Black Hair,
Blue Bones
T he prehistoric mounds have long been associated with the otherworldly races. The prospect of treasure kept the mound peoples’ descendants tunneling into those graves and returning with the artifacts of a forgotten culture—the odd sword, razor, or hoop earring—and, more importantly, stories of the people who made those fine objects, the princes and princesses who were buried under all those tons of earth and who were thought to still enjoy some sort of existence in the adjacent land of the dead. In other words: elves. The mortal remains and personal belongings of the mound folk of the Nordic Bronze Age gave rise to a perception of the elf as a tall, glittering creature with close connections to both the underworld and the sun. But what were the princes of Old Elfland like while they lived?
Having scrambled over the rooftops of their mortuary dwellings, I wanted to know more about their daily lives. First of all, what did the people of the Nordic Bronze Age look like? We know they were descended in part from the people who had occupied the area since the Old Stone Age, a time when the only “white” people in Europe had been the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals had been there much longer than modern humans and had already had tens of thousands of years to adapt to a climate that was much colder and darker than that which we had all enjoyed in the African homeland. By 28,000 years ago, Neanderthals were on the wane, though they did manage to pump a few of their genes into the pool of Middle Eastern hunter-gatherers who were gradually replacing them.
The most recent DNA studies have revealed that the descendants of those incoming hunter-gatherers had black hair and very dark skin. By 10,000 years ago, many of them still fit this general profile, and some of them now had blue eyes. A bone hair pick excavated from a shell midden in Meilgård, Denmark, suggests that at least some of the people living there around 5000 BC also had tightly curled hair as, of course, many Scandinavians still do today. Around this time, the “natives” were joined by big game hunters who had pushed even further north and east in the past and were now trickling south again. These people had slightly lighter skin and an even greater range of eye colors.
The first farmers arrived in southern Scandinavia about six thousand years ago. At first, wary looks would have been exchanged between the still quite dark-skinned, sometimes blue- or green-eyed hunter-gatherers and the lighter-skinned, dark-eyed agriculturists coming in from the southeast. Eventually, they all warmed to one another and became a single people, but I’m sure it wasn’t a seamless transition.
We can’t be sure what languages these people were speaking, but one of those waves of farmers probably brought with them an early strain of Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, perhaps even one distantly ancestral to the English in which I am writing right now. If those farmers didn’t bring it, then later settlers from the Ukrainian steppe certainly did, including those who brought horses and wheeled transport with them about three thousand or more years ago. By this time, the Nordic Bronze Age was fully up and running. Our mound people may have already been speaking Proto-Germanic in a variety of dialects, none of them quite yet corresponding to today’s German, Swedish, Danish, or even Old Norse or Old English. That was all in the future.
Looks-wise, were the mound people what we have come to think of as “Germanic”? Possibly not yet. Low doses of sunlight and inadequate nutrition can encourage lighter pigmentation in one’s offspring, but not right away, and Bronze Age Denmark was a climatic halcyon era compared to what had gone before and what would come after it. When it comes to such oldsters as England’s 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man, DNA provides the evidence for their appearance. (Cheddar Man had very dark skin, black hair, and blue eyes.) But the remains of the mound folk, though much younger, were buried in peaty soil or oak coffins, the tannins in both of which have destroyed any trace of DNA. Though we know that some of the ancient Danes were blond, others would still have resembled their darker-haired Middle Eastern ancestors.
Egtved Girl (died summer 1370 BC) was one of the blondes. While she is and will probably remain Denmark’s most famous prehistoric citizen, recent isotopic analysis of her teeth and fingernails has revealed that she most likely hailed from Germany’s Black Forest region. At the time of her death, she had only recently arrived in Denmark, perhaps as a “longboat bride.” Still, she probably would not have been considered exotic or even particularly foreign by her Danish in-laws. We know her hair was blonde because she left it behind in her oak coffin along with her skin, teeth, toe- and fingernails. Her bones had long since disintegrated.
I’m not sure how Egtved Girl’s blonde hair was able to escape the dark brown dye job that has affected so many of her contemporaries’ corpses. Perhaps she had been especially well wrapped by her grieving in-laws. The curious proto-archaeologists who started poking around in the oak coffins in the early 1800s often reported that the occupants had dark, black, or even “coal-black” 10 hair. In some of the mounds, the bones had deteriorated into a bluish paste or powder. Many of these people, no doubt, did have dark hair, but later excavators realized that the hair had in many cases been stained by the tannins.
