04/02/2024
A Viking Age gold pendant in the shape of a coiled serpent, and probably worn as a protective amulet or on a necklace.
This one was discovered near Gørding in Denmark. It’s one of 21 pendants found so far, all of them in the shape of a coiled snake.
Six of the pendants turned up in the graves of very high-status women, and are thought to date from the early 9th Century, before the onset of Christianity in Scandinavia.
One possibility is that the women buried with these snake pendants were specialists who guarded the boundary between the living and the dead. It would be natural to see them as having a special affinity with snakes, a creature that can live above and below ground, and moves between the worlds of the living and the dead every time it sheds its skin.
Coiled snakes can also be a sign of female fertility and future prosperity. The Legendary History of Gotland, which dates from the 13th Century, tells the story of the first couple to settle on this Baltic island. The woman was called Huitastierna, and she had a dream on the first night she slept with her husband: “It was just as if three snakes were coiled together within her womb, and it seemed to her as though they crawled out of her. She related this dream to Hafþi, her husband, and he interpreted it as follows: ‘Everything in rings is bound. Inhabited this land shall be; we shall beget sons three.”
