The Gundestrup Cauldron: Gods in Silver from a Danish Bog

On 28 May 1891 peat-cutters in a small bog called Rævemose, near Gundestrup in the north of Jutland, struck metal. Under the peat lay a great silver bowl, and stacked inside it a set of silver plates crowded with gods, beasts and warriors. Someone had taken the cauldron apart before it was laid in the bog, placing the rim and the decorated plates in the bottom of the bowl. It is the largest known piece of European Iron Age silverwork.

The object

• About 69 cm across and 42 cm high, weighing almost 9 kg, of silver, gilded in places. It is made of 13 plates: five inner plates, seven outer plates (an eighth is missing), and a round base medallion, fitted to a plain curved bowl.
• It was made by several silversmiths, working by repoussé (hammering from behind). The busts' eyes once held glass.
• Most specialists date it between about 150 BCE and the early first century CE, the pre-Roman Iron Age.

The images

Inside are the famous scenes. An antlered figure sits cross-legged holding a torc and a ram-horned serpent, among stags and other animals. A bearded god holds a wheel. A goddess appears between wheels, with elephants and griffins. Three bulls face men with swords. On the most discussed plate, foot-soldiers with long carnyx war-horns march in one direction while horsemen ride above them in the other, and a giant figure holds a man head-down over a vat.

Outside, great busts of gods and goddesses grasp smaller human figures and animals. At the bottom of the bowl, a bull collapses beneath a figure with a sword.

Celtic, Thracian, or both?

Almost everything about the cauldron's origin is argued.

• Celtic elements: the torcs, the carnyx horns, the helmets and the shield types match finds from the Celtic world. The antlered figure closely resembles the god named Cernunnos on a Gaulish monument from Paris, the Pillar of the Boatmen. Scholars such as Garrett Olmsted read the scenes as Gaulish myth.
• Thracian workmanship: the silversmithing techniques, the style of the animals, and the elephants and griffins point to the lower Danube, in modern Bulgaria and Romania, where Thracian silverwork flourished. Timothy Taylor and others argued that Thracian smiths made it, perhaps for Celtic patrons.
• How it reached Denmark is unknown: as booty, a gift, a trade good, or carried by migrating peoples such as the Cimbri, who came from Jutland and raided southwards in the late second century BCE.

Most scholars now see it as the product of contact, a Thracian-style object bearing Celtic imagery, and do not think it has to be one or the other.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The antlered god. The seated figure with antlers is the best-known image of what is called Cernunnos. The name comes from one damaged inscription, and whether the cauldron's figure bore it is not known. The torc and serpent recur with antlered figures in Gaulish art.

The vat. The scene of a man held over a vat has been read as human sacrifice by drowning, which a later Roman scholium on Lucan links to the god Teutates. It has also been read as a cauldron of rebirth, like the one in the Welsh Mabinogion that brings dead warriors back to life. Both are modern readings of an image without text.

Deposition in water. Deliberately dismantling the cauldron and placing it in a wet place matches a long northern European tradition of offering valuable objects to the powers of lakes and bogs. The same tradition lies behind the bog bodies of the region.

Connections

Celtic & Germanic (ch14), Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51), and Journeys to the Underworld (ch47). Compare the Holy Grail (V14) for the cauldron-to-grail tradition in medieval romance.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/gundestrup-cauldron.html