Egtved Girl’s hair was fairly short, but Skrydstrup Girl wore hers piled on top of her head and covered with a net of horse hair. She also had two gold hoop earrings to Egtved Girl’s single bronze one. The hair of the woman from Borum Eshøj could be combed out to two and a half feet long and was also bound by a net. Unfortunately, all of it became detached from her skull while she was still in her coffin and was lost sometime after her removal. Sketches were made before it went missing, but we don’t know what color it was.
The young man from Borum Eshøj had a mop of formerly blond hair and a large nose. The Muldbjerg Chieftain had also been a blond and had worn his hair long under a dense woolen cap that probably doubled as a soft helmet because he also had a bronze sword at his hip. It is no surprise that few of these men had beards since their most prized possessions, after their swords, were their elaborately incised bronze razors. They were probably dry shaving, for while their wives and servants may have used a soap-like substance of tallow and wood ashes to wash the wools and linens, it would have been too caustic to use on the face. The soapwort plant didn’t work its way up from the Mediterranean until Roman times, and while the native pennyroyal is good for cleaning greasy fleeces, it can’t be worked into a lather.
So how tall were these clean-shaven, elaborately coiffured mound people? Many assume that the short beds and low lintels they see in old houses mean that people were shorter in the past and that we’ve all been getting steadily taller over time. They fail to take into account the differences in sleeping habits and the need to keep warm air from escaping the rooms in winter. The ancient Scandinavians were no shorter than Scandinavians today, though we should keep in mind that the well-fed folk in the mounds, whose remains we do have, were probably taller than the hoi polloi whose remains we don’t have.
The slender pictographic figures that leap, bound, and somersault across the rock faces of southern Scandinavia suggest that the people of the Nordic Bronze Age were as fit and trim as their contemporaries, the Cretan bull-leapers. This was no sedentary society, and even the remains of the elite show signs of hard work. What we should not infer from the cavorting figures is that these people were accustomed to walking around naked. While there may have been a certain amount of proud display at festival times, as evidenced by the glyphs, the dead entered their mounds fully dressed and would have walked around the same way while they lived.
A spry young thing like Egtved Girl could get away with a short woolen blouse and string miniskirt, but mature women wore full-length skirts. Judging by their lightweight, finely netted bonnets, Scandinavian housewives enjoyed a fair amount of freedom compared to the heavily veiled ladies of Mycenaean Greece. Women completed their outfits with spiral bracelets, earrings, wire torques, amber beads and, in a few cases, large, spiked discs worn like buckles over the knots in their tasseled sashes. Much has been made of Egtved Girl’s spiked disc with its delicately etched spirals, but it was not unique; a woman from Ølby and a man from Bredhøj sported them too.
The concept of trousers had not yet been imported from Central Asia, so men made do with a linen loin cloth covered by a long tunic or cloak. Only warriors carried swords, though any man could wear a thick, felted cap to keep his head warm in the winter and deflect the odd blade from his skull. You may have heard that the Vikings never wore those stereotypical horned helmets. You may also have heard that Bronze Age Scandinavians did, but while there is evidence of horned bronze helmets on bronze figurines, in votive deposits and on the rock faces, none, as far as I know, have ever been found on heads, so they were probably part of the priests’ ritual paraphernalia rather than battle wear.
Both men and women carried short bronze daggers for spearing meat, peeling fruit, or whittling sticks as well as for self-defense. Sandals and moccasin-type footwear were the rule for both sexes. Where did they go in them? The people of ancient Jutland would not have understood the expression, “If I’d known you were coming, I would have baked a cake.” This was a landscape in which you could almost always see visitors, or invaders, coming from miles away, so there was no excuse not to have some barley cakes toasting in the fire by the time your guests arrived at the door. While there were some forests of birch, oak, and alder, most of the land was pasture and fields of wheat and barley. In this open landscape, the burial mounds would have made a strong impression indeed.
So much for the houses of the dead; what about the homes of the living? In the Danish ballad “Queen Bengerd” (1214), the spoiled queen says, “How dare the peasant hope for more / Than leather latch and wattled door?” 11 The princes of the mound people could not have hoped for much more either. While their longhouses would have been much roomier than those of their peasant neighbors, with plenty of freestanding outbuildings around them, they would all have been constructed of thick, upright posts and walls woven of hazel and willow branches plastered with mud. For a smooth finish, a slurry of clay and pulverized cow pats might have been slathered over the walls. I would not be surprised if they then painted their beloved spirals, snakes, birds, and horses all over the finished house.
