Introduction

Conversion to Christianity in northern Europe was not just a shift to a different religion but also a transition to different modes of representation. In Scandinavia, artists at first adapted, then rejected, then adopted the figurative or narrative Mediterranean art associated with Christianity. Scandinavia was exposed to narrative Mediterranean art through Late Roman medallions which inspired Migration Period gold bracteates; however, the flowering of this initial phase of narrative art was short-lived. Instead, Scandinavian animal styles of the fifth through the eleventh centuries developed and continued specifically as a reaction to classically derived narrative art. In this chapter, I contend that the decorative animal styles were manipulated and advanced as a statement of ‘otherness’ from Mediterranean-based narrative Christian art, by which Scandinavians signalled their own agenda and expressed a specifically pagan mentality. This animal style persisted until narrative elements were finally incorporated into northern art – both Christian and pagan – as a result of institutional conversion in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The Role of Narrative Art

The basic necessity of ‘narrative’ art is that it visually connotes a story that is recognizable to the target audience. Defining various types of narrative has been of great concern for classical art (e.g. Meyboom 1978). In his recent Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell (1999) divided narratives into different schemes including monoscenic, synoptic, simultaneous, progressive, unified, cyclical, continuous, episodic and serial. This is more detailed than necessary for the present consideration of Scandinavian art, but it is instructive to consider how Greek and Roman, as well as Early Christian art – which developed out of Late Roman Mediterranean styles – had strong historical or pedagogical intent expressed through narratives. By contrast, Scandinavian art tended toward the symbolic, with only minimal visual clues to indicate a story or theme.

Christianity is a religion of the Book and the Word. As Premysław Urbańczyk (Chapter 2 in this volume) has explained, pagan beliefs were ‘naturally acquired in the informal process of gradual education’, whereas Christianity is a ‘religion of the book’, and must be formally taught. The illiterate were often instructed in Christianity at least partly through visual sources, so visible narratives were very important to supplement the written account as promoted by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century (Diebold 2000, 18).