They are so small and so thin that you can barely hold one without creasing it: the guldgubber, “gold men,” tiny figures pressed from stamped gold foil. About three thousand are known, and most come from just a few sacred places of the North. A look at one of the most puzzling finds of the Germanic Iron Age – and at why no one knows for certain what they were for.
The name came from the farmers. As early as 1791 the Swedish antiquarian Nils Henrik Sjöborg reported that in the dunes near Ravlunda people kept finding small gold sheets which they called guldgubbar – gold men. The name stuck. It refers to figures one or two centimetres tall, pressed into the thinnest gold foil, often on square little plates.
Most were made in the Germanic Iron Age from around 375 AD and were used into the Viking Age; production peaked in the Vendel Period (550–800). Some were made with a die – from Scania we even know a tiny bronze plate that apparently served to stamp such figures.
About three thousand are known, spread over some thirty find sites in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Yet they are not evenly scattered but cluster at the “wealth centres” of the age – the great hall and cult sites. By far the largest find comes from Sorte Muld on Bornholm: 2594 figures alone. Other rich places are Uppåkra near Lund, Slöinge in Halland, Helgö in Lake Mälaren, the Eketorp ringfort on Öland, and, far to the north, Borg in the Lofoten islands.
Striking is exactly where they turn up: often around the postholes of great halls, at places credited with a special, also religious, importance. The gold lay not in the grave but in the sanctuary.
The image is hard to make out with the naked eye, so fine is it. Three main motifs can be told apart: single people, embracing couples and animals. The single figures carry attributes – men with a staff, women offering a drinking horn. On Bornholm there are even pigs and other animals. The most famous motif, though, is the “loving couple”: a man and a woman embracing, she in a many-layered gown with a large brooch, he in a knee-length coat.
“Gerd is her name, the daughter of Gymir, / the grimmest of men … / the gleam of her arms lit up / the air and all the waters.” Skírnismál (Poetic Edda), after Karl Simrock's translation (public domain)
This very embracing couple has been read as a “sacred marriage,” as the image of a divine pair – often recalling Freyr and the giant's daughter Gerd, whose wooing the Eddic poem Skírnismál tells. More on this god is in our piece on Freyr.
And here the riddle begins. No one knows for sure. The figures are so delicate that they can hardly have been meant for constant wear – only a few are pierced for sewing. The most common reading: offerings, or a kind of ritual “temple money,” laid down at a holy place. In favour of this is that the find sites were almost always centres of power and cult. Others think of images of the gods or the ancestors, of witnesses to an act – perhaps of an alliance or a marriage.
However you turn it: the guldgubber belong to the oldest and finest goldsmith's art of the North. On a surface smaller than a fingernail you can make out folds in the gown, hairstyles, the grip of one hand around the other. It is the same joy in the tiny, carefully placed detail that also makes a good engraving: as much meaning as possible in as small a space as possible.
Guldgubber are figures one to two centimetres tall of stamped gold foil, known from around thirty find sites in Scandinavia, some three thousand in all; 2594 come from Sorte Muld (Bornholm) alone. They were made from around 375 AD, peaking in the Vendel Period (550–800). The motifs show single figures (among them men with a staff, women with a drinking horn), embracing couples and animals. They cluster at central hall and cult sites, often near postholes.
What exactly the guldgubber were for is unresolved – “offering,” “temple money” or “image of the gods” are interpretations, not certainties. The equation of the embracing couple with Freyr and Gerd, or the reading of a staff-holding man as Thor, are hypotheses too. Only the find is certain: tiny gold images, clustered at holy places. Everything beyond that is reasoned conjecture.
The Golden Horns of Gallehus · Freyr – god of fertility · The Norse pantheon · Thyra Danebod – Denmark's mightiest woman.