We know from their coffins that these people excelled at woodworking, a skill they inherited from their ancestors of the Ertebølle Culture (5300–3950 BC) and which is evinced in the pair of beautifully decorated ashwood canoe paddles found at Tybrind Vig on the island of Funen. There’s no reason to believe the Danes’ carving skills would have gone downhill over the next few thousand years, so there were probably fine examples inside the mound peoples’ houses too. Their halls certainly would not have been crammed with furniture—they had no bedsteads, chairs, or tables—but they would have had other ways to define space and brighten the living quarters. They may have known a precursor of the slender, elaborately carved crown-rail that hung from the rafters of later Scandinavian halls and over which decorative cloths could be draped. Our Bronze Age Danes have not left us anything as elaborate as the plaids and geometric brocades the Swiss Lake Dwellers were producing as early as 3000 BC, but they could certainly have produced some dense wall hangings with which to insulate their homes.
Roofs were thatched with river reeds and heather and pitched steeply enough to give the hearth smoke somewhere to go and to shed the snow that fell even during the warmest period of the Bronze Age. There were no chimneys. A large village might have as many as thirty grand houses, but most would have fewer.
Each farmstead had a tree, most likely a hawthorn or crabapple, either beside it or growing in a courtyard around which the various outbuildings stood. This was the apaldr, as it would be called later in The Saga of the Volsungs. If the ancient Danes already subscribed to the most basic beliefs that the Volsung family did later, then this tree was inhabited by the guardian spirit of the farm’s founder.
It would not have been uncommon to see little striped piglets running around and around this tree and rampaging through the kitchen garden. They were what’s for dinner, at least on special occasions. Porridge was served at all meals, though oatmeal did not appear until the latter part of the Bronze Age. Cows were the heart of the economy, so there was always fresh milk, cheese, and something like yogurt. Berries were eaten fresh, but the small, sour apples were better stewed or drunk in the form of hard cider. Mead and beer, brewed from both barley and wheat, were flavored with a variety of herbs including yarrow and chervil. More like a meal than a beverage, the thick, soup-like beer could also be sweetened with honey and bilberries, a wild fruit related to the North American blueberry.
Only when one’s belly is full can one turn one’s mind to thoughts of the spirit. Well fed, our mound folk devoted much of their time and energy to their religion. Though they would be transmuted into elves by subsequent generations, they certainly would not have thought of themselves as otherworldly creatures and quite probably had their own cult of the elf. The subject of Nordic Bronze Age religion is vast and mysterious. Because it is just too big to take on all at once, we will be chipping away at its surface over the course of the rest of this book.
CRAFT: Balkåkra Sun Crown
The folkloric elf wedding usually takes place at Christmas or Midsummer, both dates that stand out prominently in the northern calendar: the season when the days are shortest and the year’s longest day when the sun hardly sets at all. Midsummer would have been the occasion for a festival in the Nordic Bronze Age, too. The tradition of the Midsummer boat-burning persisted into the Middle Ages and beyond and sometimes included a mock wedding.
In The Chariot of the Sun, author Peter Gelling says of the wedding party incised on the Vitlycke Rock in southern Sweden, “The presence of a man armed with an axe need not surprise us.” 12 Maybe we, the readers, need not be surprised, but the bridegroom had better watch out because he’s the one who’s going to get it. The concept of the sacred marriage was not unique to Scandinavia or even to Europe; in Mesopotamia, the king of the city was expected to bed the priestess once a year to ensure the fertility of the land. In Europe, however, the ceremony had a special twist: the bridegroom had to die.
By the time the ceremony began to be documented in the remotest parts of Europe where it survived, the ritual had devolved into a ridiculous little play in which the “dead” groom was revived, and the axe wielder or Moorish knight or whatever character had come to deal the stroke was vanquished. Were men ever truly sacrificed at these solstice celebrations? Evidence in the form of bodies slashed and strangled in the Iron Age and preserved in peat bogs testify that they were, as do the written accounts of early medieval Christian missionaries taking in the horrors of Viking Age ritual.
