[I am working up - very belatedly - the paper on Style I that I gave at the Leeds IMC in 2010. I got a little distracted by critique of a particular school of archaeological thought on the topic. I present here, in draft from for discussion, that bit of the paper. The footnotes etc are omitted because they aren't finished.]
One principal axis of this matrix is the cultural description
of the art-style as ‘Germanic’. The explanatory
weaknesses of the term ‘Germanic’ become very evident when one encounters
phrases like the following:
‘[Style I’s appearance] is marked by the sudden disappearance
of all sea creatures, which up till then dominated Scandinavian ornament and
represents the beginning of the Germanic interpretation of the animal
world’ (emphasis added)[1]
This begs two crucial questions: ‘why then?’; ‘why like
that’? We are entitled to ask why, if the
term ‘Germanic’ can satisfactorily perform any analytical work, the ‘Germanic interpretation
of the animal world’ in art only ‘begins’ in the late fifth century, when
Germanic-speakers had dominated the region for centuries. Furthermore, why does this art take this
particular form after (and indeed before) centuries within which the
metalworkers of Germania Magna had proved
more than capable of reproducing Roman models or otherwise producing coherent
figures and interlace? Appeals to a
pan-Germanic cultural ethos get us nowhere in response to either question.
That the notion of pan-Germanic identity and ethos emerged in
the precise, contingent circumstances of sixteenth- to (especially) nineteenth-
and twentieth-century German politics is surely now well established. The idea
that all speakers of a Germanic language can be treated as culturally
interchangeable can no longer be sustained.
Scandinavian origin myths among post-imperial peoples cannot be traced
before the sixth century and, even then, among the Italian Goths alone, where
it was clearly only one of a number of stories circulating. Alleged Scandinavian origins for other early
medieval peoples (like the Lombards or Burgundians) emerge later, in emulation
of the Goths. Yet, such appeals to ‘Germanic’
culture remain as common as ever. A
swathe of recent work on Style I has attempted to read it in line with changes
allegedly occurring in Scandinavia at this time which produced the Germanic
concept of the hall.
Another appeal to the pan-Germanic ethos is associated with
the fairly widespread claim that Style I was a badge of a ‘shared Germanic aristocratic
identity’. When applied to decorative
art, this argument is circular. Style I’s
popularity is explained because its ‘Germanic’ nature appealed to the
‘Germanic’ social élites who sponsored its production. For the irrefutable reasons previously
outlined, ‘Germanic’ is a label that can carry no analytical, or even
descriptive, weight, either for the art or the people. That a common élite identity existed amongst Germanic-speakers in the late fifth
and sixth centuries finds no more support in any written data, such as exists
for at least some of the regions this shared aristocratic culture allegedly
encompassed. This explanation has no
empirical grounding whatsoever. Therefore,
the existence of a shared ‘Germanic’ élite ethos has to be argued in reverse,
from the distribution and popularity of the art style. And so on...
Furthermore, if ‘Germanic’ art only emerged in the later fifth century,
in spite of the long-standing existence in Scandinavia of Germanic-speakers,
then it would seem that, to be popular among a Germanic élite with a shared
culture, that ‘shared Germanic culture’ could – logically – only have emerged
at the same time, alongside the art. How
this might be possible across a wide area of diverse, frequently antagonistic
peoples is not an issue that appears to have troubled students of Style I who espouse
this argument. If there were any area
where a common, non-Roman, military identity might be employed to unify
Germanic-speakers of diverse cultural, geographical and familial backgrounds,
that area would not be Germania Magna but,
ironically, the Roman Empire itself, where fifth-century politics were
increasingly focused around military leaders of at least a claimed non-Roman
origin. It may in fact be that material
culture did come to be employed in
precisely that way to unify exactly that disparate élite group but, if it did,
it was material culture originating in the Mediterranean, not the Baltic.
The other component of the problematic analytical matrix is
religious. Style I imagery frequently continues
to be read according to concepts drawn from Norse sources from (at the earliest
and most optimistic) c.1000, half a
millennium after the appearance of this form of decoration. These texts are then supplemented by (and
indeed read via) anthropologically-derived ideas of shamanism and tribal ritual
of uncertain application. It must never be forgotten that the
principal sources upon which any view of Nordic paganism is based, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, were both written down in earlier thirteenth-century Christian contexts, the former by Snorri
Sturlusson. The extent to which they
represent earlier texts (written or oral), the faithfulness with which they do
so, and how much earlier any such texts can be dated are all matters for guesswork, not fixed starting points for analysis.
