A VIKING AGATE BEAD ON A HAMMERED GOLD AMULET, CIRCA 10TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A VIKING AGATE BEAD ON A HAMMERED GOLD AMULET, CIRCA 10TH CENTURY A.D. Of ovoid form, the polished agate bead of warm honey tone is drilled through its long axis and mounted within a shaped sheet-gold band that curves in a serpentine line across one face of the stone. The gold band is worked in repoussé with a dense field of ring-and-dot motifs interspersed with small triangular punchmarks enclosing three pellets, the whole executed freehand and slightly irregular in its spacing. At the upper terminal, the band is gathered and bound with tightly wound twisted gold wire, forming a collar from which rises a loop of doubled twisted wire for suspension. A smaller collar of plain gold caps the lower end of the stone. The ring-and-dot ornament running the length of the mount belongs to a decorative vocabulary widespread across the Viking world, where the motif appears on bone, antler, metalwork, and jewellery from the 9th through the 11th centuries. Its persistence across such varied media suggests a protective or apotropaic reading in addition to its ornamental function, the concentric circle being one of the most enduring signs associated with the eye and with warding in the northern European tradition. The triangular punches enclosing three dots may carry a related charge, though the reading here is offered with caution. Agate and other hardstone beads reached Scandinavia through the long trade corridors that linked the Viking settlements of the Baltic and the North Sea with the Volga, the Caspian, and ultimately the Abbasid Caliphate and the Indian Ocean. Such stones arrived as loose beads and were re-mounted locally in precious metal, transforming imported material into personal ornaments and amulets of high status. The pairing of an eastern hardstone with a distinctly Norse metalworking idiom, hammered sheet gold worked in ring-and-dot and finished with twisted filigree wire, is characteristic of this exchange. Gold itself remained comparatively scarce in Viking Age Scandinavia relative to silver, and its use for a mount of this scale indicates a commission of significance, likely intended as much for amuletic protection as for display. This pendant exemplifies the Viking practice of adapting imported prestige materials to indigenous ornamental grammar, in which an object of foreign origin is domesticated by the application of a recognisably Norse decorative language. The combination of an eastern trade bead with hammered gold sheet and twisted-wire suspension places it within the small corpus of hardstone amulets recovered from Viking Age contexts, and represents the meeting point of long-distance commerce and local goldsmithing tradition. Dimensions: Length of stone: 2.5 cm

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