A great gold buckle, weighing nearly half a kilogram, was pulled from the burial mound during the excavations at Sutton Hoo. It had lain in the ground for over 1,300 years as part of the treasure hoard belonging to King Redwald. He died in AD 625, and historians reckon him to be the most likely chieftain to have been buried in that barrow. In life, the buckle, hollow with two sliding clasps at the back, may have been attached to a sword-belt strapped around his waist to hold the magnificent weapon also found in that hoard. Of course, a beautifully-crafted gold buckle would have been of enormous value, and undoubtedly worn for show. Along with Redwald’s other riches, it was meant to impress the powerful warlords in his court. It reminded them of his pre-eminence and of the gifts he could bestow on his most loyal retainers. Also, princes visiting from other kingdoms would have been left in no doubt that Redwald was a mighty and wealthy chieftain. His gold radiated his presence and power, his luck and his charisma as a leader born to rule.
But the gold buckle transcended the psychology of boasting and status. In the Middle-earth of a thousand years ago, many of these pieces of artwork were much more than aesthetically pleasing artefacts – they carried subtle depths of meaning. Master gold and silversmiths locked into the design of much of the finest jewellery the secrets of the cosmos. And when King Redwald slid shut the catches on the great gold buckle, he fastened upon himself a defining image of Wyrd, the arbiter of his destiny, and that of his kingdom.
Jewellery
Of course, at all levels of society, people’s hair, arms, fingers and clothes were often decorated with necklaces, brooches, pins, arm and finger rings made with a variety of metals and stones. Circular clasps to fasten cloaks at the neck or on the shoulder were crafted from gold, silver, with cheaper versions from bronze. Women wore ornate pins in their hair.
By the middle of the Middle-earth period, smiths making this jewellery used well-established methods. A Saxon craftsman, for his best work in gold and garnets, first hammered a baseplate of solid gold. He then lit his fire, and brazed or soldered gold wires to the baseplate to make a pattern of shallow holes. Into each hole he carefully fitted a piece of gold foil, and then a small piece of garnet. The roughened surface of the gold foil reflected light, making each tiny stone sparkle brilliantly in finger rings, necklaces, brooches and ornate hairpins.
For everyday jewellery, many pieces were made to the same pattern, but jewellery for the king and other nobles was usually custom-made to unique designs. And the smiths also worked on a larger scale, weaving metal fibres into pattern-welded swords, decorated shields and helmets with symbols which imbued the warrior with magical protection and powers. The work of these craftsmen was valuable, because it represented many hours of toil in the forge. A fine pattern-welded sword could have taken a team of smiths weeks or months to produce.
Most of the extensive collection of gold jewellery recovered from Redwald’s burial mound is reckoned by experts to have been made in one workshop – perhaps even by one goldsmith. This master jeweller, presumably Redwald’s chosen craftsman and renowned for his special skills, had laid strands of gold across the gold baseplate, and interwoven them. The interlaced design of strands covered the front of the buckle. The strands twined among each other, eventually terminating in the stylized curved beaks, claws and staring eyes of birds, snakes and dragons. The interlace is intricate, on a fine scale, and the surface of each thread is detailed with two parallel lines running along its length. The space between them is punctuated by dots. It looks uncannily like strands of DNA, the fundamental structure of life in modern molecular science.
All over ancient England, Scandinavia and western Europe, hundreds of such skilled smiths created these fantastic and intricate swirling thread designs. While fashions in jewellery evolved over the thousand years, these interlace features shared similar aspects to Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Celtic jewellery.
Historians often talk about these designs, and the ways they changed over the centuries, as if they were simply evolving fashions. Today, essentially religious icons, like the Christian cross, are often reproduced as a conventional design for jewellery, as in gold necklaces. They are worn for personal ornament, and not necessarily for profound expression of sacred values. And at some level, the interlace designs of Middle-earth jewellery may also have been recognized as the conventional, and accepted, image of wyrd.
Except that, in times past, the very process of gold- and silver-smithing was considered a magical process. Even iron had an almost supernatural status itself. It was harder than copper, tin or bronze, and had a lustre. Iron-forged objects were considered to be effective in counteracting malevolent spirits – the use of horseshoes over doors as a magnet for good luck, and iron nails as weapons against witchcraft continued in popular usage right into recent times. A charm for healing a horse of elfshot begins: ‘If a horse be shot, then take that knife of which the haft shall be yellow ox’s horn, and let three brazen nails be on it … If it be elves which are on him, may this be a cure for it.’
A figure called Weland featured in legends as a spirit who inspired the work of smiths – his smithcraft was considered the most advanced possible, and imbued with magic. When Beowulf boasts of the fine mail coat he is wearing, the lines of the poem have him say ‘best of battle-shirts, it protects my breast – foremost of garments – it is Hrethel’s legacy, Weland’s work’. There is a prehistoric long barrow in Berkshire, situated on the Ridgeway not far from the White Horse of Uffington, which was named after this smith-spirit. It is called Wayland’s Smithy. King Alfred refers to it, so we know that it extends back at least as far as Anglo-Saxon times.
The Dwarf-Smiths
The people of Middle-earth thought of the dwarves as living in the Lowerworld as magical smiths. In everyday life, it was the smith’s ‘power over fire’, and especially the magic of metals, which gave them the reputation of a kind of sorcerer. It rendered them a special kind of power. They used heat to transmute elements of the earth into knives, swords, and beautiful jewellery. They created, and wove, fibres of beauty and strength in pattern-welded swords, and the fantastic and intricate swirling thread designs of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Celtic jewellery. Theirs was thread magic of a material kind.
