Nordic Bronze Age

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.

A great deal of what survives from the Nordic Bronze Age was deliberately placed where it could not be got back: weapons, ornaments and vessels sunk in bogs, lakes and rivers, sometimes broken or bent first. Richard Bradley's work on hoards and votive deposits across prehistoric Europe treats this as a religious act rather than as loss or storage, and points out that the selection is patterned. Particular object types go into particular kinds of water, the deposits cluster at particular places over long periods, and the material is often the most valuable available.

The lur horns are the clearest case. They are large curved bronze trumpets, difficult to cast, and they are usually found in pairs in bogs, which suggests both that they were played in pairs and that they were given up together at the end. What none of this establishes is who the deposits were for. No name of a god or spirit survives from the period, and attempts to read the later Norse pantheon backwards into it are speculation, separated from the material by some two thousand years and by the arrival of new languages and peoples in between. The atlas keeps the period distinct from the Viking Age for exactly that reason.