The left panel of the Franks Casket contains perhaps the most curious extant depiction of the Romulus and Remus myth: a recumbent she-wolf, feet pointed upwards, and poised just above a likewise inverted runic label reading ᚹᚣᛚᛁᚠ (wylif).Footnote 1 The runes, like the she-wolf, are upside down as well as reversed with the text running from right to left. The twin boys, appearing more like men than babes, suckle the mother-wolf, in a suspended, aerial manner; one clutches her by the foot. Above them, a second wolf hovers. Both creatures lick the boys with elongated tongues. To the left and right, men – possibly shepherds or warriors – clutch spears as they wade through the foliage and into the ‘green cave’ of Mars.Footnote 2 Each man holds a weapon in one hand and budding vegetation in the other as they discover the scene which would become so iconic throughout the Roman empire and thus medieval Europe. Roots and branches unfold throughout the scene, the entirety of which is encompassed by the runic titulus reading: ‘romwalus and reumwalus twœgen gebroþær afœddæ hiæ wylif in romæcæstri oþlæ unneg’.Footnote 3 What is the source for this radical imagining?
Book VIII of Virgil’s Aeneid contains a description of the forging of Aeneas’s shield upon which Vulcan casts an image of the mother-wolf licking Romulus and Remus, thereby ‘shaping’ the boys with her tongue. Two studies of the casket – one by Carol Neuman de Vegvar and another by George HendersonFootnote 4 – independently pointed to the relevance of this passage in relation to the casket’s clear use of the licking motif.Footnote 5 But these studies only note the connection in passing. Mysteries abide: why is the mother-wolf, who is traditionally depicted as upright and sheltering the boys, fully reclined in this image? And how are we to account for the second wolf in the uppermost portion of the panel? What about the unusual positioning of the boys? This article argues that there are further details in the Aeneid and its late antique commentary tradition that may shed light on this panel’s unique artistry. In addition to building a stronger case for the Aeneid as a likely source for the artist’s depiction of this episode, I will furthermore suggest that the designer’s use of nuanced classical allusion is strong enough to offer insights into the transmission history of the Aeneid and Virgilian commentaries in the early Northumbrian intellectual milieu which produced the intractably enigmatic Franks Casket.Footnote 6
The Romulus and Remus story appears frequently in some of the earliest medieval English iconography. The episode features on coins and jewellery, some varieties of which would have been roughly contemporary with the Franks Casket. The earliest known image from the British Isles is imprinted upon the Undley Bracteate (British Museum number 1984,1101.1), a gold pendant with repoussé design (c. 450–480).Footnote 7 The runic phrase which is etched above the helmeted profile of a bearded man has been variously interpreted: as ‘howling she-wolf’; or ‘[This picture of] a she-wolf [is] a reward to a kinsman’; and even ‘Mead is a strong companion’.Footnote 8 A celestial object shines upon the she-wolf who is, like the runes, arched over the feeding twins. Because the pendant – which bears similarities to amulets which were sometimes worn by women – contains some of the oldest runes ever recorded in the Anglo-Frisian futhorc, it is believed that this item could have been made in Frisia before being brought to England.Footnote 9
While the Bracteate was likely based on Urbs Roma coin types which pre-date the casket, there are a variety of coins featuring the she-wolf with twins which would have been in circulation during the eighth century. These include: secondary Series V pennies from southern England, silver coins minted for King Æthelberht of East Anglia (d. 794), and another series for King Offa of Mercia (790s).Footnote 10 According to Katherine Cross, such iconography ‘constituted a major mode of transmission for the origin legend, largely independent of written versions’.Footnote 11 The Series V coins (c. 725), which may constitute the earliest known English use of the myth, are unique in their depiction of the scene in that they feature droplets of milk falling into the mouths of the expectant twins. The Wuffing dynasty of East Anglia seems to have had a special affinity towards wolves and wolf imagery, which may explain their interest in minting the story upon their currency. And Cross has proposed that the twins upon the Series V coins appear to be larger, more ‘full grown’, in much the same way as they are represented upon the casket.Footnote 12
A final near-contemporary of the Franks Casket, also made of whalebone, is the so-called Larling fragment or plaque (TL 98148968), likely made in the last quarter of the eighth century.Footnote 13 Later stone sculptures also depict the nursing of the twins as seen on the Donaghmore Cross (County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, ninth or tenth century) and Maen Achwyfan (Flintshire, Wales, tenth century). Yet, in each of these instances, the she-wolf is upright with the boys crouched below her belly in the traditional manner.Footnote 14
These different coinage issues, stoneworks and boneworks mean that the dynamics of the Romulus and Remus story would have been widely recognized. But, like the Series V coinage, the myth could also inspire distinctive iconographic representations. The Franks Casket’s depiction of the she-wolf and twins stands apart for its extensive breaking with the traditions established by coinage issues and other material expressions of the myth.Footnote 15 As de Vegvar observes, the theme of Romulus and Remus in the hands of the Franks Casket artist is essentially ‘reinvented’.Footnote 16 To be sure, the myriad idiosyncrasies of this panel have occasioned much comment over the years. However, as de Vegvar flatly remarks, ‘no extant classical image could have provided a model for the reclining she-wolf’ and no study has furthermore ‘satisfactorily explained the iconographic peculiarities of [this] panel’.Footnote 17 It remains possible, however, that written versions of the legend may have been consulted by and thus influenced the casket’s designer.
