#Intriguing datum plus#

Karl Hauck identified the major figure depicted on bracteates as Odin, based on what he called Kontext-Ikonographie, by which he looked at pictures not in isolation but by considering inscriptions, later texts, place-names, image traditions, archaeol-ogy, and motif details such as figure attributes and gestures (Hauck 1975). Interpretation often depends upon analysis of texts from Late Antiquity or the later medieval period, in particular Old Norse Eddic and saga material (e.g.

Besides classification, the other major concern of bracteate scholarship has been identifi-cation of the figures depicted on these objects. Further refinements to bracteate groupings were made by Mogens B.Mackeprang (1952), but the basic division of the Migration Period bracteates continues to be used, even in the most recent corpus of bracteates as presented by Karl Hauck (IK 1,1–3,2). Type A comprises bracteates with a man's head, Type B includes standing human figures, Type C shows a man's head and a horse-like animal, Type D has a dragon-like animal, and Type F has a horse-like animal but no human.

#Intriguing datum plus#

Although bracteates were classified into Types A–H, Montelius (1869) recognized that Types A through D plus Type F are the ones that date to the Migration Period of the fifth through sixth centuries A.D., whereas others are later. Thomsen (1855), Oscar Montelius (1869), and Bernhard Salin (1895) focused on organizing these artifacts by classi-fying them into types according to details of images depicted in the central stamped field of decoration. Bracteate classification and iconography From the earliest research on bracteates, scholars including C. Before presenting alternate explanations, I will review basic information about bracteates and their inscriptions, and I will summarize the basic tenets of Hauck's thesis. I also propose the use of what Michaela Helmbrecht (2008) has termed ‗context analysis' to focus on the various contexts in which bracteates have been discovered in order to shed additional light upon their meaning. In this paper, I will high-light other interpretations of bracteates, not as definitive answers to the meaning of bracteates but instead to emphasize the tenuous nature of all such theories.

While the research of the late Karl Hauck has dominated bracteate scholarship for the past forty years, his theory of bracteate iconography is not the only possible interpretation of this imagery that may illuminate our understanding of the inscriptions. Relatively few of the 170 bracteates with runic inscriptions-which are known from only 110 different dies (Düwel 2008: 46)-are semantically meaningful. The writing is mostly in the elder futhark but also in corrupted Latin copied from inscriptions on Late Roman coins and medallions, which are presumably the models for bracteate imagery. Although nearly 1000 Scandinavian Migration Period (fifth-and sixth-century) gold pendants called bracteates have been discovered in Scandinavia and throughout northern and central Europe, only about twenty percent of these objects have inscriptions.