Dear Ingegerd
Your corpus presumably includes the wonderful 'Celtic' bronze hanging-bowls
of British or Irish manufacture and found almost exclusively in Norway, Britain
and Ireland. The pertinence for this list is that they have an (early) medieval
religious context in that
a) the insular majority, though found in 'pagan Saxon' cemeteries (whatever we
may now understand by these terms), may be 'sub-Roman' and therefore from a
Christian-led society;
b) one of their most typical motifs, the spiral trumpet design, is 'matched
exactly' in a carpet-page from the illuminated Gospel-book, the Book of Durrow,
c. 675-80 (quoting Rupert Bruce-Mitford);
c) one of the insular bowls was found on the site of St Paul-in-the-Bail, the
church built in, or on the site of, the courtyard of the Roman forum of
Lincoln, and traditionally associated with St Paulinus, the 'apostle of
Northumbria', c. 627, though it is know thought that the grave in which the
bowl was deposited could be later than the earliest phase(s) of the church.
While it is therefore tempting to jump to syncretic conclusions about these
artefacts and the possible transmission of insular ideas and meanings from
'Christian' Britain to 'pagan' Scandinavia, let me play devil's advocate. What
encourages us to attach particular ideas and meanings to these artefacts? The
question is important in our discussion of early clerical duties and ritual,
particularly if it is being suggested that the church at first left many
occasions for ritual well alone.
Graham Jones
Leicester
Ingegerd wrote:
>
> Thank you for the interest! At the moment, only a couple of copies exist of
> my thesis at University College London, called "Vessel import to Norway in
> the first millennium A.D. Composition and context", Ph.D. thesis, Institute
> of Archaeology, 1996, but, if I can finish off my revision of it fairly
> soon, it will be published by The Archaeological Museum in Stavanger,
> Norway, this year (still in English!) in their series AmS Skrifter.
> As to the content and conclusions, they do not really deal with
> Christianity, but the place and meaning of certain imported objects (vessels
> of bronze, glass, pottery etc.) in pre-Christian Norwegian society. Instead
> of interpreting the vessels just as prestigious, but mainly functional,
> objects, my theory is that they were used (and they are mainly found in
> burials) as metaphors and symbols for regeneration, fertility and
> continuity, both in rituals conducted during the lifetime of the deceased
> and in the burial context. Such rituals would probably have been seen as
> particularly important for the leading families (hence the association with
> high-status farms), who also had a ritual responsibility for their society
> as a whole, another reason why they (who also had the means) were eager to
> acquire specialized vessels for the purpose.
>
> This may not be quite what you had expected, Graham, but if you, or anyone
> else, is interested in discussing this, or the more general points about the
> early introduction of Christianity into these Norse societies, I shall be
> happy to do so, on or off list!
>
> Ingegerd H.
>
> Dr. Ingegerd Holand
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
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