There are numerous written sources which address the Romulus and Remus story. Augustine’s City of God Xv.v contains an account sometimes used for moralizing purposes by comparing the story of Remus’s violent end to the fratricidal story of Cain and Abel. And while mention of the nursing of Romulus and Remus by the she-wolf does not feature in the Old English Orosius (the text of which is, albeit, much later than the Franks Casket), like Augustine, that history does recount the later treachery of Romulus (ii. 2):
… wearð Romeburh getimbred fram twam gebroðran, Remus and Romulus, and raðe æfter ðan Romulus hiora angin geunclænsode mid his broðor selge … Ðus gebletsode Romulus Romana rice on fruman: mid his broðor blode þone weall …
… the city of Rome was built by the two brothers Remus and Romulus, and soon after that Romulus defiled its inception by killing his brother … In this way Romulus consecrated the rule of the Romans at the outset: the wall with his brother’s blood …Footnote 18
The Orosius account sidesteps the twins’ youth altogether, focusing solely upon the details of kin-killing, treachery, and bloodshed.
A number of classical authors, however, do recount the story of the foundlings and their discovery and adoption by Faustulus and his wife, Acca Laurentia, including Livy, Florus, Plutarch, Justinus and Eusebius.Footnote 19 Indeed, de Vegvar suggests that the panel may be more indebted to iconographic traditions concerning the ‘discovery’ of Romulus and Remus rather than their ‘nursing’, though it is possible that the artist wished to conflate these two moments.Footnote 20 Despite de Vegvar’s gesture towards Aeneid VIII, she maintains that ‘iconographic anomalies’ persist.Footnote 21 With this study, I do not aim to address every anomaly within this scene, but wish to offer a window into the source traditions that may have been available to and informed the artist’s innovative stylistic manoeuvres.
Vulcan’s Reclining She-Wolf
While the image of a recumbent she-wolf appears nowhere else in surviving medieval iconographic depictions, a passage which describes a ‘recumbent’ mother-wolf does exist. The ultimate source of this topos, as I alluded to above, may be found in Book VIII of the Aeneid. The artist’s rendering may even be close enough to imply a direct link. Book VIII recounts how Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, appeals to the god of the forge, Vulcan, requesting special weaponry on behalf of her son. Vulcan crafts a shield replete with prophesies for the Roman world. According to Christina Mazzoni, Aeneas’s shield is quite possibly ‘the most symbolic object in the entire Aeneid’.Footnote 22 Vulcan begins his metalwork with the origin story of the twins and their fostering by the mother-wolf. The relevant passage reads as follows:
De Vegvar and Henderson first drew attention to this image of licking and shaping which ‘speaks to a metaphorical fashioning of the Romans as the children of the wolf’.Footnote 24 But I would go further and argue that the artist shows more than a casual familiarity with this passage; instead, he seems to be reading this moment in the Aeneid with a keen eye to every detail just as he has deliberately inverted the words wylif (female wolf) directly below the fully reclined nursing mother. Marijane Osborn points out that the runes are ‘positioned … under the part of her recumbent body that produces the milk that nourishes the twins … a label specifically of her female function’.Footnote 25
Indeed, the most defining feature of this passage from Virgil, as it relates to the depiction of the myth on the Franks Casket, is the phrase procubuisse lupam or (the ‘mother-wolf, reclining’). The term procubuisse has occasioned different translations, but generally scholars accept that it most closely translates as ‘reclining/to recline’. According to The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources the term procubuisse is related to ‘procubus’ (‘prone, prostrate’) and ‘procumbere’ meaning ‘to adopt a prone position on the ground, to lie down’.Footnote 26 It is generally accepted among classical scholars that Virgil does indeed imagine the she-wolf as reclining upon the shield of Aeneas. Lee M. Fratantuono and R. Alden Smith suggest that, in the Aeneid, the ‘image of the reclining she-wolf’ reminds viewers that ‘Wolves are associated with Rome’s fierce martial tradition’, while the ‘rendering of wolves as harmless is a sign of the Golden Age’ or Pax Romana. Footnote 27
This leads to the larger question: why would the image of a reclining she-wolf have appealed to the designer on a thematic level when he would have likely been familiar with the traditional image of the upright wolf with eyes gazing forward as if into the future as seen with the famed Bronze Capitoline statue in Rome and Roman-derived coinage.Footnote 28 Catherine Karkov offers one interpretation: the upside-down positioning of the wolf and the runic text requires greater physical interaction with the casket on the part of the viewer. Moreover, she argues that this ‘inversion also refers to the darker side of the myth, to the fact that the foundation of the city involved the murder of Remus by Romulus and Romulus’s subsequent rape of the Sabine women. In its allusions to murder and rape, the panel would have connections with the scene of Weland on the front of the casket’.Footnote 29 The fact that the twins are fully grown warriors, and possibly depicted with beards,Footnote 30 rather than small children, certainly anticipates such a reading; the artist looks ahead in time to when brother will betray brother and violence will spawn the birth of an empire.