The ‘pagan’
axis of Style I interpretation nonetheless assumes that an image of pagan
belief obtained from these texts can be applied, in detail, to artwork no less
than 750 years earlier. However, between
the late fifth and the late twelfth centuries artistic motifs changed
dramatically in the Nordic world. Style
I gave way to Style II, Style III, and then the array of Viking styles –
Oseborg, Borre, Jelling, Mammen and Ringerike – before, with Urnes Style (in
its early, middle and late forms of course), we arrive at the end of the
Germanic/Viking Animal Art ‘era’. Even
at Urnes Style’s demise we still have fifty years or so to wait before Snorri
wrote down the Prose Edda. While Scandinavian decorative art between
c.475 and c.1170 went through no fewer than nine changes (not counting Urnes
Style’s subdivisions) of sufficient importance to necessitate a change of art-historical
categorisation, the mentalité it represented is thus supposed somehow to have drifted
along unchanged beneath this turbulent surface of actual, documented
expression, eventually to be written down in effectively the same form as it
had taken 750 years previously. The
difference between the supposed stasis of Scandinavian pagan belief and the
dynamism of its artistic expression is made yet more problematic by the
paradigm itself, which sees the emergence of Style I animal art (surely
correctly) as symptomatic of important social and cultural change. If that were the case then something similar
surely lies behind the many subsequent changes of style. Scandinavian archaeology, reveals important,
dynamic change in social and economic structures throughout the second half of
the first millennium. Against this
background, an entirely stable set of religious beliefs and practices defies
credibility.
These problems are only exacerbated at the earlier end of the
period. If Style I’s content is
religious, does its difference from earlier art mean that this religion only emerged
c.475 and, if so, why? Or, if the
religious beliefs were older, why did art not manifest it before the emergence
of ‘Germanic animal art’, or why did it represent it in such different
ways? These are the same problems as we
encountered with the ‘Germanic’ construct, and they are equally fatal to the
approach. The religious axis takes us
nowhere – in answer to the questions of ‘why then’ and ‘why like that’ – just
as quickly as the ‘Germanic’.
The strongest argument offered in favour of the approach is
the depiction on Style I metalwork of episodes identifiable, with varying
degrees of plausibility, as those mentioned in the Eddas. There are two
problems with this justification. A
fourth-century depiction of Christ at, say, the marriage at Cana might be
recognisable as such to a twelfth- or thirteenth-century western European
Christian. We would quite wrong,
however, to assume on that basis that Christian theology, practice and
organisation from 1300 could be applied in any detail at all to the church of
c.400, or even of c.900 and its artwork.
In that instance, moreover, a series of more or less canonical written
texts existed, around which beliefs could be anchored to some extent.[2] It is worth pointing out, furthermore, that
the earliest runic texts actually to mention the gods of the Nordic pantheon
come from slightly later than the period of Style I and frequently from areas
far to the south, in ‘Alamannic’ regions.
One inadmissible justification for the use of later Eddic evidence is the assertion that structures would remain intact
within traditions even if the details changed.
It is difficult to see what the basis for such a statement could be and,
in any case, the ‘structures’ adduced are modern interpretations, rather than
being explicitly described in the texts.
At the weakest end of the scale is the simple acceptance of the method,
‘faute de mieux’. Tania Dickinson, one
of the most careful and knowledgeable of Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, simply
says that most schools of archaeological ‘theory’ accept the approach. That will not suffice to exclude critical reflection
on the issue.
These analytical axes are sustained, first by a raft of
similarly evidence-free, mystifying ideas about the magic quality of the
artefacts and then by ideas of ethnicity, migration and of a rigid Christian-pagan
divide which are all inadequate to the task.[3]
[2]
This means that, even if one could assume that the religious ‘texts’ of the Eddas (written or otherwise) had been
transmitted, unchanged, for 700 years before being written down, we would be in
no sense authorised to assume an unchanging accompanying theology.
[3]
The most alarming element of what we might call the Nordic/Germanic Pagan’
school of writing about Style I is that it seems, intellectually, to be entirely
hermetically sealed; discussion appears to be locked within a particular academic
circle. The sorts of questionable
readings just discussed are repeatedly built upon, adding further assumptions
and interpretations, which then in turn become building blocks for further work
and so on, producing pyramids of dubious assertions. With so much now at stake, in terms of
academic status and power, there seems no way that a fundamental, scholarly
critique of the approach can emerge from within this paradigm.
