Centuries before the Eddas were written down, Scandinavian Bronze Age people appear to have already imagined the sun's daily journey in remarkably similar terms. The Trundholm sun chariot, a bronze artifact discovered in a Danish bog in 1902 and dated to roughly 1400 BCE, shows a horse drawing a wheeled chariot on which sits a large disc, gilded on one side and plain bronze on the other, an arrangement widely interpreted by archaeologists as a representation of the sun being pulled across the sky by day, shining, and returning beneath the earth or sea by night, unlit. No text survives from this Bronze Age culture to confirm what stories, if any, its people told about this image, so any connection to the much later, textually attested myth of Sol driving her sun-chariot pulled by named horses must remain an inference rather than a proven continuity, one separated from the Viking Age sources that preserve Sol's story by well over two thousand years and an entirely different, non-literate culture.
Scholars of Nordic religion nonetheless frequently point to the Trundholm chariot as evidence that a sun-chariot image had deep roots in the region long before the Viking Age poems were composed, suggesting that Sol's myth, when it finally reaches written form in medieval Iceland, may be preserving, in altered and elaborated form, a genuinely ancient Scandinavian way of picturing the sun's movement that this single, extraordinary Bronze Age object happens to let us glimpse directly.