The Viking ship was not merely a tool – it was a status symbol. And at its top there often gleamed a masterpiece of gilded bronze: the weathervane.
The Viking ship was far more than a means of travel. It was the most costly, most elaborate object a community owned – a sign of power, wealth and skill. The famous ceremonial ships of Oseberg and Gokstad show with what love of detail these vessels were adorned. And at their top there often gleamed a true masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art: the weathervane.
Poetry itself celebrated the perfect ship as one of the greatest wonders – it is no accident that the best ship in mythology belongs to a god.
„Skíðblaðnir is the best of ships." — Grímnismál 44, after Bellows
If even the gods owned their wonder-ship Skíðblaðnir, which could be folded up like a cloth, it is no surprise that people fitted their own ships with the most precious ornament they could make.
Several of these splendid vanes survive, named after their find-places: Heggen and Söderala in Scandinavia, Källunge on Gotland. They are crescent-shaped, of gilded bronze, and adorned all over with finely engraved animals in the elegant Ringerike style – lions, fabulous beasts and birds, entwined in trailing, lively tendril-work. From the curved lower edge hung small rings bearing ribbons or pennants, and often a sculpted animal – a dragon or lion – crowned the top.
One must picture it in the sunlight: on the mast or prow of a longship such a golden vane flashed and gleamed far across the water, while the ribbons rattled in the wind of travel. It was ornament and status symbol at once, a signal that announced from afar: here comes a mighty lord.
The fascinating thing is how these works of art survived at all. When Christianity came, the vanes did not vanish – they moved from ship to steeple. Their crescent-shaped, streaming form suited a weathervane perfectly, and so several of the surviving pieces served for centuries as church weathervanes high above the villages of Scandinavia. Precisely because they were kept in honour up there and repaired again and again, they have come down to us.
So the weathervanes tell two things at once: of the outstanding craftsmanship of the late Viking Age, and of how smoothly Norse art grew over into the Christian age. The heathen showpiece of a warrior ship became the ornament of a house of God, without the art being lost.
That the vanes originally sat on ships is well supported by contemporary pictorial sources – such as coin images and the Bayeux Tapestry – and by their form, even if the exact placement (mast or prow?) is not settled beyond doubt for every single piece. Such open questions of detail take nothing away from the admiration these objects deserve.
For us as an engraving workshop the weathervanes are a special model. They show with what care and skill the Norse engraved and shaped metal – every tendril, every animal set by hand. It is exactly this spirit, of raising a useful object into a work of art through fine engraving, that joins us across a thousand years to the masters who made these golden vanes.
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Weathervanes of Heggen, Söderala, Källunge. Signe Horn Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology.