Slender animals and serpents winding around one another in endless, elegant loops, as fine as if drawn with a pen: this is the Urnes style, the last great art style of the Viking Age. Its name comes from a carved church portal high above a Norwegian fjord – and its ornaments are still a treasure trove for anyone who loves beautiful patterns.
The art of the Vikings was, for centuries, an art of animals. In ever new styles – Broa, Borre, Jelling, Mammen, Ringerike – bands, gripping beasts and tendrils entwined into dense patterns. The Urnes style is the last of them. It arises in the second half of the 11th century, still strongly shaped by the preceding Ringerike style, and remains in use until the beginning of the 12th century. Then European Romanesque art displaces the old animal loops.
Its hallmark is fineness. Where older styles look bold and full, the Urnes style becomes thin, supple, almost nervous. Slender four-legged beasts and narrow serpents – the Scandinavians called them drakslingor, “dragon-loops” – wind around each other in wide figure-eights and loops, often in a struggle one can barely untangle.
“There comes the shadowy dragon flying, the glittering serpent, up from the Niða-fells.” Völuspá, after Karl Simrock's translation (public domain)
The name was given by a place: Urnes on the eastern shore of the Lustrafjord, a side-arm of the Sognefjord in Norway. There stands the stave church of Urnes, whose origins reach back before the year 1100; it is regarded as the oldest stave church in Norway. Its jewel is the richly carved north portal – great animal loops worked in wood, so lively that they gave the whole style its name. Because of this portal the church became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
The fascinating thing: here heathen animal ornament sits on a Christian church. The portal unites Celtic echoes, Viking tradition and the emerging Romanesque in a single work – an image of transition, carved in oak.
The Urnes style was not confined to Norway, nor to portals. It is found on runestones, on jewellery, on metal fittings right across Scandinavia – the fine dragon-loops are almost ubiquitous on Swedish runestones. Even on the Bayeux Tapestry, the embroidered pictorial account of the Norman conquest of England, echoes of Urnes, Ringerike and Mammen can be seen. Because the patterns changed over time, they even help researchers with dating: from the style of the loop one can read when a piece was made.
These old patterns are timelessly beautiful – and they are exactly what makes good engraving: a clear, flowing line that joins into a whole. Anyone who wants Norse ornament on slate or wood stands in a thousand-year-old tradition of the animal loop. More on the related signs and their authenticity is in our piece on Norse symbols.
The Urnes style is the latest art style of the Viking Age; it arises in the second half of the 11th century and remains in use until the beginning of the 12th, emerging from the Ringerike style. Its hallmark is fine, interlaced animals and serpents (drakslingor). Its name-giver is the carved north portal of Urnes stave church (Lustrafjord, Norway), the oldest stave church in the country, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. The style is also found on runestones, jewellery and metalwork throughout Scandinavia.
The interlaced animals of the Urnes style are ornament, not a secret writing system – one should not read every loop as a “message.” Also, the surviving stave-church building is younger than the reused portal: the church itself is essentially of the 12th and 13th centuries, while the older portal was carried over. The style is genuine Viking art on the threshold of the Christian Middle Ages.
Runes & their meaning · Thor's Hammer · Norse symbols: real or invented? · The Golden Horns of Gallehus · Guldgubber – the tiny gold gods.