Viking Art and Jewellery: Symbols of Power and Belief

Written by Simon Williams

Walk into any major museum with a Viking collection and you will find a case of silver. Arm rings, pendants, hack-silver fragments, brooch pins. The labels will tell you the date and the findspot. What they rarely tell you is what you are actually looking at.

Viking jewellery was not decorative in any sense we would recognise today. It was a complete visual and material language, simultaneously communicating wealth, spiritual allegiance, political loyalty, and cosmological belief to anyone who could read it. The person wearing a heavy silver arm ring twisted in the Borre style, a Mjolnir pendant at the throat, and an oval brooch at each shoulder was not making a fashion statement. They were making a series of precise and legible declarations about who they were, what they believed, and where they stood in the social order of the Norse world.

This article is the starting point for understanding that language. It introduces the six major art styles of the Viking Age, explains what Viking jewellery was actually doing in Norse society, and maps the full range of topics covered in this series. Each section points outward to a dedicated article where the subject is covered in full archaeological depth.

Why Viking Jewellery Was Never Just Decoration

The Norse did not separate the sacred from the functional. An arm ring was money. It was also a sworn oath. It was also a demonstration of a chieftain's generosity and a warrior's loyalty. A pendant was a prayer made permanent in metal. A brooch was a fastening for a garment and a canvas for the kind of interlocking beast imagery that encoded an entire cosmological worldview in a surface the size of a palm.

This layering of function is what makes Viking material culture so difficult to understand from a modern perspective and so extraordinarily rich once you begin to read it on its own terms.

The hack-silver economy, in which arm rings and ingots were cut into fragments and weighed against lead counterweights to settle transactions, meant that jewellery existed in a constant state of potential dissolution. A ring worn today might be half a ring tomorrow, the cut portion weighing out a payment for timber or a ship passage or a season's worth of iron. The objects that survived intact to reach museum cases are the ones that were buried or lost before that dissolution happened.

Our dedicated article on the Cuerdale Hoard covers the hack-silver economy and the ribbon-style arm ring in full. The Permian silver rings article follows the eastern trade routes that brought exotic silver forms into the Norse world from the Kama River basin. And the Viking ring money article explains the weight standards and trading mechanisms that made portable silver jewellery function as a genuine monetary system.

The Six Major Styles of Viking Art

Scholars divide Viking art into six overlapping stylistic phases, each named after a key site or object associated with its emergence. Understanding these styles is the foundation for reading Viking jewellery, because the style in which a piece was made tells you roughly when it was produced, where it originated, and what artistic tradition the smith was working within.

Oseberg Style (c.775 to 875 AD)

The Oseberg style takes its name from the famous ship burial excavated at Oseberg in Vestfold, Norway, in 1904. The burial, dated to around 834 AD, contained an extraordinary range of carved wooden objects including sleds, bedposts, and animal head posts, all decorated in a style characterised by broad gripping animal heads, staring eyes, and spiralling ribbon bodies locked together in complex interlace.

The Oseberg style is primarily a wood-carving tradition, but its animal vocabulary fed directly into the metalwork styles that followed. The gripping beast, the defining motif of the next phase, has its roots here.

Borre Style (c.850 to 950 AD)

The Borre style is the first truly pan-Norse artistic style, found across Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the eastern Viking settlements from the mid-9th century onwards. It is characterised by symmetrical ring chains, interlocking knotwork, and the gripping beast: a compact, mask-like animal figure whose limbs grip either its own body or the border of the design field.

Borre style metalwork is among the most widely distributed Viking Age material, appearing on brooches, mounts, and strap ends from Norway to Dublin to the Dnieper. Its ubiquity suggests it functioned as a shared artistic language binding the Norse world together across enormous distances. Our dedicated article on the Borre style gripping beast covers this motif and its appearances in the archaeological record in full.

Jelling Style (c.900 to 975 AD)

The Jelling style takes its name from the royal burial mounds at Jelling in Jutland, Denmark. It represents a shift toward more naturalistically rendered animal forms, with sinuous S-shaped ribbon beasts whose bodies form elegant double-contoured profiles. The interlocking chaos of the Borre style gives way to something more controlled and more linear.

