In recent years material research on early medieval Northern Europe and its Viking Age (ca. 750 to 1100 CE) has experienced an unparalleled renaissance, driven in part by digital technologies that allow archaeologists to ask new questions and find answers to previously unanswerable ones. Our project Handicraft Archaeology based on Intelligent Technology (HAbIT) with 3-year funding from The Research Council of Sweden and support from Museum West and UrbNet in Denmark, seeks to understand how applied arts from early urban contexts contributed to making Scandinavia a part of Western Christianity. The project title alludes to ancient craft processes and to the technical solutions of today that help us rediscover them – such as 3D laser scanning, virtual object analysis, augmented metal casting experiments, and material composition analysis with the aid of portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF). These blog posts focus on one question and on the ways we have used new technologies to propose new answers.
Over the past decades, hobby metal detectorists in Denmark have been finding hundreds of small, religious badges dating to the decades around the year 1100, which in a Scandinavian context falls into the Transition Period between the Late Viking Era and Medieval Era. Three motifs, all animals with symbolic import, are the most common: a bird, a sheep or lamb, and a large beast surrounded by loops.
PHOTO OF A BIRD BADGE
Tiny brooch depicting a bird. Found during the excavation of the
Transition Period workshop in Ribe. Maximum length: 2 cm
PHOTOS OF LAMB BADGE
Two brooches depicting the Lamb of God.
The one on the left stylistically somewhat earlier than the one on the right.
Urnes-style badges depicting a great beast surrounded by loops.
They differ in terms of artistic quality, but the motif is the same.
These animals have been interpreted plausibly as Christian symbols. It has been argued that the whole set might be standing for the Holy Trinity, consisting of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The idea to depict God’s animating power as a bird and Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God falls in line with generic medieval iconography. The notion to represent God as a beast in loops, however, derives most likely from native Scandinavian custom.
These finds from Ribe unsettle existing chronologies about the production and use of religious badges. They seem to be simultaneously too late and too early.
On the one hand, as symbols of missionary efforts, they are late. During the Viking Age, Scandinavian peoples mediated important messages by means of animal art. Do our badges reconnect to that tradition? Perhaps. It would make sense for Mother Church to use the traditional channel of animal art to appeal to the hearts and minds of her Scandinavian converts. But according to the mid-Viking Age runestone at Jelling – which is often called Denmark’s baptismal certificate – king Harald Bluetooth (d. ca. 987) “made all the Danes Christian” around the year 965. The Transition Period religious badges, produced in the decade around 1100, post-date Harald’s claim by about four to six generations. It is hard to argue that the users of our Transition Period badges were converts, when Harald’s claim – together with other supporting data – make it likely that the era of official conversion lay many generations behind them.
On the other hand, compared to the general rise in the use of religious badges in the West, the Transition Period badges are early. A good comparison is provided by the popularity of the devotion to Thomas Becket, who was assassinated in Canterbury cathedral in 1170 by four Anglo-Norman knights. The shrine site saw the mass influx of pilgrims and the production of badge-like objects for them almost immediately and for decades thereafter. The enigmatic badges found in Denmark predate the Canterbury badges by many decades.
What then prompted the production and use of the Transition Period badges?
Over the past five decades, archaeologists have been slowly paving the way to an answer through their work excavating three Transition Era workshops where these badge-like objects were produced. One site is in the northern Danish city of Aalborg, the second is in the southern Swedish cathedral town of Lund, which was under Danish rule until 1658, and the third and most recent site is in Ribe, excavated in 2012. The excavation of this site produced thousands of finds: mold fragments, crucibles and other casting debris, as well as miscast jewelry made of brass, all dating in between 1077–1120. The finished objects produced at the Ribe workshop remind us of medieval badges, but they also differ from them in some interesting ways!
In part two of our blog post series on religious badges from Ribe, we will explore how the Transition Era Ribe badges were produced.