Because the golden age of Old Elfland was a more forgiving time, climate-wise, one hopes that there were some years when it would have sufficed to simply draw the wedding couple’s likeness on a stone instead of drawing blood. It’s even possible that all those ships, dogs, horses, horned figures, and cavorting human celebrants pecked into the stones served the same purpose as the staring ceramic countenances the Sumerians placed in their temples: to trick the gods into thinking that their devotees existed in a constant state of adoration. Then again, at the same time that those wide-eyed figurines occupied the temples, real live Sumerian harpers and dancing girls were put to death and entombed with their kings and queens.
I like to think that the lurer, the beautiful, spiraling trumpets that were always played in pairs, were the wedding bells of the Nordic Bronze Age. But if the worst-case scenario is true, then at least once a year they would also have sounded the soft, lowing notes of a funeral dirge.
Unlike Annika, the unwilling heroine of the Swedish folktale “Bergtagen,” whom we’ll meet in a moment, the brides in the rock carvings do not wear crowns; their long hair sticks out behind them in what looks like a greased ponytail. They have no other accoutrements. (The bridegroom gets a sword and a shield resembling a sun wheel, but he is going to die, so we won’t begrudge him these.) If the brides of Old Elfland had gone for crowns, I imagine they would have wanted something like this one, which is inspired by the bronze “sun drum” unearthed in Balkåkra in southern Sweden but probably imported from one of the state-of-the-art workshops in southeastern Europe. To adapt it as a crown, I have turned the drum upside down and reduced the number of “wheels” from ten to eight.
Unlike the other crafts in this book, this one is as simple as “copy, cut, and paste.” For me, part of the appeal of the Nordic Bronze Age is the romance of the early period of this field of study. Though not as spine-tingling as the adventures the Egyptologists were having at the same time, there were nevertheless moments of excitement: the interrogation of Anders Sahlberg and Lasse Pärsson, who were suspected of plundering the mound they had tentatively excavated at Bredarör in 174813; the pilfering of the oak coffins at Trindhøj by a small child with a chimney scraper in 1861; the suspense-inducing telegram that Dr. Henry Petersen sent to his superiors from the Muldbjerg mound in 1883: “PECULIAR COFFIN. MAN OVER 6 FEET … AM DIGGING FOR WIFE.” 14
One of the most important tasks in those early days was the rendering of the objects in ink on paper. The museum employees who made the drawings would probably have considered themselves draftsmen rather than fine artists. Nevertheless, their work is beautiful in itself. You can look at photographs of the Balkåkra Sun Drum online, but they don’t hold a candle to the fine lines of the drawing that was made when the drum was first lifted out of the earth.
When your friends ask you why there is a tiny paper crown sitting on your kitchen table, tell them you are waiting for a tiny paper bride to come and put it on.
Instructions:
Copy and cut out the crown, cutting down between the “wheels.” Fold wheels out so they bow forward slightly. Glue tabs on the inside.
SPELL BREAK: Spirited Away
Choosing a single wedding story for this book was no easy task. Southern Scandinavia offers hundreds if not thousands of stories about elven/human nuptials, so many that I imagine the runic newspapers of Elfland must be full of wedding announcements. Elves love weddings. A good summer wedding gives them a chance to show off their finery, enjoy a festive meal, and revitalize their otherwordly clan. “We need fresh, new blood in our family,” 15 an elven elder tells the prospective human bride in one of the Norwegian stories.
The elf wedding is also an echo of the ancient tradition of the sacred marriage, one of the central rites of Bronze Age religion. It probably took place at the summer solstice. In the historic era, peasant girls spent the long days of summer alone with the sheep or cows in the summer pastures, which in Norway and Sweden often meant the mountains. The unprotected girls were easy prey for any elves planning a Midsummer wedding. Many of the stories end with the last-minute rescue of the bride. Quite often, she has to rescue herself. Occasionally, she has regrets. I like the Swedish folktale known as “Bergtagen” 16 for the fact that the bride does not get rescued at all—that and the goat at the end. Also, I needed a story with a wedding crown in it. The Danes don’t do wedding crowns, but the Swedes do.
I don’t know if the Hayao Miyazaki movie Spirited Away has been translated into Swedish, but if it has, it may be under the title Bergtagen. Bergtagen is a specific kind of spiriting away: it means to be taken into the mountains, not by robbers or a sudden desire to go skiing, but by supernatural agency.