On another level, this depiction also implies a realistic familiarity with canine psychology and behaviour; the act of reclining implies absolute comfort and trust on the part of a canid. But, in terms of nursing, such a position is more natural and thus realistic than the statuesque, upright wolf. In this way, the mother-wolf’s posture might signal the peaceable nature of ecclesia, the figure who rears what will ultimately become the seat of the mother church.Footnote 31 According to Augustine, Rome was divinely destined to unite the world and bring about peace. And Leslie Webster has importantly shown that, in the eighth century, the Christian reinterpretation of the she-wolf myth was understood as the ‘mother church, which both offers salvation and nourishes the faithful’.Footnote 32 The artist’s use of the term ‘afedan’ to describe the nourishing of the twins would support this interpretation. The term means ‘to feed’ or ‘to suckle, nurse’ on the most literal level, but can also have the force of ‘to nurture, to bring up, raise (a child)’ and ‘to nourish (someone, someone’s mind)’.Footnote 33 According to Harriet Soper, this scene depicts the ‘dynamic process of formation at the start of life’.Footnote 34
In both patristic traditions and then the later Joca Monachorum riddling tradition, nursing was often associated with wisdom and intellectual nourishment (the ubera sapientia motif).Footnote 35 There even exists an ubera sapientia riddle by the Irish Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, whose Epitome XV invokes Romulus as the founder of Rome:
The first [grammarian] was an aged man by the name of Donatus, at Troy, who lived, they say, for a thousand years. When he came to Romulus, the founder of the city of Rome, he was received with the greatest rejoicing and stayed there for four years. During this time he built up a school and left innumerable works in which he posed various riddles, saying: ‘My son, who is the woman who offers her breasts to countless offspring, and however much they are sucked they flow just as richly?’ The answer is Wisdom.Footnote 36
If the designer of the casket was familiar with this manner of riddling, it would suggest that the panel might promote Rome as an aspirational source of wisdom and learning, an issue I will return to later on. Furthermore, if we take the she-wolf upon the left side of the casket as signalling ecclesia, or possibly sapientia, it establishes tighter connections with the front of the casket, which bears the image of Mary as Theotokos. Taken together, both panels then juxtapose child-rearing, pax and maternal fostering, while simultaneously alluding to the crafting of weaponry and, ultimately, violence and bloodshed.
The Wylif and her Whelp
In this section, I will suggest that the presence of the overarching second wolf also points to the artist’s adroit reading of Virgil.Footnote 37 Often regarded as the most anomalous feature of the entire scene, medieval scholars continue to be vexed by the presence of the second (and possibly superfluous) wolf. Several theories have been put forward after generations of debate. One of the earliest proposals was by Holthausen (1900), who suggested that this canine was not a wolf at all, but meant to be taken as Faustulus’s sheepdog.Footnote 38 Goldschmidt (1918) speculated that the extra wolf might be the she-wolf’s mate, a suggestion which seems unlikely given that a male wolf appears nowhere in surviving versions of the legend, written or visual.Footnote 39 Souers (1935) thought that the additional wolf was purely decorative, both filling in the space and also mirroring the doubling of the men which appear both right and left.Footnote 40 And Becker argued that the wolves are actually Woden’s famous beasts of battle.Footnote 41 More recently, Osborn has suggested that the second wolf allows for ‘both boys [to] be licked within a single illustration’.Footnote 42 And James Paz has proposed that we need not read this as a single ‘scene’ at all. Paz interprets the two wolves not as separate, but rather a single creature though at different moments in time. As observers, according to Paz, we are encouraged ‘to take two, even four, differing views of what is going on. The upside-down runes on the lower border also provoke movement and alternative ways of seeing’.Footnote 43
But images of ‘wolf-doubling’ can be found elsewhere in early English iconography, in contexts which allude to protection. Though not a depiction of the Romulus and Remus story, this motif can be seen upon the garnet cloisonné purse-lid, replete with garnets and millefiori glass gems, from Mound One of the Sutton Hoo ship burial (dated to the seventh century). This treasure exhibits the ‘double wolf’ or ‘man between the beasts’ motif with upright wolves, mouths open, and a man in between.Footnote 44 Rebecca Pinner notes that the ‘lower limbs of the animals are entwined with the legs of the man, whose arms appear to reach towards their front paws. The proximity of the wolves’ open mouths to the man’s ears is suggestive of them whispering or speaking directly to him’.Footnote 45 According to Sam Newton, the ‘peculiar flanking position of the beasts could be regarded as a representation of the protective presence … of the ancestral guardian-spirit of the Wuffings’.Footnote 46 But alternate readings of this item are certainly plausible.Footnote 47 The purse-lid bears similarities to the helmet plate dies from Torslunda, Sweden, which feature a warrior battling two bears with jaws clamped upon his head. One of the bears has been pierced with the warrior’s sword.
Since wolves were viewed affably in this East Anglian context, however, it is worth considering the line of reasoning suggesting that the wolves are meant to be viewed as protective guardians upon the purse-lid. Similarly, many of the stylistic features upon the Franks Casket are consistent with iconographic traditions signalling protection, both maternal and martial.Footnote 48 I would argue that the left panel of the casket, like the purse-lid, similarly evokes protection: both the protection of the vulnerable twins as well as the contents of the casket.Footnote 49 A visual theme of protection and defence can be traced around the panels of the casket and through various related Northumbrian media.Footnote 50 According to Webster, with the casket, we are ‘dealing with a kind of visual literacy, with its own enduring grammar and vocabularies’.Footnote 51
To further address this puzzle, it is also worth returning to Virgil and his use of the adjective fetam (from feta). In some contexts, fetam indicates pregnancy though, in this case, it is more likely that the she-wolf has ‘just given birth’.Footnote 52 Fratantuono and Smith, in their extensive commentary on Book VIII of the Aeneid, note that Virgil’s ‘ecphrasis moves to the celebrated image of the she-wolf and her “offspring” … Virgil [plainly] describes the she-wolf as “a mother” the adjective can describe an animal that is newly whelped’.Footnote 53 The second wolf, in other words, should be understood as neither accidental nor strictly ornamental here. Read in this Virgilian light, the second wolf is none other than the mother-wolf’s pup, represented to be just as fully grown as the boys.
