Viking Age Glass Bead Necklace with Bronze Pendants

Composed of a round-section hoop with decoratively twisted wire collars, graduated bulbs adorned with granules. 11.4 grams, 35 mm



From the collection of a North American gentleman, formed in the 1990s.

Adorned with granule clusters to the sidewall and a granulated cross to convex base. 1.40 grams, 14 mm



From the collection of a North American gentleman, formed in the 1990s.

Pendants in the form of miniature buckets have been found in a number of pagan Anglo-Saxon and Viking contexts and are generally made of bronze or iron, with gold examples being rare; three gold examples were found with the hoard from Hoen, Norway. Bronze bucket amulets have been found at Driffield in Yorkshire, and Vimose bog in Denmark, among other places. In form they represent wooden buckets bound with bronze or iron bands which have been found in Anglo-Saxon and Viking graves and are believed to have held mead or ale and were used to replenish the cups from which warriors drank. As amulets they probably represent the ecstatic power of alcoholic drink and the role of women as the dispensers of these precious beverages.

Formed as a crouching beast modelled in the round with hollow slot to the underside; elongated head with raised lentoid eyes and ellipsoid ears, ribbed wings to the shoulders, knop tail and splayed claws to the feet; mouth open with detailed fangs. 84.9 grams, 66 mm



From the collection of a North American gentleman, formed in the 1990s. This lot has been checked against the Interpol Database of stolen works of art and is accompanied by search certificate no. 200289.

The navigation techniques in use in Iron Age Northern Europe were very sophisticated, as would be expected from people bordering the Baltic, North Sea and North Atlantic where boat- and ship-building traditions have been perfected over more than a thousand years. A carved wooden panel from Bergen, Norway, shows a number of Viking longships at sea, some with weathervanes mounted on the stempost. They are mounted vertically with the beast on the outer end. Gilded bronze weathervanes appear on the roofs of medieval churches in Sweden, Norway and Finland where they are often regarded as ornamental: symbols of access to resources and craftsmanship for the important families who endowed such buildings. These weathervanes in many cases originally adorned ships and were used as part of the navigational equipment. They may have inspired the medieval Norman custom of attaching a gilded weathervane or cock to church roofs, which eventually spread to secular buildings such as castles in France and Italy where their use was restricted to certain ranks of nobility (Lindgrén, 1983).