Pagans and Christians

Soon after the beginning of the Viking Age, a woman was buried at Bjørke, beside a western Norwegian fjord according to contemporary pagan custom: fully clothed, with selected ornaments and possessions indicative of her status. This Bjørke lady was provided with a pair of the characteristic oval brooches that formed a distinctive element of Scandinavian female dress during the ninth and tenth centuries, two bronze arm-rings and an iron weaving- sword, but most prestigious of all – as most exotic – was a lozenge-shaped, gilt-bronze plaque, decorated in an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon style. Stripped from its backing, one of its corner rivet-holes is empty so that it could be suspended as a pendant. Its form and the cruciform nature of its ornament suggest that it was made to embellish the cover of a holy book; its removal had been an act of sacrilege. Here then we are faced with direct evidence of Norse paganism – Viking loot, from an English monastery, ritually deposited in a Norwegian grave.