Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 Read Online Free Page B

advance on stone tools but bronze was even more important for making status symbols, such as weapons, jewellery, razors, horned helmets, lurs (horns) and fittings for wheeled vehicles, and cult objects such as the magnificent ‘Sun Chariot’ from Trundholm in Denmark, a model of a four-wheeled horse-drawn wagon carrying a brilliantly gilded sun disc. The horned helmets, misinterpreted by antiquarians in the nineteenth century, helped give rise to the romantic, but mistaken, belief that Vikings wore horned helmets. Sadly, Vikings never wore horned helmets. The Bronze Age elite probably also achieved close control over the use and distribution of amber. Amber beads and other ornaments are common offerings in Stone Age graves in Scandinavia, but they are virtually absent from those of the Bronze Age. Amber is so light that it floats in salt water – another property that made it remarkable to the ancients (it also burns) – and is washed up on beaches around the North Sea and the Baltic for anyone to pick up. However, it appears that the elite claimed ownership of all amber washed up in their territories and could prevent others using it so they could prioritise its use for export.
    Petroglyphs
    It is during the Bronze Age ( c. 1800 BC – c. 500 BC ), that the importance of seafaring in Scandinavia first becomes obvious. No Bronze Age ships have yet been found in Scandinavia but representations of them are everywhere, carved on rocks and etched into bronze vessels and tools such as razors, and most prominently as stone ship-settings. The latter are groups of large stones arranged to form the outline shape of a ship that were used to mark graves. Sometimes taller stones are placed at the ends of the settings to give the impression of raised prows and, more rarely, there are raised stones in the position where, in a real ship, a mast would have been. Most ship-settings range in length from around 6 feet (1.8 m) to 50 feet (15.25 m) but the longest, the now largely destroyed setting at Jelling in Jutland, is about 1,100 feet (335 m) long. Over 2,000 settings survive, with a major concentration on the Swedish island of Gotland, but these are probably only a fraction of those originally built. Many of the survivors are now incomplete as a result of farmers removing stones to build walls or clear land for the plough, and it is likely that many more have been completely destroyed in this way. The first ship-settings were built in the second half of the Bronze Age and they continued to be built almost until the end of the Viking Age, nearly 2,000 years later. It is impossible to be certain what beliefs were associated with these symbolic ships or, for that matter, that those beliefs remained the same throughout the long period in which the settings were built, but they were probably intended in some way to transport the soul of the deceased to the afterlife. The use of real ships in burials, which began in the centuries immediately before the Viking Age, was probably a development of these beliefs.
    Even more numerous than ship settings are petroglyphs showing large canoe-like boats crewed by warriors armed with spears and axes, as well as wheeled vehicles, animals and sun discs. The boats are always shown in silhouette and have distinctive double beaked prows at each end. No other details of the boats’ construction are shown on the petroglyphs, however. The boat petroglyphs are usually carefully sited in natural channels on the rocks, along which rainwater and melted snow would flow to create a lifelike scene. It is unlikely that the petroglyphs were carved simply because Bronze Age people liked to see pictures of boats. They probably depict mythological scenes or had some ritual purpose. The ships are often associated with petroglyphs of sun discs which, with artefacts like the Trundholm Sun Chariot, should probably be interpreted as evidence of a solar cult. Solar cults were widespread in later Bronze Age Europe and are