The story starts peacefully enough. Annika, a Swedish serving girl, is taking care of the cows up among the summer pastures. (Spiriting away only happens to serving girls and dairymaids, never to princesses or even merchants’ daughters.) The cows she is tending are all white, brown, or golden, so when she notices a black one grazing amid the herd, she knows it is no ordinary cow. She claims it for her own by throwing a steel knife over its head. From Iceland through the British Isles and on up to Finland, this is the universal method of appropriating elven property and may have something to do with iron’s ascendancy over bronze back in the eighth century BC.
If you have picked up this book, you may have heard of the seventeenth-century Scottish fairy authority, Robert Kirk. Reverend Kirk might still be with us today if the fellow who was instructed to throw a knife over Kirk’s apparition when it showed up at the reverend’s own funeral had had the presence of mind to complete the task. Because the fellow failed, Kirk remains locked inside the fairy knoll on which he suffered his fatal stroke. Annika, however, executes the trick successfully and takes the cow home with her for milking. She has just bent to the task when a troll woman shows up to complain of the theft. “Fine, take it back,” Annika tells her, but the troll woman doesn’t. Instead, she promises Annika that payment will be exacted on her wedding day, though she doesn’t say how.
A year goes by. Annika has found a nice young man and is preparing to marry him. She hasn’t forgotten the whole black cow incident, so she’s careful to spend the whole of her wedding day indoors in human company. Eventually, however, it becomes “impossible for her to stay inside.” She needs the outhouse in the worst way, and this is the moment the trolls have been waiting for. The instant she sets foot outside, they grab her.
Why did they wait until her wedding day to abduct her? Brides are vulnerable creatures, caught between the worlds of childhood innocence and wedded bliss. Neither here nor there, they are most easily taken in that temporal borderland between the speaking of the vows and the consummation of the marriage. And of course, the trolls had planned the whole thing, from the planting of the black cow in the herd to the kidnapping of the bride. Though we never meet him, we know there is a nice troll bridegroom waiting for Annika inside the mountain. (If you have already looked up “troll” in the appendix, you’ll see there is no reason to believe he was anything less than charming.)
The helpless human wedding guests encourage Annika to kick her abductors hard in the shins, but the trolls have too firm a grip on her. No one takes up a musket or jumps into the fray, so I can’t help but wonder if Annika, witnessing her mortal bridegroom’s inaction, just decided to stop struggling and take her chances inside the mountain. Either way, I hope she lived happily ever after, for she was never seen again except at a distance, wandering those mountain pastures.
But here comes the best part of the story: shortly after the bride disappeared, her wedding crown was returned to her family. It arrived by goat. As the bemused wedding guests looked on, the goat trotted up to the farmhouse, spread a napkin on the step, and placed the crown upon it. The goat then departed without a word.
It was the discovery of local bog iron, along with some prolonged spells of bad weather, that brought the golden age of Old Elfland to a close. But elfkind continues to reject human-wrought metal of all kinds. It’s clear from a handful of other tales that they prefer to array the bride with their own silver buttons and brooches. There are a few cases where they drop the silver and run when the wedding is interrupted—they’re elves, so they can always make more. In the Norwegian story “The Abducted Bride,” 17 a girl takes an iron key with her to fetch some bread from the storehouse on Christmas Eve and is not seen again until the following Christmas Eve when she reappears to assure her family that she is doing well and they shouldn’t worry. She also returns the key.
The first Scandinavians to adopt the pastoral lifestyle probably entered into it as one would buy into a franchise today. A man’s starter herd of cattle, acquired as part of a dowry or in exchange for a bundle of furs, would have come with instructions, some nifty new Indo-European terms, and maybe even a few new gods. If he learned the language and incorporated those gods into his daily rituals, he would not only become a successful husbandman; he’d be all right with his stock-raising neighbors. It was probably the same situation when his descendants adopted metallurgy. But there are always those who prefer the old ways and reject the new partnership, sliding the proffered knife or ingot back across the ground in silence and walking away into the mountains.
10. Glob, The Mound People, p. 23.
11. Olrik, A Book of Danish Ballads, p. 151.
12. Gelling and Davidson, The Chariot of the Sun, p. 68.
13. They probably would have plundered it if the grave had still contained anything of monetary value.
14. For the full text of the telegram, see Glob, The Mound People, p. 77.
15. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 218.
16. Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales, pp. 96–7.
17. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 220.