Gold Bracteate

Bracteates begin as imitation. In the late Roman period the empire paid, bribed and flattered the peoples on its northern edge, and part of what it sent was gold medallions with the emperor's head in profile. In Scandinavia these were worn, copied, and then copied from the copies, and over a few generations the imperial portrait turned into something with no Roman content left. The head remains, but it acquires a horse-like animal beneath it, a bird beside it, a headdress that is not a diadem, and around the edge a border of stamped triangles and beaded wire. About a thousand of the resulting discs survive, thin enough to be struck from one die into gold foil, with a loop soldered on for wearing.

The classification into types A to F is by what is on the die: a head alone, a head above a quadruped, a rider, a whole figure, and so on. The commonest type is the head above the animal, and the standard interpretation connects it to a healing scene, on the strength of an Old High German charm in which a god heals a horse's leg. That reading, developed at length by Karl Hauck, identifies the head as an early form of Odin and treats the whole class as a devotional and protective object of that cult. It is the dominant reading and it is not universally accepted, with critics arguing that a tenth century German charm is thin ground on which to interpret fifth century Scandinavian imagery.

A substantial minority of bracteates carry runic inscriptions in the older futhark, and they matter out of proportion to their length, because there is very little runic writing this early. Some are names, presumably of makers or owners. Some appear to be meaningless sequences, which may be a die-cutter copying letters he could not read, and which is itself informative about how far literacy extended. And a small group carries short words that recur across many objects and across other early inscribed finds: alu, laukaz, lathu.

None of the three has an agreed meaning. Alu has been connected to ale and so to ritual drinking, to a root meaning protection, and to a term for ecstatic or altered states, and the argument has run for the better part of a century without resolution. Laukaz means leek or garlic, a plant with protective associations, and is usually read as a charm word. Lathu is generally taken as an invitation or summoning. These are positions held by identifiable scholars against each other, which is the ordinary condition of a difficult text, and the sensible thing is to record that the words are formulaic and that their sense is disputed rather than to choose. What the inscriptions do establish beyond argument is that the objects were not merely ornamental: somebody thought it worth putting writing on them, in a society where writing was rare.