LOT 0340

Viking Age 'Great Beast' Weather Vane Terminal

11TH CENTURY A.D.

2 5/8 in. (84.9 grams, 66 mm).

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.

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.

See Graham-Campbell, J., Viking Art, London, 2013, items 138-140, for Ringerike style ship-vanes; for a discussion of Viking-period weather vanes and their re-use as badges of nobility in Normandy, see Engström, J. & Nykänen, P., New Interpretations of Viking Age Weathervanes, in Fornvännen, vol.91, 1996; Lindgrén, S., Viking Weather-Vane Practices in Medieval France in Fornvännen, vol.91, 1996 and Lindgrén, S., Viking Weather-Vane Practices in Medieval France in Fornvännen, vol.78, 1983.

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).