating of the swords also correlatesquite well with when we think the Bedale Hoard itselfwas deposited in the ground. So, I'm not expecting you to read all this small print, this is just an example! There are quite a largenumber of these swords; now, when I drewup this slide there were around 70 but I've since discovered an articlewritten in Norwegian that adds afew more to the batch,so its slightly out-of-date but there are a good number ofthese swords, probably around the 100 mark,that we know of to date. Now thisexcludes several stray finds of pommelsand fragments of guards that have beenrecorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, so I'm focusing more onthe complete swords that we have fromarchaeological contexts here, butthere might be a few more represented onthe PAS database. Most, as you might beable to see, do come from Britain withsignificant numbers also from Norway andrather fewer from Sweden and Denmark,Finland, Iceland, Germany, Belgium and theNetherlands. So, this is the overallcontext to which the Bedale sword fittingsbelong. They also have several quiteinteresting typological, stylistic and kind of regional features that makethem also stand outa little bit from the rest of the pack of these typesof swords. I'm not going to be able tolinger on those issues today, just because we'resort of short amount of time, but I wouldlike to take just a few moments to talkabout one or two of them because I thinkthey're quite interesting; but if you areinterested in learning more detail aboutthat, then this will be discussed furtherthan the publication, so you can have alook there if you’d like to follow up. So first of all I want to talk abit about the decoration on thefittings. Now as I've mentioned it'sclearly in this tradition of the Trewhiddlestyle, but it's also idiosyncratic in a couple of interestingways, so I'm going to take the animalmotifs rather than the plant motifs as acase study here, just because I thinkthat early medieval animals are alwaysreally fun to look at; they're alwaysvery energetic and lively and it seemsthat the makerquite enjoyed workingwith them too as we’ll see. So first ofall we’ll take a closer look at the roundel, or thedisc in the centre of the pommel there. So caneverybody see an animal in this, in thisroundel? It's a little bit difficult to see -the trick withAnglo-Saxon animal artis often to try and find the extremitiesof the creature first, so you can lookfor the nose, the snout, theeye is often a good one to look forbecause it's often just a little drilledhole, or kind of like an almond shape orsomething like that, that's often quitegood to find; or sometimes the tail and the feet, youcan find those, and once you've got thoseextremities you can kind of work yourway through the rest of the animal andtry and find it there. And thisparticular animalis really hard tounravel because it's somewhat of acontortionist! It took me quite a longtime with a few highlighter pens to actuallydiscover exactly what he was doing inhere, but we're gonna have a little looktogether so you'll now be able to seethe wonders of my craft with MicrosoftPaint in order to decode our creaturehere. So first of all, good that's working, wehave the creatures head. You can see that it has a rather blunt snout with a quitenice little peakednose, and again that drilled eye, that's quiteclear to see there, and that helps youto find the head of the creature,and it has a very interesting (you'll seewhy it's interesting in a little while)triangle shape behind the eye there, whichis probably representing the earpointing backwards. So,it has a slenderneck which kind of follows the loweredge of the disc before dividing intothe creature’s body and foreleg. If wefollow the foreleg, it's a very thinelongated foreleg which is extendingfrom a kind of a rounded hip, sort oflike a pear shaped hip there, and itweaves through the creatures own body,tail and hindleg into the disc’scentre andthen reaches the upper left edge as youcan see it here,to kind of terminateright in front of the creatures jaw there. Next, the body:this is tapering from quite a deep chest, adeep breast which is arching upwardsthrough the disc’scentre and then downback again towards the right edge asyou're looking at it, where it splitsinto another one of these broad hips anda thin tail. So here we have the tail,which is lacing back again towards theleft from the hip, and it passes underand over the beast’s body in a kind ofloop before ends in what we refer to as either a nicked or a notched pointat the lower right edge down there. Andlast but not least the hindleg - it'sextending kind of diagonally backdownwards through the bodyof the creature there, passing over it andunder the tail to terminate in a curled foot that's just nestling under thesort of neck, the snout of thecreature there, under the jaws there, justkind of curling back on itself, rathernicely sort of wedged in there. So thesnubbed snout and that sort of nicked or notchedbody and the backward-looking stance ofthe creature and it's interlacing limbs,all of these things fit quitecomfortably within the Trewhiddlestylewhich I've been talking about, but I justwant to talk a little bit more aboutthat notch which is representing theanimal’s ear just behind its eye there. Sothe same kind of feature is sported byother beasts on the grip mounts of thesword, so it shows that the hilt piecesdo seem to be matching with each otheras I've mentioned, and that they wereprobably all made to be on the sameweapon, which is not always a given forearly medieval swords, but that's completely another story so I'll just parkthat wrong there for now. But usuallyTrewhiddlestyle beasts, as you cansee on these strap ends on theleft-hand side of the slide there, theyhave quite smooth heads, sometimesthey're earless or they might havelittle rounded or pointed ears whichare kind of poking out of that rathersmooth head, but the Bedalebeast’s ear, as you can see, is quitedifferent, it's like this little sunkentriangle set behind the eye there, and Ifound this to be quite hard to parallel,I haven't been able to find anythingthat looks quite like this; and it'spossible that this little detail mightrepresent an innovation, a stylistic innovation, on the part of the maker of this this design. Let's lookalso briefly at the animals around theband at the base of the pommel, so thispart just along here. Now the Trewhiddlestyle, as I've mentioned, it usually putsits animals in little arched framesor little rectangles, kind of theselittle sort of arcades, and the animalsfill the space almost like they're insome kind of little zoo, you know, theyhave their own little space there. But onthe Bedale pommel, I hope you can seeon the slide here, they were allowed toextend much more freely through muchlonger panels; they have this kind ofsinuous space that they can kind ofweave their way through, and this rare arrangement again I found quitedifficult to parallel. The main one thatI found is on another sword from theRiver Meuseat Wessemin the Netherlands, whichI hope you can see, is sort of similarbands along the lower part of thepommel here which has these creatureskind of free to move throughout thewhole of the space there. Now what thismight say about the sword and where itwas madeis sort of quite difficult to answer, but Iwill be speaking a bit more about thatin the publication, so they'll bea little bit more information available;but for now I just wanted to illustratethat the Bedale Hoard is this reallyinteresting mixture of quite typical andthe form - we find these good parallelsfor the shape of the of the actual swordhilt there - but even down on a microlevel it has these little idiosyncrasies, little unusual elements, these really interesting little different features that sets itapart from those of other swords inthe corpus of these Petersen typeL weapons. So I'll just take aquick drink. So now I want to move on tothe main focus of my paper, and that'swhat I think are the most curious, themost interesting,aspects of these swordfittings. First of all the use of goldinstead of silver which I've alluded toalready in their decoration, but alsotheir very presence in one of thesehoards. I think the two of those thingsare actually directly related to eachother, and I think it's here thathopefully the title of my talktoday will start to become a little bitclearer. But I'm going to take the secondone of those things first: so what isthis particular weapon, these particularpieces ofa sword,doing in one of these hoards? Now the epicpoem Beowulf, which I'm sure is known toall of you, I’m sure we read it all everyweekend and we quote it all at length,I know that I do in my daily life, thispoem survives in a manuscript ofaround 1000 but probably contains olderelements that date back to much earlierthan that.