IMC 2025: Sessions
Session 548: Travelling Images in Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia
Tuesday 8 July 2025, 09:00-10:30
| Sponsor: | Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Trondheim / Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, Oslo / Universitetet i Bergen |
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| Organiser: | Margrete Syrstad Andås, Institutt for kunst- og medievitenskap, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Trondheim |
| Moderator/Chair: | Åslaug Ommundsen, Institutt for lingvistiske, litterære og estetiske studier, Universitetet i Bergen |
| Paper 548-a | Viking Beasts Reimagined: Mammen Style, Ringerike Style, and Their European Relatives (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Decorative Arts, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 548-b | Travelling Motifs: The North Sea As a Hub of Artistic Exchange in a Period of Structural Change (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 548-c | Manuscript Art on the Stave Church? (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Decorative Arts, Ecclesiastical History, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 548-d | Sources for the Chevron Ornament in Architectural Decoration (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Sculpture, Byzantine Studies, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Abstract | This session examines visual motifs in Viking-age and early medieval Scandinavia, and the North Sea and the Viking world as a creative culture bringing old and new, the east and the west together in new style groups. Images which appear on runestones in Ringerike style, may be traced back to Beatus manuscript and the Spanish region, whilst motifs like “sunken stars” appears to have travel from Byzantium by way of Norway and Normandy, into the common stock of Romanesque. At the same time, motifs from book illumination and metalwork from the 8th and 9th centuries are reinvigorated in what is now known as Urness style. The oldest of the stave church portals and surface décor such as blind arcades, of an 11th C date, reflect a multitude of influences form the east and the west, and from older Viking-age imagery. In total, the end of the Viking age comes across and an inventive and dynamic period. |