THE GOLD BRACTEES
OF THE
MIGRATION PERIOD
1, 2 ICONOGRAPHIC CATALOG
(IK1.TEXT)
by
MORTEN AXBOE, URS CLAVADETSCHER,
KLAUS DÜWEL, KARL HAUCK AND
LUTZ VON PADBERG
WILHELM FINK VERLAG MUNICH



PREFACE
In Germania, Tacitus mentions the Dioscuri sanctuary among one of the eastern tribes, the Naharvali, in c. 43. The Roman ethnographer also characterizes the Germanic veneration of these youthful twins by pointing out that there were no images of gods there, nulla simulacra. In a fundamental generalization that the Germanic peoples did not depict the majesty of the heavenly powers in human form, we encounter the same information already in c. 9 of Germania. This is not the place to discuss the history of the impact of that generalized statement in topos form. However, it is interesting to note that even the human-shaped wooden idols from the bogs of Central and Northern Europe provided reasons to question these Tacitus accounts, Germania d. Tacitus, 1967, p. 182. Such doubt becomes increasingly urgent because in the later imperial period we encounter a whole range of Germanic simulacra deorum. Since the Hunnic-Germanic migrations, the North has become more closely aligned with the Mediterranean world, also insofar as it adopted the amulet form of the image and symbol of the gods. For "images of gods as amulets are common in pre-Christian antiquity throughout the entire Mediterranean basin," Dölger, 1934, pp. 70, 277ff. Given the particularly favorable conditions for their preservation, we gain an astonishing insight into this genre of Migration Period imitation antiquities, which is significant in religious history, through the more than 800 gold bracteates from the Migration Period. They are therefore presented here in a complete three-volume iconographic catalog. The introduction, Volume 1.1, explains how this catalog was created and organized. This introduction also includes a bibliography and a museum index, both of which serve both Introduction 1.1 and this catalog Volume 1.2. They also provide the abbreviations used in the bibliography and museum index in the volumes of this corpus. The museum index is particularly helpful if one does not know the name of the find location, but only the region or country of origin. This index serves as a tool to compensate for the fact that, unlike Mackeprang (1952), we have not structured our catalog according to country of provenance. The introductory volume, presented at the same time, offers a general introduction in Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2, explains the considerations behind the material selection, as well as practical tips. Chapter 3 introduces the descriptive scheme; this includes overviews in conjunction with a series of text figures, which are also referred to in this volume with the abbreviation Fig. together with the corresponding number. These text figures in the introductory volume also explain the linking forms (Figs. 4-6) as well as the leg position variations (Fig. 7-12) in the quadrupeds of the C-bracteates and other companion animals (Figs. 14-18). Only in this way could the descriptions be written at all and at the same time concisely. The discussion of the runic inscriptions is introduced in Chapter 5. In the introductory volume, the most extensive Chapter 4 was devoted to the canon of themes of the amulets and the wide variety of their pictorial objects. This Chapter 4 had to be written in such a way that it could be continued in the evaluation volume, which concludes the three volumes of the editorial iconographic catalog.
This forced us to make do with provisional motif designations, which nevertheless have and retain their validity alongside the final, later ones.

The focus of this work, which compiles a catalog of the golden image amulets of the North from the era of a culture based on oral tradition, is iconographically oriented. After all, it was necessary to adapt to visual habits that are completely different from our own. The concept of the catalog was conceived a full decade before the first colloquium on prehistoric image content was held in Marburg, Lahn, in February 1983. In recent years, bracteate research has remarkably increased its interest in questions of manufacturing technology, as illustrated, for example, by the publications by Birgit Arrhenius, Morten Axboe, and Per-Olof Bohlin in 1981 and 1982. Since our descriptions were written since the mid-1970s, the current observations and results on production history came too late for them. However, these more recent works were still fully taken into account, especially in the bibliography for the individual catalog items. These significant investigations are incorporated there with the help of keywords in an index-like format. Morten Axboe, although only included in the corpus team since December 1983, also read the second proof. In this way, observations from his extensive original studies, which are of interest in terms of production techniques, could still be taken into account here.
The critical evaluation of the evidence initiated with this first catalog volume begins to make the long-lasting echo of the borrowed material, as well as the rapidly
increasingly independent visual world, more precisely comprehensible. At least in the long run, this material allows us to view these remarkable testimonies of a special minor art form, on the one hand, in their dependence on previous and contemporary works, such as images of emperors and gods from later antiquity, but on the other hand, also to penetrate to the interpretatio Germanica of the appropriated and transformed. This makes it possible to research this interpretatio Germanica in a similar way to what has long been possible with the interpretatio Romana of the gods of marginal cultures, attested in literature, images, and inscriptions. Methodologically, this task can be compared to that mastered by Grabar (1968, 2, esp. pp. 37ff., 42ff.) in his appreciation of the rich streams of monuments of Christian iconography in their history of origin. At the same time, we gain new tools to further explore the major theme of the emergence of image and writing in Northern Europe (Werner, 1966) in even more differentiated detail.
The iconographic catalog, with its three volumes of text and plates, the first two of which are presented here, is a complex editorial undertaking. But only in this way can the penetration into the horizon of a culture of memory without written tradition, with the help of pictorial evidence, be promising. At the same time, this historical horizon itself can be reconstructed. If the illustrations appear at similar enlargements as in the Hirmer publication "The Roman Coin," 1973, this simultaneously opens up an increasingly independently developing world of designs, despite the fact that it is accessible to us almost exclusively in works of small-scale gold art.
K. Hauck