A VIKING SILVER RING, CIRCA 9TH-10TH CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A VIKING SILVER RING, CIRCA 9TH-10TH CENTURY A.D. Of broad band form, the hoop flattened and expanding slightly towards a central plaque, the terminals tapering and finishing in tightly coiled wire wraps that secure the band. The outer face is worked in two horizontal registers separated by a raised median line, each register filled with a continuous row of triangular fields alternately pointing upward and downward, so that the ground reads as a lattice of triangles and lozenges. Each triangular field is punched with a pattern of small dots, while the intervening spaces between the registers and along the edges carry rows of ring-and-dot motifs. The interior of the hoop is plain, retaining traces of earth and a warm ochre encrustation that also fills the recesses of the ornament and throws the design into relief. The decorative vocabulary, triangles filled with punched dots, ring-and-dot motifs, and paired registers separated by a raised line, belongs to the standard repertoire of Viking Age metalwork, where such geometric ornament appears across finger-rings, arm-rings, strap ends, and mounts. The ring-and-dot in particular is among the most persistent motifs of the northern European Iron Age and continues into the Viking period as a shorthand for solar or apotropaic meaning, though by the ninth and tenth centuries its use is largely decorative and habitual. The coiled-wire terminals reflect a construction method familiar from Scandinavian silverwork of the period, in which a flattened band is finished by wrapping the drawn ends around themselves to form a closure that is at once functional and ornamental. Silver held particular economic and social weight in the Viking world. Circulating both as ornament and as bullion, it was the principal medium through which wealth was displayed on the body and, when required, cut down for exchange in the hack-silver economy. A silver finger-ring of this weight and workmanship would have functioned simultaneously as personal adornment and as portable value, its ornament advertising the status of the wearer while its metal content remained convertible. The influx of Islamic dirhams along the eastern river routes supplied much of the raw material for Scandinavian silversmiths during the ninth and tenth centuries, and objects of this kind sit within that wider bullion economy. This ring exemplifies the geometric decorative tradition of Viking Age personal silver, in which a limited vocabulary of punched and stamped motifs is deployed with confidence across a compact surface. The doubled register of triangles and the ring-and-dot borders represent one of the most characteristic decorative schemes of the period, and the survival of the coiled-wire terminals preserves the original method of closure intact. Dimensions: Internal Diameter: 1.9 cm

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