Using my friend Stefan's home-made illuminated drawing pulpit (tried & true), I've traced a photograph of the new-found Kaga foil-figure die to make it easier to understand the motif. The drawing will appear in a short paper in the summer issue of Fornvännen.
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I'm proof-reading pdf files of Fornvännen's summer issue, including a note I've written about the Kaga foil-figure die. It's full of ugly hyphenations, but contentwise it's OK. So I've put the file on-line here for all you guldgubbar fans.
Update 21 April '08: And here's the final printed version…
Very timely with the discovery of the Kaga foil-figure model, my buddy Ing-Marie Back Danielsson has published her PhD thesis in archaeology, Masking Moments. The transitions of bodies and beings in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (available on-line). There's a picture of a foil-figure or other late-1st…
Many senior Swedish archaeologists are afraid of metal detectors and uncomfortable with the idea that the public might have access to such machines. Likewise with information about the locations, or even the existence, of newly made metal detector finds. "Keep it quiet or you'll attract looters."…
Working with the Gothenburg Historical Society's metal detector group at Sättuna near Linköping in the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to be on site when Niklas Krantz found the thirteenth gold foil figure die known to scholarship. These dies were used in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries to…
Nice button-on-bow brooch!
I can't help it. That just sounds so much like "Take a look at that ass!".
Well, I get the impression that she is sitting on the loo. If that is the case, I wouldn´t be looking that direction... :-)
I'm gonna invade your hall, slaughter your retinue and take a dump in your high seat, Lars.
Well, I think Lars is just envious for not finding the first evidence for the use of WC high seats from the Merovingian period! ;-)
Very nice Button brooch indeed! It provides some nice typo dating.
Since the brooch seems to be such a prominent feature, and probably important, I think we could make a fairly good assumption that it could be a representation of Freyja, wearing the Brisingamen.
Has there been any study about how brooches appears in connection with female depictions?
The seminal study is Birgit Arrhenius's 1962 paper "Det flammande smycket" (in Fornvannen, where else?). But there are probably also numerous later contributions. Margrethe Watt certainly has ideas about the attributes of the characters depicted on foil figures.
Well, interesting. But something should be done more coherently. After all, this is one of the few ways by which we could try and trace back a goddess of such importance as Freyja into the earlier centuries.
Britt-Marie Näsström strongly advocates that she represents the Great goddess type of divinity and that she was know by many names. I think that these many names may be signs of an attempt to bring together several "Great goddesses" into one by late viking age "thinkers" or more likely later chronicler who wanted an ordered structure.
The important piece of jewellery is something that keeps occuring through history and in archaeological finds, especially in connections with what seems to be depictions of female dieties, whatever they where called.
But then, most males wanna write of spears and swords and thundering gods, don´t we, Martin?
Why is there so many things that NEEDS to be researched and why am I not able to do anything of it?