This scenario, wherein the she-wolf is accompanied by her pup, was commonly acknowledged in ancient traditions. Book II of the Fasti by Ovid reads:
This doubling of the wolf (mother and pup) carries greater thematic significance as well. She fashions the human pups with her tongue, as does their foster-sibling.
It is probable that the Romulus and Remus story would have been widely known in medieval Ireland as well. The trope of the mother-wolf who nurtures abandoned humans is evident in some early Irish biographies. The Scéla Éogain ogus Cormaic and the Genemuin Chormaic recount the fosterage of the legendary Irish High King, Cormac mac Airt, who was said to have been taken away by a she-wolf back to her den (which comes to be known as Uaim Cormaic or ‘Cormac’s cave’) where he was nursed alongside her litter.Footnote 55 According to Kim McCone, we can assume that ‘Irish literati saw the parallel with Romulus and Remus and appreciated its imperial implications for the Tara monarchy’.Footnote 56 The oldest version of this legend dates to the eighth century.Footnote 57 A similar hagiographical motif appears in the Vita Sancti Albei (Life of St. Ailbe), a text which is likewise from the mid-eighth century.Footnote 58 While these tales are likely drawing upon the classical myth, they contain no references to recumbent she-wolves or the licking-as-shaping motif. What is significant about these narratives, however, is their insistence upon the deep emotional relationships forged between the humans and the wolves that foster them, both their lupine foster-mother and their animal ‘siblings’. These stories, according to Thomas O’Donnell, ‘allow us to see the devotion, grief and mutual support that characterise’ the social institution of fosterage.Footnote 59 Both tales emphasize not just the role of the mother-wolf, but the lupine foster-brothers as well. In the story of Cormac, both the future king and the pups are reared and nurtured together; as a result, they share in a similar kind of education and develop a deep emotional connection. Furthermore, both ‘Ailbe and Cormac … have continued bonds with their wild foster families’.Footnote 60 It is certainly plausible that the casket designer could have been familiar with and drawing upon the fosterage imagery in these Irish legends, which afford the wolf-siblings pride of place in the development of the abandoned humans they help to raise, all the while adding a ‘more human and social construct’ to this panel.Footnote 61
Together, the lupine family moulds the twins ‘as it were for the destined Roman future – one that will implicitly be one of civil war and internecine strife’.Footnote 62 Fratantuono adds that, ‘For Virgil – as for his Roman audience – the wolf is an ambiguous, indeed contradictory animal’,Footnote 63 the forerunner of both greatness and violence.Footnote 64 Thus, with this image, the artist depicts the motherly female wolf representing ecclesiastical and intellectual nourishment, and the young wolf, perhaps signifying emotional bonds and military virtue.
The Wolf’s Tongue in Virgilian Poetics
The final critical detail derived from Virgil’s discussion of Aeneas’s shield concerns the ‘licking’, which was what initially drew scholars to the passage from Book VIII. References to the mother-wolf licking the twins (‘lingua lambentem pueros’) appear in both Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities, I.lxxix) and Livy (Ab urbe condita, I.iv), but Virgil’s depiction supplies a figurative purpose behind the action. His text describes the mother-wolf’s act of licking with the term fingere (‘to form, to shape, to invent’). Fingere is, of course, the root of the English word ‘fiction’. And the very word ‘language’ comes from the Latin lingua (‘tongue’).Footnote 65 According to Mazzoni:
The definition of fingere is to feign, to make fictions, to invent, to form … Latin poets regularly use the verb fingere as a synonym for writing poetry: Fingere is what poets do … Both mothers and poets produce an individual where none existed before.Footnote 66
But to this, we might add that fingere could just as easily refer to the craft of any artist. According to Mazzoni, the metaphor of licking the boys into shape gets directly to the heart of Virgil’s notion of authorship. Virgil, by way of analogy, attends to his verse the way a mother wolf might attend to her young. In fact, Virgil’s own historical biographer, Suetonius, acknowledged Virgil’s desire to be seen as the creaturely ‘mother’ of his poems. In this case, Suetonius describes Virgil’s writing habits with his Georgics, but with a direct echo to the she-wolf passage of Book viii of the Aeneid:
… traditur cotidie meditatos mane plurimos versus dictare solitus ac per totum diem retractando ad paucissimos redigere, non absurde carmen se more ursae parere dicens et lambendo demum effingere.
… it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning, and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape.Footnote 67
Whether a she-wolf or a she-bear, Mazzoni notes that this ‘licking-as-shaping image is repeated in a variety of critical sources which describe Virgil’s craft’, linking ‘the instinctual work of an animal mother and the painstakingly self-conscious work of a human (and male) poet’.Footnote 68 In the case of the Aeneid, ‘the she-wolf, busy in her formative task of licking’ becomes a guiding ‘metaphor for the poet’s own practice’.Footnote 69 And upon the Franks Casket, the she-wolf is not only a metaphor for artistic praxis, but also a signature of sorts for the designer, a depiction of the tender rearing of their masterwork.
