Sometimes a whole world of gods sits on a thumb-sized piece of bronze. The four Torslunda dies from the island of Öland are such a case – stamping tools used to make images for splendid helmets.
Sometimes half a mythology sits on a thumb-sized piece of bronze. The four Torslunda dies from the island of Öland are such a case. Found in the ground near Björnhovda in 1870, they are among the most precious pictorial witnesses of the Norse past – not as jewellery, but as tools: press-dies used to make images for ceremonial helmets. To hold them is, in effect, to hold the printing plates of the Vikings’ ancestors.
The dies date to the Vendel Age (6th–7th century), the era immediately before the Viking Age proper. With them one pressed thin bronze foils in relief; these foils were then mounted as decoration on helmets of the Vendel and Valsgärde type. This is remarkable: it is an early mass-production of images – the same motif could be pressed again and again, much like a stamp. Four motifs survive, among them a man between two bears and a warrior with an axe beside a bound beast.
Most famous is the plate with two figures: a dancing warrior in a horned headdress and, beside him, a spear-bearer in a wolf-pelt. A modern laser scan brought a decisive detail to light: the dancer has only one eye. That single, deliberately set eye is, for many scholars, the key – they read the figure as Odin, the god who sacrificed his eye at Mímir’s well to gain wisdom.
The warrior in the wolf-pelt beside him is read as a berserker or úlfheðinn (wolf-warrior). On a single thumb-sized plate, then, a whole world-view is condensed: the one-eyed war-god, the ecstatic dancer, the man who becomes a beast in the animal’s skin. Warrior cult, animal identity and divine image fall together in one motif – a window into the religious imagination of an age from which we have almost no written testimony.
The other plates too are riddle-images of great force. One shows two dancing, spear-armed warriors in horned headdresses, mirror-facing each other – a motif known from other find-spots and often linked to a warrior band or a rite of consecration. Another shows a man standing between two rearing bears, seizing them by the throat: the “master of animals”, an ancient image-type reaching from Mesopotamia to the North.
The fourth plate, finally, shows a warrior fighting with an axe against a monstrous creature that seems to be on a chain. Whether a specific legend is meant, or a general image of the fight against the powers of chaos, cannot be said for certain. It is precisely this openness that makes the Torslunda images so compelling: they tell stories whose text we have lost.
The pressed foils sat not on plain war-helmets but on the precious ceremonial helmets of the elite. Parallels are found right across the North Sea: the famous helmet of Sutton Hoo in England and the helmets from Vendel and Valsgärde in Sweden bear very similar pressed-foil images of dancing warriors and riders. These helmets were emblems of power, almost wearable picture-programmes – the wearer displayed with them his closeness to Odin and the war-god cult.
And one more detail is worth a look: the horned headdress of the dancers is a cult and dance attribute, not an everyday helmet. Not a single real war-helmet of the Viking Age bore horns – neither the Coppergate helmet of York nor any other surviving helmet. The Vikings’ “horned helmet” is a 19th-century invention (stage, romanticism, opera). The Torslunda plates show: horns existed in the image, in ritual, in dance – but not on the battlefield.
What fascinates us most about the Torslunda dies is their craft core. Here, 1,400 years ago, someone pressed the same image onto metal again and again – one of the earliest ways of reproducing a motif and fixing it permanently. That, at bottom, is still what we do in our workshop: bringing an image cleanly, repeatably and durably into a material. Between the bronze die of the Vendel-Age craftsman and the laser that burns a band of runes into slate lie many centuries – and yet the same wish: to give the fleeting image a form that lasts.
„Naked youths, to whom it is sport, fling themselves dancing among swords and levelled spears." — Tacitus, Germania 24 (public-domain translation)
Odin · Berserkers & Úlfheðnar · Runes · The Sacrificed Army in the Bog.
Swedish History Museum (SHM), Stockholm; Torslunda plates. Neil Price, The Viking Way; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Image credit (title): Torslunda plates, Swedish History Museum (National Historical Museums of Sweden), CC BY 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).