Jelling art adorned runestones, metalwork, and the objects associated with the Danish royal court of the 10th century, most notably the period of Harald Bluetooth, whose reign saw the Christianisation of Denmark and the blending of pagan and Christian visual traditions. The Jelling style ribbon beast article explores this transition in detail.

Mammen Style (c.950 to 1025 AD)

The Mammen style emerged in Denmark in the mid-10th century and spread rapidly across Scandinavia. It is named after the decorated axe found in a burial at Mammen in Jutland, inlaid with silver in a style that combined animal forms with foliage and tendrils in a new and extraordinarily refined way.

Mammen style jewellery and metalwork shows a growing interest in surface decoration for its own sake, with animals intertwined with plant forms in designs of considerable elegance and complexity. It is also the style associated with the Hiddensee treasure, the gold jewellery hoard from the island of Hiddensee that represents the peak of late Viking Age goldsmithing. The Hiddensee gold treasure article covers this extraordinary find in full. To understand what the Viking axe meant as a symbol of warrior identity, including the Mammen axe itself, read our dedicated article on the subject.

Ringerike Style (c.990 to 1050 AD)

The Ringerike style, named after a group of decorated runestones in the Ringerike district of Norway, represents the Viking artistic tradition at its most naturalistic. Animals appear with spiral hips, almond-shaped eyes, and elegant limbs, surrounded by leafy scrolls and tendrils that show a strong awareness of contemporary Romanesque decorative traditions from continental Europe.

Ringerike art appears on runestones, wood carvings, and metalwork across Scandinavia and in Viking-influenced areas of England. It marks the point at which the Viking artistic tradition began actively absorbing influences from Christian Europe rather than simply parallel-developing alongside it.

Urnes Style (c.1050 to 1150 AD)

The Urnes style, named after the carved portal of Urnes stave church in Norway, is the final and arguably the most refined phase of Viking art. It is characterised by slender, elongated animals intertwined in graceful asymmetric loops, their forms reduced to pure elegant line. The biological specificity of the earlier styles has given way to something almost abstract.

Urnes art appears on church carvings, metalwork, and jewellery across Scandinavia and represents the final synthesis of the Viking artistic tradition with the Christian material culture that was by this point dominant across northern Europe.

What Viking Jewellery Was Made From

Silver was the prestige material of the Viking Age bullion economy, and the majority of the most significant surviving Viking jewellery is made from it. But the full material range of Norse jewellery production was considerably broader.

Bronze was the workhorse material, used for the oval tortoiseshell brooches worn by Norse women across the entire Viking world, for small-scale pendants and mounts, and for the vast quantity of everyday jewellery that never made it into the prestige hoards. Gold was rare and reserved for the highest-status objects. Iron was used for utilitarian pieces. Amber, imported from the Baltic coast, was prized for beads. Imported glass beads, some originating as far away as the eastern Mediterranean and the Abbasid Caliphate, appear in Norse women's grave assemblages and speak to the extraordinary reach of the Viking trading network.

The craftsmanship behind Viking jewellery production was of a very high order. Lost-wax casting, filigree wire work, granulation, repoussé, and niello inlay were all techniques in regular use among Norse smiths. Our dedicated articles on Viking lost-wax casting and Viking silver granulation cover the technical dimensions of Norse metalworking in detail, and the tortoiseshell brooch casting article explains how the most widespread form of Viking Age jewellery was actually produced.

The Major Forms of Viking Jewellery

Arm Rings and Neck Rings

Arm rings were among the most commercially and socially significant objects in the Viking Age material record. They functioned simultaneously as portable bullion, oath-binding instruments, and gifts cementing political and personal loyalty between lords and followers. The ribbon-style arm rings of the Danelaw, the multi-strand braided Permian rings of the eastern trade routes, and the heavy twisted silver torsades of Gotland represent three distinct regional traditions within the broader arm ring category.

The Cuerdale Hoard article covers ribbon-style arm rings and the Danelaw bullion economy. The Permian silver rings article covers the eastern trade tradition. The Gotland torsade article covers the elite multi-wire neck ring tradition of the Baltic.