Scholars have often discussed the theme of ‘exile’ with this panel and others.Footnote 70 While the thematics of exile are certainly relevant, I would propose that this panel is also highly focused on protection, rearing and ‘nurturing’: the artistry of a mother; a master-smith; an artisan. Just as the forge-god’s crafting of Aeneas’s shield connects to the artist’s act of carving, so too can we trace connections between the smithing of Weland on the front of the casket and, to the careful viewer, an homage to the labours of Vulcan on the left. According to Webster, certain scenes upon the casket may be read as ‘contrapuntal pairs’, or panels that mirror, refer to, and speak to one another thematically.Footnote 71 If Virgil is the ultimate source for the depiction of the Romulus and Remus myth, the designer has implicitly employed a contrapuntal programme at its hinge and joined a classical Mediterranean god (Vulcan) with his Germanic legendary counterpart (Weland) through the guiding theme of craftsmanship, whether it be the handiwork of mothers, smiths, or poets.Footnote 72
It is worth considering the representation of wolf tongues in Germanic traditions as well since the casket as a whole is so infused with a variety of legendary matters. Indeed, the image of a she-wolf who licks a hero features memorably in an early episode from the Saga of the Volsungs (Chapter 5). Here, King Siggeir places Sigmund and all of his brothers in the stocks. For nine successive nights a menacing she-wolf comes and devours one brother each night until Signy devises a honey-plot to save her brother’s life.Footnote 73 The saga author describes how the ylgr (she-wolf) licks the honey from Sigmund’s face, but this action ultimately leads to the loss of her tongue and her death.Footnote 74
There are also later stone carvings which may depict this episode.Footnote 75 While the Franks Casket is, of course, much older than these later carvings, and quite different in terms of style and type, if the artist of the Franks Casket wished to evoke the wolf tongues of Germanic legend, it would offer further correspondence with the Weland material on the front of the casket. But in each of these Germanic cases, wolves are agents of terror, not maternal tenderness.Footnote 76 Thus, the artist of the Franks Casket takes what may have been a well-known trope involving heroes surviving interactions with hungry wolves and repurposes them so as to emphasize nurturing protection, origin myths and their own artistic and poetic practice of creation.
With this reliance on the Virgilian connections, the artist also ventures a careful statement about their relationship to their craft. It is likely not accidental that the smithy scene on the front leads to and touches the left panel, which announces this erudite artist’s own painstaking practice via the licking-as-shaping metaphor. According to de Vegvar, ‘as a pagan work of Latin verse’, the works of Virgil were ‘probably only accessible to the most learned’.Footnote 77 If the artist of the Franks Casket followed this Virgilian metaphor closely, which I think is likely, it is appropriate that the licking motif features so prominently. The artist, like the wolf, shapes within a space of both peace and protection while anticipating future violence and bloodshed all at once.
Desire and Suspense in Servian Commentary Traditions
But just how widely would Virgil’s works have circulated and been known in early England? Aldhelm shows clear knowledge of Book VIII, for example, in his Carmen de uirginitate, De pedum regulis and Enigmata. Footnote 78 Bede’s works and style also betray a familiarity with Virgil in his Comm. in Genesin and De orthographia. Footnote 79 According to Michael Lapidge, ‘it is not only at the level of verbal reminiscence that Bede shows his debt to Virgil. His preferred hexameter structures are precisely those of Virgil’.Footnote 80 We also know that Boniface was familiar with some Virgilian material.Footnote 81 Later in the period, ‘we find Virgil identified explicitly (as “Frigilius” and “Firgilies”)’ in the Old English Boethius. Footnote 82 Knowledge of Virgil may have arrived via networks of communication among Irish clerics. Adomnán, for example, seems to have been familiar with his works. According to Jan Ziolkowski, based on ‘allusions in his extant writings … [it is likely] that Virgil was studied at Iona during [his] abbacy’.Footnote 83
Ultimately, it is probable that portions of Virgil’s Aeneid would have been available in Northumbria, at the magnificent library at Wearmouth-Jarrow, as well as at York during Alcuin’s lifetime, in Wilfred’s library at Ripon and at Acca’s Hexham repository. But while hard evidence for the circulation of Virgil in the early medieval English period is scant, it is possible that there was a mediated link through the works of Servius (sometimes called Servius Grammaticus) and his important commentary on Virgil.
