“In the Beginning There Was the Spear”: Digital Documentation Sheds New Light on Early Bronze Age Spear Carvings from Sweden

Abstract

Depictions of metal weapons are frequent in the rock carvings of the Swedish Bronze Age. Occasionally, they exhibit details of the objects, thus indicating that they may have represented real artefacts. Images of spears engraved from Litsleby, Kalleby, and Finntorp (Tanum, Bohuslän) and also from Tuna (Bälinge, Uppland) are analysed in the chapter. It is suggested that they depict spear types from the Early Bronze Age, c. 1750–1100 BC, including spears of the Valsömagle type. At Litsleby, a complete spear of this kind was first engraved in Period IB of the Nordic Bronze Age, around 1600 BC, and the carving was subsequently updated over a period of several hundred years. The original spear was engraved individually without a human figure, suggesting that it was considered a unique weapon, possibly Odin’s spear “Gungnir” or its Bronze Age precursor. As argued throughout the chapter, the cult of weapons seems to have preceded the materialization of the gods wielding them – gods that only began to appear in the Late Bronze Age, hundreds of years after the Early Bronze Age introduction of bronze spears into Scandinavia. The four case studies discussed in the chapter constitute remarkable examples of the life histories of ideologically and materially important Bronze Age spearheads and of the complex, long-lived biographies of their rock carvings.