The dwarves in the ancient stories of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, were responsible for making magical objects for the gods and goddesses. The animal most sacred to Freya was the sow, and for Frey it was the boar. The dwarves made golden images of these animals on which the goddess and god rode. Freya’s sow was called Hildisvin (Battle Pig) and Frey’s boar was called Gullinbursti (Gold Bristled). These magical, golden animals could outrun any horse.
The dwarves also made Freya’s famous necklace. There is no doubting the fame and fortune of the necklace itself. One of the various references to it is in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf: ‘Never under heaven have I heard of a finer prize among heroes since Hama carried off the Brising necklace to his bright city, that gold-cased jewel…’ It was called the Necklace of the Brisings. Scholars debate the identity of ‘the Brisings’, but most reckon them to be four dwarfs of the Lowerworld. Dwarves were known for driving hard bargains for their magical smithwork, and to obtain the necklace, Freya slept with all four dwarves. As a result, most of the myths, stories and ceremonies which concerned Freya were either not written down at all, or were written but later destroyed because of the often erotic nature of her mysteries and myths, and were especially singled out for eradication by the monkish missionaries to the north. Even in normally tolerant Iceland, her poetry – the ‘mansongr’ (love song) – was prohibited.
The Old Norse ‘brisingr’, means fire, so the Brisings means fire-dwarves – referring either to their goldsmithing or to the fire they use in their work.
The necklace of the Brisings is much more than a pretty trinket. It gave Freya great powers. The object was said to be worn either as a belt or as a necklace, depending on how the goddess wished to use its power.
In their alchemical abilities as magical smiths, the dwarves focused on magical manipulations. For example, the myths tell a story about Alvis, a dwarf living in the World of Dark Elves. In a twelfth-century Norse poem he reveals some of his wisdom about the various realms of the universe. The name for night varies, he says, from one realm to another. The war gods, fertility gods and giants refer to it by its quality of a dark blanket (Darkness, Hood and Lightless respectively), and the elves call it Sleep’s Soothing. The Dwarves, however, refer directly to the Magical Quality of Night, its use as a special, ritual time, its relation to their function as spinners of spells. They call it ‘The Weaver of Dreams’.
Reflecting the deep level of their work, smiths were often regarded with awe, and treated as a version of wizards. Their power over fire was a kind of sorcery, because they were able to transmute elements of the earth into shapes of their own desire. The smith had a magic power peculiarly his own – a trait common in tribal societies where forging iron retains the mystery of a miraculous skill governed by taboo and mastered by an elite group of craftsmen. So crafting symbols of the underlying structure of life from gold – at the behest of the greatest kings and chieftains – was to make magic.
Interlace Design
So, common to Saxon, Celtic and Viking artwork throughout the thousand years of Middle-earth culture, were ornate and detailed designs like Redwald’s gold buckle, in which lines of decoration twist and enmesh within each other to form an unbroken web of gold strings. The interwoven strands created a seemingly never-ending pattern. The interlaced patterns seem sinuous and organic. They embody the soft contours of nature, rather than the sharper angles of human engineering. But it is when the designs are studied closely, that we can see how the jewellery reflects the deeper dimensions of Middle-earth magic. The gossamer-threads of the silver and gold-formed knots appear impossible to unpick. A pull on any thread would surely produce an inevitable and complementary pull on another. The jewellery designs convey an impression of constant but controlled motion. The overriding impact is of tremendous vitality and energy contained within a finite universe. And this is where the jewellery design concurs with the earlier examples of the Middle-earth vision of life in weaving. The sensuous curves and interlaced folds of the jewellery designs parallel, like a microcosm, the everyday life of the people of Middle-earth. The designs seem to form an almighty web of veins and threads, so sensitive that in life, any movement, any thought, any happening no matter how small, would reverberate throughout the web. Their mutual interdependence echoes a vision of life in which all things are interconnected. And this is the fundamental meaning of the Anglo-Saxon concept of Wyrd, in which that which unfolds in life is the natural outcome of all that went before. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, the magic of the Middle-earth mind is in knowing that everything involves and implies everything else.
This view of life is deeper and more complex than our everyday experience of it. Our minds work much more like individual strands of these interwoven designs. We have an independent identity. In making our way through life, we are aware of many influences, barriers, forces, obstacles, but we cannot see it in all its complexity. And in Middle-earth, in daily life people must have done as we do – look for elements that are predictable and apparently logical. But even so, as the flow of events unfolded for each person with the minutiae of daily life, individual happenings must also have seemed capricious – even chaotic. Some things happen with no pattern, no theme, no rhyme or reason. But while this is perhaps how life could seem subjectively in the daily round, the concept of Wyrd underlay the belief that there was a logic to complex events, but it was beyond our capacity to perceive it. There were so many causes that no one but the spirits, and perhaps the Wyrd Sisters, could ever see them all at once. Individuals could follow individual threads, and observe where they crossed others. But there were too many to see the pattern formed by the web of threads. The wizard Gandalf says that even the wise could not see all ends. And in the real Middle-earth, this was exactly true of interlace jewellery. Redwald, when he wore his interlace gold buckle, showed that his presence as king was part of the natural flow of events in the cosmos.