Ulla Mannering - Iconic Costumes: Scandinavian Late Iron Age Costume Iconography

Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

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Hardcover Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-215-0

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Front cover: Gold figures National Museum of Denmark

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The publisher and I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

I wish to express my gratitude to the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK) that funded my PhD research and Dronning Margrethe IIs Arkologiske Fond for financial support for the translation of my PhD dissertation, Billeder af dragt: En analyse af pkldte figurer fra yngre jernalder i Skandinavien (University of Copenhagen, 2006). I would also like to thank Ulla Lund Hansen my PhD supervisor, Bente Magnus and Torsten Capelle my PhD opponents, and Lise Bender Jrgensen my academic mentor.

My heartfelt thanks to John Peter Wild and Margrethe Watt who kindly read and reviewed the entire manuscript, and Morten Axboe who reviewed the chapter on bracteates, and who all offered invaluable suggestions for improvement. All mistakes are now my own.

I also thank all the museums and universities in Scandinavia who helped provide study material and images, and the following: Anders Andersen for making the drawings of the gold-foil figures from Slinge, Bjrn Skaarup for making the drawings of some of the gold-foil figures belonging to the National Museum of Denmark; Pernille Foss for helping redraw already published drawings and also making new drawings; Margrethe Watt for kindly providing drawings of the Danish gold-foil figures along with the late Eva Koch, and Peter Andreas Toft for helping with the correspondence analysis. For this publication, I would like to thank Morten Axboe, Jan Peder Lamm, Bente Magnus, Charlotte Rimstad, Marianne Vedeler, Martin Stoltze and John Peter Wild for use of images; and Anna Nrgrd, Susanne Lervad and Lise Rder Knudsen for help in obtaining images. A special thanks goes to Roberto Fortuna at the National Museum of Denmark for the wonderful photographs of the many archaeological textiles.

At the Centre for Textile Research (DNRF64) I would like to thank: my wonderful colleagues Marie-Louise Nosch and Eva Andersson Strand who over the years repeatedly encouraged me to rework the text, for their persistent encouragement and support to publish in English, Cherine Munkholt for translating the original PhD text and her fantastic work editing and coordinating the publication; Sidsel Frisch for her immense help with the picture editing and for insightful suggestions in terms of content editing the revised text, and Louise Ludvigsen, Line Lerke, Stine Bttern, Ziff Jonker, Philip Dons Madsen, Manon Leroy, Elina Stamatatou, Jane Malcolm-Davies, Mikkel Nrtoft, Egzona Haxha and Camilla Ebert for editorial assistance.

I would also like to thank the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF64) and the National Museum of Denmark for their support and Farumgaard-Fonden for their financial support for the printing of this book.

Above all, I would like to thank my family for their infinite patience and support.

This is a revised edition of my PhD dissertation which was successfully defended at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in June 2006. Taking its point of departure in an archaeological textile and clothing perspective, this book presents a selection of the rich and varied iconographic material from Scandinavia depicting clothed human figures.

The source material consists of five object categories: gold foils, gold bracteates, helmet plaques, jewellery and textile tapestries, which complement each other with regard to choice of material, content and function. The objects selected for the study are, with a few exceptions, produced and found in Scandinavia, i.e . present-day Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and only in a few cases is material found outside Scandinavia included in the analysis. The majority of finds are dated to the Scandinavian Late Iron Age (AD 4001050) while a few finds are dated to the Scandinavian Middle Ages (AD 10501536).

Through a recording system developed for the present analysis of iconographically recorded costumes, the content of the object categories selected for this study is described and compared, and the results are compared with the existing knowledge of archaeological textiles and clothing finds. Here, I have primarily focused on finds from contemporary Scandinavia and the northern part of Germany, which in this period belonged to the Scandinavian cultural area. To include the European continental clothing tradition would be a next step, but it was not feasible within the scope of the PhD project.

In 2005 I began working at the Danish National Research Foundations Centre for Textile Research (CTR) at the University of Copenhagen, and since 2010 I have been employed at the National Museum of Denmark monitoring the collaborative research programme working with the Danish collections of textiles and skin objects from the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. Knowing that my dissertation, due to its Danish language, was not available to the majority of my overseas colleagues, I have, in this period, published a few articles in English about Scandinavian costume iconography (Mannering 2008; 2013; Mannering and Andersson Strand 2009), but it is a great pleasure to finally be able to present the entire work in English.

To revise a PhD dissertation is not a straightforward task as formalities and the target group are suddenly different, and with time, ones knowledge and the archaeological record, too, are subject to change. Since 2005, many new finds pertinent to this study have appeared, but I soon realised that it would be too complicated a task to incorporate all of them in the comparative material, and instead chose to focus on updating the archaeological textile and clothing chapter, and include many new photos. I hope the readers will appreciate this.

Margrethe Watt, the prime researcher of gold-foil figures, which is the largest object category included, will publish her long-awaited book on the Scandinavian gold-foil figures in 2016 (Watt forthcoming), and no doubt, with its full overview, descriptions and drawings of all Scandinavian gold-foil figures, it will create renewed debate and interpretations of the gold-foil figures themselves, and Scandinavian iconography in general. This may affect the present study, but also make it easier to see and evaluate the material that I did not include here.