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Bronze Age Rites and Symbols

1969; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 222; Issue: 5188 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/222041a0

1476-4687

Glyn Daniel,

Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History

HILDA DAVIDSON has already put students of the ancient history and religion of pre-Christian Scandinavia in her debt with her books The Road to Hel, Gods and 2H.yths of Nm•thern Europe and Pagan Scandinavia.Now, together with Peter Gelling, she gives us a special study of the chariot of the sun and other rites and symbols of the Northern Bronze Age.The title is catch-penny and misleading: this is a serious and useful book about all the syrnbo!H used in Scandinavian Bronze Age engravings and their survival into the historical heathendom of Scandinavia.The book starts, as, with such a title, it had to, with a colour plate of the Trundholm cult object in the National Museum in Copenhagen.This is captioned, even before we read the book, "the chariot of the sun", as well it may be.We do not learn from the contents or the preface that this is really two books.Part one deals with the Bronze Age, occupies pages l to 136 and is by Gelling: part two is called "After the Bronze Age", occupies pages 139 to 180, and is by Davidson.Professor Christopher Hawkes contributes a preface to the book, but it is a preface only to Gelling's part.Reading what he has written one might imagine that Hilda Davidson's more important part of the book did not exist.One has an uneasy feeling that thoro was originally a book by Gelling to which Hawkes wrote a preface which now appears with a long and valuable additional part by Hilda Davidson.Gelling surveys the work of Scandinavian archaeologists on their Bronze Age rock engravings from Oscar Almgren's Hallristningar och Kultbruk (1927) to Althin's Studien zn den bronzezeitlichen F'elszeichnungen von Shine (1945) and the work of Gjessing and Marstrander on the 0stfold engravings.He goes carefully and thoroughly through all the motifs from disks and disk-men, through weapons, ships, farming, the sacred marriage, and ritual dress to decorated metalwork.He has a chapter on the Mother-Goddess in which he relies uncritically on 0. G. S. Crawford's late and highly uncritical and ill-informed book The Eye-Goddess.Even with Crawford as an uncertain guide, Gelling seems strangely ignorant of the art of the megalith builders of western Europe which must lie behind much of Scandinavian Bronze Age rock engraving.It is odd that the big Ostergotland disk (his Fig. 3d) is not recognized by him, as it has been for years by Scandinavian and British archaeologists, as the eye-goddess almost precisely in the form she appears on the underside of tho capstone in the north side-chamber at Now Grange.Hilda Davidson takes the story on from the end of the Bronze Age rook-carvings.These symbols, she says, did not disappear from the north.Even after the end of the heathen period a number of the symbols remained powerful, leaving an enduring mark on folk customs in northwestern Europe.The sun-disk, the axe, the spear and tho sword wore still of primary importance in the culture of tho late heathen period up to tho Viking Age.There were, she says, two moments of change in the religious history of Scandinavia.The nr•st was at the end of the hunting period; the second was the acceptance of Christianity."Tho period between," she writes, "for all its variations in cults and symbols and tho gods and goddesses of different names found in the literature, may be viewed as a largely harmonious whole.The religion of this epoch was that of men working on the land and travelling by sea, fighting in small bands under independent kings and heroes in a heroic societv ....We are fortunate that so vigorous and