The Sun Carried Across the Sky

Nordic Bronze Age imagery repeats a small number of motifs with striking consistency across Scandinavia: ships, sun discs, horses, raised axes, and pairs of figures. Flemming Kaul's study of the decorated bronzes argues that these are not separate subjects but parts of one narrative about the sun's daily journey, in which the disc is drawn by a horse across the sky by day and carried by a ship through the underworld by night, with fish and snakes marking the transitions.

The Trundholm find, a bronze horse drawing a disc gilded on one face only, fits that reading closely, since a sun with a bright side and a dark side is exactly what a journey out and back requires. This is inference from images, and Kaul is explicit that it is. There is no text of any kind from the Nordic Bronze Age. What supports the reading is the internal consistency of the material across hundreds of objects and rock carving panels, and the way the elements combine in fixed sequences rather than at random. The atlas records the sun journey as a scholarly reconstruction with strong support rather than as a documented belief, because the people who made the images left no statement of what they meant by them, and other readings of the same material remain in print.