Little is known about Servius, a Roman teacher and grammarian, who likely compiled his commentary in the first decade of the fifth century.Footnote 84 Early manuscripts refer to him as ‘Servius’ and later texts sometimes append ‘Maurus’ or ‘Honoratus’ to his name.Footnote 85 Servius’s works were modelled on (now lost) commentaries by Donatus. According to Peter K. Marshall, Servius’s interests ‘range from the purely grammatical or linguistic … [for] understanding the very words used by Virgil … to much broader questions of style and imagery’.Footnote 86 Hendrikje Bakker has argued that the works of Virgil and Servius became so conjoined in the Middle Ages that they were often viewed as inseparable.Footnote 87
Fortunately, there is firmer evidence that the works of Servius were transmitted in and around the medieval British Isles.Footnote 88 Indeed, Aldhelm, Boniface, Alcuin (and later Byrhtferth) demonstrate a familiarity with Servius.Footnote 89 According to Elizabeth Marshall, ‘Servius’s commentary has particularly strong Insular connections since one of the versions in which it survives, an interpolated version known as the Servius Danielis, might be the work of an Irish compiler who completed their work … possibly as early as the seventh century’.Footnote 90 As I have already suggested, Servian commentaries come in a variety of forms derived from two major versions. P. K. Marshall explains:
One is the ‘plain’ Servius text composed around the year AD 400 … the other is usually referred to as DServius, which was compiled (probably in the early seventh century) by grafting a selective text of Servius … [to possibly] the lost work of the great fourth century scholar Aelius Donatus.Footnote 91
This seventh-century expanded version of Servius, sometimes known as either ‘Servius Auctus’ or ‘Servius Danielis’ (or more simply ‘DServius’), after Pierre Daniel, who edited this version in 1600, builds upon and occasionally corrects the original inherited Servian material. And physical evidence attesting to knowledge of DServius in the early medieval British Isles survives. In 1968, a bifolium discovered in the records of the Pfarrarchiv of Spangenberg (Hessisches Staatsarchiv in Marburg) was found to contain excerpts of Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid in an English cursive miniscule dating to the early eighth century. Today, this bifolium has the call number of Fragment 319 Pfarrarchiv Spangenberg (Depositum) Hr Nr. 1. There is even some speculation that this fragment could have been handwritten by St Boniface himself or, at the very least, connected to Boniface and his circle at Fulda.Footnote 92
The Spangenberg bifolium is essentially pure, though incomplete, DServius.Footnote 93 Its content begins at Aeneid III.561 and ends at VIII.713, though it does not contain material on the shield and she-wolf passages. It is, however, entirely possible that the leaflet could have once been gathered together with excerpts on all twelve books of the Aeneid. Lapidge rightly asks if this fragment could ‘represent the tip of the iceberg of classical texts transmitted by way of England to the Continent’.Footnote 94 Fulda, of course, enjoyed a ‘remarkable collection of classical Latin texts’.Footnote 95 Lapidge further notes that Alcuin seems to have had in his possession a complete work of ‘Seruius’ (or texts that travelled under the name of ‘Sergius’).Footnote 96 In any event, Servian material, we can surmise, would have been available and possibly well-known during the likely floruit that saw the production of the Franks Casket.
The works of Servius also enjoyed a later flourishing of interest in the Carolingian era. One of the earliest full copies of Servius’s works can be found in Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 363 (or the Codex Bernensis), dating from the third quarter of the ninth century. This copy was made in an Irish script and, furthermore, contains many Old Irish glosses. According to Brent Miles, ‘Bern 363 is a testimony to the esteem earned by Irish scholars of the Carolingian Revival for Virgilian studies’.Footnote 97 And knowledge of Servius does not appear to have subsided, especially among Irish authors. The Middle Irish Don Tres Troí (‘On the Third Troy’) attests to continued knowledge of Servius. Helpfully, the translator of this text, Flannacán, provides a bibliography of sorts at the end of his work:
Conadh amlaid in iarum ro toghladh fa dheoidh an Troí gur ro scailed an mur co solamh cen mothá usthadh bend 7 is airer o fágbadh sidhe da fhoillsiugud conadh amhlaid sin ro bai an mur uile rena brisedh. Beidb immorro 7 Ferb 7 Oras 7 Sugastin 7 Barr is iad na hughdair o ro coimeccradh an scel-sa. Flannacán immorro ro thinnta a nGaidhilg. Finit.
And thus was Troy destroyed at last and its walls swiftly toppled, all but a few prominences which were left to show what the walls had been before their destruction. Bede, Servius, Orosius, Augustine, and Varro, these are the authors from whom this story has been put together. Flannacán translated it into Irish. Finit.Footnote 98
Among the esteemed names of Flannacán’s sources is none other than Ferb (Servius).
There are several relevant portions of Servius’s text wherein he comments upon Book VIII (lines 630–5 onwards). In the Thilo and Hagen edition, the expanded or corrective work of DServius is featured in italics (as seen below). This DServius expansion is where we first begin to see a lengthy interpretation of ‘procubuisse’:
8.630 … est autem elegans figura ‘fecerat procubuisse.’ sane laus est operis, ut talis videretur. ‘fetam’ vero quae peperit et nutrire potuisset. Footnote 99
… ‘He had made her lie’ is an elegant figure [of speech], however. It is of course praise of the work [Vulcan’s shield] that it should seem like this. ‘Fetam’ clearly [shows] that she gave birth and would have been able to nurse.
