Sword Beads, Funeral Beads, and Trade Beads of the Norse World
From Furnace to Flame: A Journey In Glass
Children’s Funeral Beads
Soon after starting the Ribe Bead Project, I committed to participate in the 2021 Stella Nova Competition for the Kingdom of Meridies. This would be my first kingdom level competition. As part of the proceedings for the competition, a laurel of the Kingdom helps the competing artists with navigating competing at that level. One of the things my advising laurel did was offer up additional readings. One the articles she found for me was an article called “Strung Along: Re-evaluating Gendered Views of Viking-Age Beads”. It described beads found across the Norse world and provided the beads with historical and cultural context. One of the described beads was a sword bead. It just so happened that I had been working on a side project for a customer and was working out how to make these beads. I can’t come across a bead in literature and not try and make it, so off I was and I started with the sword bead. The article mentioned it in name only so I went off finding examples. Many of the beads are based off of work done by lampworker Mike Pool, others were based off of museum exemplars. To get the cone shape that some of the sword beads have, I made a custom marver from soap stone. I think that some of these beads may have been used as a toggle. They get the name sword bead because when they are found, they are associated with swords. They may have been a toggle for a peace tie or pouch, but that is just my take on them. They are one type of bead often associated with graves believed to be those of men.
I also set about making the other beads from the article. The images from the article that I was working with are below as well as an image from a museum sent to me by another lampworker to clarify what the children’s funeral beads looked like.
Scandinavian bead-types of various materials are relatively common artifacts across the Viking world. They have sometimes been overlooked or received limited attention and consigned as ‘jewelry’, based on modern concepts of female dress and adornment. This paper outlines and discusses the evidence for bead use in the burial of male-gendered individuals during the Viking Age. I then consider beads from settlement contexts, reconsidering the common assumptions made on the gender affiliations of these artifacts, and propose a broader view of their function and meaning in Viking-Age society.
Below are the images I was working with. The first three were from the article “Strung Along: Re-evaluating Gendered Views of Viking-Age Beads”.
I tried my best to color match and size match the pictured beads. When it came to the black and white beads, I just made a choice to go with red and blue. As far as the children’s beads, I started by using translucent red, but later learned that translucent red was not a thing when it came to the Norse beads that have been found so far.