Pendants and Amulets

Thor's Hammer pendants are the most recognisable form of Viking amulet, but the pendant tradition was far broader and more regionally specific than popular accounts suggest. The Gnezdovo Mjolnir from the Rus trade settlements, the Bredsatra Mjolnir pendant from Öland, and the cross-hammer hybrid pieces of the Hiddensee treasure each represent distinct regional and chronological variations on the amulet tradition.

Our dedicated article on Viking amulets covers the spiritual and protective function of Norse amulets in full. The specific archaeological finds are covered in the dedicated articles on the Gnezdovo Mjolnir, the Bredsatra pendant, and the Hiddensee treasure. For a deeper look at what the Valknut and Norse knotwork on a Mjolnir pendant actually meant to the people who wore them, read our article on why Vikings wore Mjolnir: the hammer of Thor.

Brooches

The oval tortoiseshell brooch was the defining item of female dress across the Viking world, worn in pairs at the shoulders to fasten the straps of the Norse apron dress. Thousands of examples have been found across Scandinavia and the Viking diaspora, making them one of the most archaeologically reliable markers of Norse female presence at any site. The tortoiseshell brooch article covers their production and significance in full.

Finger Rings and Spiral Rings

Finger rings are less common in the Viking archaeological record than arm rings and pendants but no less interesting. The Viking spiral ring tradition, which has roots stretching back two thousand years before the Viking Age, appears in burial assemblages from Birka in Sweden to the Danelaw in England and reveals the everyday personal ornament of Norse society at its most accessible level. The Viking spiral finger rings article explores this form and its place in the broader Norse personal ornament tradition.

The Sacred Dimension: Animal Motifs and Divine Symbolism

The animal imagery that dominates Viking art was not merely decorative. It encoded a cosmological worldview in which specific creatures carried specific divine associations, and wearing those creatures in metal was a way of claiming their qualities and invoking their protection.

Ravens connected the wearer to Odin, who sent his birds Huginn and Muninn across the world each day to gather knowledge. Wolves invoked Fenrir and the warrior qualities associated with Odin's wolf companions. Serpents recalled Jormungandr and the cyclical destruction and renewal at the heart of Norse cosmology. The raven belt mounts worn by Norse warriors, and the broader tradition of bird-of-prey imagery in Viking metalwork, are covered in full in the Viking raven belt mount article.

The Borre style gripping beast and the Jelling style ribbon beast represent two distinct ways of encoding this animal cosmology in jewellery and metalwork. Both are covered in their dedicated articles, but their relationship to the broader spiritual tradition of Viking material culture is explored in our article on Viking jewellery in burial and ritual contexts.

Viking Jewellery Across the British Isles

The Viking presence in Britain and Ireland left an extraordinary material legacy. The Cuerdale Hoard in Lancashire, the Vale of York Hoard in Yorkshire, and the Silverdale Hoard also in Lancashire represent three of the most significant concentrations of Viking Age silver ever found in Britain, each offering a snapshot of the bullion economy at a specific moment of political turbulence in the Danelaw.

Beyond the hoards, the Anglo-Scandinavian artistic tradition that emerged from sustained Norse settlement in northern and eastern England produced a hybrid material culture visible in church carvings, decorated stonework, and metalwork that blends Norse beast styles with Anglo-Saxon interlace traditions. The jewellery of this period is among the most fascinating in the entire Norse world precisely because it documents cultural contact and exchange rather than a single tradition in isolation.

Where to Go Next

This article is the starting point for the Viking jewellery series. Each of the 15 dedicated articles below goes deep on a specific find, tradition, or technique. Follow whichever thread pulls at your curiosity.

The full series covers four areas. The silver hoard and bullion economy articles follow the money: how silver moved through the Norse world and what the arm rings and hoards it produced can tell us about Norse commercial life. The archaeological artefact articles focus on specific named finds, each one a window into a particular dimension of Viking material culture. The craftsmanship articles explain how Viking jewellery was actually made, covering the technical skills of the Norse smith in detail. And the animal style and sacred motif articles decode the visual language of Norse art, explaining what the beasts and symbols actually meant to the people who wore them.

This article is the hub of the Viking Jewellery series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/vikings