Strikingly, DServius very clearly interprets the she-wolf as having just given birth with the adjective ‘fetam’, again, offering further evidence for the identification of the second wolf in the uppermost portion of the casket’s panel. Next, Servius and the DServian commentary continues with an extended analysis of the mother-wolf’s posture:
8.631 PROCVBVISSE id est prima parte se inclinasse, quod Graeci προχύπτειν dicunt, ut inclinatione corporis ubera praeberet infantibus: nam si ‘procubuisse’ iacuisse accipias, contrarium est quod dicit ‘ludere pendentes pueros’ quod si ‘procubuisse’ ut ‘cum fetu concolor albo procubuit’ accipiamus, intellegere debemus ‘pendentes’ desiderio alimoniae suspensos vel intentos, ut ‘pendet que iterum narrantis ab ore’ alii ‘pendentes’ cessantes, ut ‘pendent opera interrupta.’ sciendum tamen, voluisse eum gestum proprie exprimere, quem in ipsius lupae cernimus statuis.Footnote 100
PROCVBVISSE this is to bend oneself with the first part [of the body], what the Greeks call ‘prokuptein’, so that by bending the body she offers her teats to the children: for if we understand ‘procubuisse’ as ‘lying’, it contradicts [the fact] that he says ‘the boys play hanging’. But if we take ‘procubuisse’ as when ‘she lay with her white litter of the same colour’ [VIII.82] we ought to understand ‘pendentes’ as eager or focused with desire for nourishment, as in ‘she hung again on the words of the speaker’ [IV.88]. It should be known that he wanted properly to express the action, which we see in statues of the she-wolf herself.
There are several essential features to note here. In the first place, the original Servius material elucidates the meaning of ‘procubuisse’, which he characterizes as ‘inclinasse’ from ‘inclinatio’ or the ‘condition of being inclined.’ ‘Inclinatio’ has strong religious valences in that it can mean a ‘bow’ or ‘genuflection’. The term is often glossed as ‘gebigde’ in the Old English corpus meaning ‘to bend’, but also ‘to bend parts of the body, recline’ with a clear gesture of supplication as in ‘to bend, stoop, bow’.Footnote 101 Among the many anomalies of the panel, as de Vegvar once pointed out, are ‘… the shepherds [who] carry spears rather than crooks, and they kneel in homage rather than gesturing in surprise or standing by’.Footnote 102 The discussion here may explain the response of the witnesses to the scene, who are shown to be genuflecting in the presence of the twins and their attendant wolves. But here, DServius (in italics) rejects the claim that Servius makes when he says that the mother wolf merely ‘bends’ her body so as to feed the twins. In the expansion, DServius connects procubuisse to Virgil’s previous use of the term (Aeneid VIII.82), where he refers to a ‘reclining’ white sow and her litter, all sacrificed to Juno. Clearly, according to DServius, Virgil means for procubuisse to mean ‘lying/reclining’.
There is one further reason to believe that the designer might be following the DServian expansion in their depiction of this episode. The left panel obviously depicts a highly unusual viewpoint of the twins which, in many ways, seems to defy the laws of gravity. Soper suggests that ‘the boys [might be] … splayed on the ground if we are given a bird’s-eye view’.Footnote 103 However, rather than a bird’s-eye view, I think it is more likely that we are witnessing a figurative (rather than realistic) depiction of the boys. DServius, in what is quoted above, details the positioning of the twins, describing them as ‘pendentes’ (hanging) in opposition to the mother-wolf. DServius proposes reading pendentes in a figurative rather than literal way; the boys are not literally hanging underneath the she-wolf, but are psychologically longing for nourishment, just as Dido hangs in suspense and longing as she listens to the story of the fall of Troy (Aeneid IV.88). Possible definitions for pendere, according to the DMLBS, include ‘to hang, be suspended’ or ‘be affixed to, cling to, to hang upon, await’ and ‘be suspended in mid-air’.Footnote 104 In no other depiction of the Romulus and Remus myth, as far as I can discover, has the artist so exactly strained and contorted the bodies of the twins in order to contrast them with the she-wolf’s own. In this way, DServius’s choice of words and imagery illuminates the casket’s depiction of the twins as sprawling mid-air. The artist, in other words, with exacting precision, visually literalizes DServius’s text; we see the twins effectively poised, hanging in mid-air out of their desire for nourishment, the same desire felt by the artist in their quest to convey meaning. While the original Servian material seems insistent upon matching Virgil’s imagery to ‘statius’ (statues) of the she-wolf, DServius is much more engaged with the symbolic meaning of Virgil’s words, not in how the myth was commonly represented outside the poetic tradition.
Finally, returning to Virgil’s metaphor of ‘licking-as-shaping’, DServius calls attention to the role of the artist as fictor: molder, sculptor, image-maker:
8.634 …fingere tamen et formare aliquid et ad integram faciem arte producere significat; inde fictores dicuntur qui imagines vel signa ex aere vel cera faciunt. Footnote 105
‘Fingere’, however, signifies both to shape something and to produce its full appearance by means of art; hence they are called ‘fictores’ who make images or statues out of bronze or wax.
I can only imagine that this description must have appealed directly to the artist of the Franks Casket. Here, the wolves are ‘making’ the children just as the artist laboriously forms and ‘sculpts’ the images, runes and contours of the casket. On one level, the wolf signifies the church which makes and nourishes its followers who desirously feed upon it. On another, she stands in for the artist. The twins desire nourishment and hang in suspense for succour from their foster-mother, just as viewers of the casket must hang in suspense for meaning, knowledge and answers to riddles with each turn of the box. The Franks Casket requires three-dimensional reading.Footnote 106 When first confronted with the front panel the viewer is tasked with making a choice: whether to move next to the lid, the right side, or the left. While there are likely no correct movements when it comes to this object, a move from the front to the left would unlock a great deal of meaning for viewers in terms of the artist’s relationship to their craft.
