Fish Head Pendant Gotland, Bronze

Fish Head Pendant Gotland

The pieces of jewellery, somewhat awkwardly called "fish-head pendants" after their shape, are made after precursors from the Vendel period on the island of Gotland.

The fish head pendants are available individually or in sets of 5. This way you can create your own individual jewellery or add to it later. The pieces are handmade by me from a special gold-coloured brass alloy. This makes the fish head pendants optically very similar to the often gold-plated original pieces.
On request and as a special order, even more authentic versions with gold plating, silver plating and black inlays are possible.

Fish-Head Pendants - Women's Jewellery of the Viking Age

This type of pendant was often worn in several pieces next to each other, creating a kind of collar. Together with glass beads and chain distributors, the fish-head pendants were typical neck jewellery for the women of the Viking Age on Gotland. Only in very rare cases (e.g. in a skeleton grave in the Kopparsvik cemetery) the fish-head pendants apparently were worn as individual pieces.

These replicas of fish-head pendants belong to "type 2", the pendants made in hollow casting. While type 1 is made of sheet metal and usually has a length of between 3 and 4 cm, the fish-head pendatns of type 2 are not only much more elaborately decorated, but also somewhat larger with an average length of just under 5 cm. This type of pendant is known exclusively from 5 to 6 hoards and around 140 individual finds and has not yet been proven in any closed grave finds.
Between 15 and 30 pieces are found together in the depots. It is unclear whether these larger collections represent a single set or possibly comprise two sets. Almost half of all type 2 finds thus come from depot finds. 

Among the single finds, about 50 pieces were reworked into dress fibulae, mostly with 3 pendants joined together and subsequently provided with a needle construction (so-called secondary fibulae).

The dating of the type 2 fish-head pendants is quite difficult due to their predominant occurrence in heterogeneous depot finds. However, it is probable that they were used within the stages VIII:2 to VIII:3, roughly the period between 900 and 1100 AD.

Link to the original: Datenbank Historiska.se