Conclusions
Cross argues that the casket’s representation of its well-known Mediterranean scenes are ‘not formulaic but creative and innovative, presenting new renderings of the narratives they convey’.Footnote 107 The images enciphered upon the left panel allude to Rome’s imperial past while presenting ‘a Christian vision of history in which Rome dominates.’Footnote 108 The designer’s learned allusions and choice to incorporate material derived from a famous poem is striking, as is the decision to do something visually unprecedented, marking a clear departure from tradition in the myth’s iconographic (and iconic) representations. This manoeuvre reveals a sophisticated knowledge base, which clearly displays the artist’s erudition.
If the connection I have traced from the Romulus and Remus panel to Virgil’s poetry is to be believed, then this tells us much about the availability of classical and late antique knowledge in eighth-century Northumbria. The monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow (founded c. 673), in particular, was oriented towards the Roman world and housed the famous library which would come to support the work of Bede. That library was assembled almost single-handedly by Benedict Biscop (d. 689), the monastery’s first founder and abbot.Footnote 109 As Richard Marsden observes, ‘Wearmouth-Jarrow was a large and wealthy monastery and evidently, for a time at least, the centre of an active, erudite and influential monasticism’.Footnote 110
Benedict is reported to have travelled to Rome multiple times during the course of his career with the aim of book and artwork acquisition. Two texts, the Historia abbatum by Bede and the anonymously written Vita Ceolfridi provide an account for Benedict’s amassing of books ranging from the scriptural, to classical and secular works, which took place over his numerous sojourns to Rome. On his fifth trip, Benedict was accompanied by Ceolfrith (c. 678), who would eventually succeed him as abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow. Bede provides a description of Benedict’s growing library in his Historia abbatum (ch. 11). Benedict and Ceolfrith returned, as Bede records, with a ‘innumerabilem librorum omnis generis copiam’.Footnote 111
When Benedict discovered that his health was in decline he instructed the brothers that ‘Bibliothecam quam de Roma nobilissimam copiosissimamque aduexerat … sollicite seruari integram ne per incuriam fedari aut passim dissipari praecepit’.Footnote 112 The Vita Ceolfridi also refers to the trove of books that came from Rome as, essentially, a great bibliothecam (library): ‘Nam et uasis quae ad aecclesiae uel altaris officium pertinent copiosissime ditauit; et bibliothecam quam de Roma uel ipse, uel Benedictus attulerat nobiliter ampliauit’.Footnote 113 Based on this, it is entirely plausible that Virgilian or Servian material could have been among the triumphant copiae of books Benedict and Ceolfrith conveyed from Rome back to Northumbria.
But Roman fervour ran even deeper than the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow. According to Marsden, Wearmouth-Jarrow in particular, was ‘thoroughly and self-consciously Italian in its art, calligraphy, and outlook’.Footnote 114 And, as Rosalind Love puts it, ‘[o]ne might legitimately ask whether their gaze can have passed beyond the papal Christian Rome to the more distant pagan antique Rome and its literary culture’.Footnote 115 Given that the monastery self-consciously emulated the creative and cultural expressions of Rome, and had established historical ties to Rome through its first two abbots, who saw its legends and lore as an aspirational source of wisdom and learning – the ultimate ubera sapientia – Wearmouth-Jarrow is to my mind a likely candidate for the provenance of the Franks Casket, through both its library and its strong interest in fashioning itself according to what Anna Gannon has referred to as the ‘aegis of Romanitas’.Footnote 116 Just as all within the monastery saw themselves as nourished, or suckled, as the Joca Monachorum riddle tradition suggests, by the great wisdom of ancient Rome, Wearmouth-Jarrow could have very likely housed the material that informed the casket’s unprecedented iconographic display of the city’s foundational myth. I think it is furthermore reasonable to assume that such traditions may have been most legible to ecclesiastical audiences, whether in Wearmouth-Jarrow or elsewhere.
By the time Ceolfrith became abbot, Wearmouth-Jarrow had a highly established network stretching from its scriptorium to Rome, as the journey of the Codex Amiatinus reveals.Footnote 117 The codex’s travels tell us that Northumbria was frequently looking towards Rome for its cues on medieval Christian culture. As Cross argues ‘the designer of the casket worked within the community or sphere of influence of Wearmouth-Jarrow’ because the scenes speak to ‘the preoccupations of [that] community’.Footnote 118 Bishop Ceolfrith’s gift to Gregory II was an offering to the pope to remember communities of Christians on the far edges of the world revealing an early English understanding of ‘the Roman Church as centre’.Footnote 119
Based on the available evidence, I think it likely that the designer of the Franks Casket had familiarity with portions of the Aeneid in some form or, barring that (and equally plausible), its Servian commentary tradition. These classical and late antique frameworks greatly enrich our understanding of the left panel of the Franks Casket by revealing its distinctive metaphors for protection, the desire for knowledge, and the painstaking art of poetic creation. In DServius’s commentary, the fictor molds impressions into shapeless aere (bronze) or cera (wax). If we think of the person who sculpted the Franks Casket as, in one sense, a mother-wolf and, in another, an ingenious fictor, then we might add that their precision gives relief, form and artistry to once-shapeless though once-living whalebone.
Acknowledgements
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
I would like to thank Richard P. Abels, Marijane Osborn, and Charles D. Wright for reading drafts of this essay and providing valuable feedback. Further thanks go to Emily Thornbury and the anonymous readers for EMEN for their many insights and suggestions in the preparation of this article.
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