Hi I'm Jennifer Wexler a curator on the Stonehenge exhibition. Welcome to my corner!
So today I want to talk to you about the sun and these amazing objects in front of me.
These are replicas of Bronze Age razors from Scandinavia. Note; these are not real. The
real ones are teeny tiny; about this big. So we've blown them up and made them out of golden acrylic
so you can see these beautiful details of the designs on the razors which show an intricate
mythology connected to the cycle of the sun and how it moves across the sky over the course
of the day. As you can see on these razors, we have a lot of depictions of ships. Why is that?
So if we think about the geography of Scandinavia, where these razors were created, there's large
bodies of water to the East and the West. So unsurprisingly the Bronze Age Scandinavians
probably associated the rising setting of the sun with the ocean and unsurprisingly boats.
You can see here these razors are actually shaped like boats and they
all depict boats and so there's this idea that the sun moved through its cycle it was transported on
a boat. But there's also some strange creatures connected to these boats. So I just want to
introduce you to the characters that are on these razors. We're going to start just before
the sunrise which is represented by this razor here. And what we've got this fish and a boat.
And then the fish again with a bird and another boat.
And then the boat kind of continues on which you can see here there's two suns and the nice
sort of midday boat and you start to see this strange creature which is
the swirly sort of wiggly figure which becomes a horse with the sun which you can see appear over
here next to another boat. And as the sun horse moves across we have the boat again
and then if you continue on we've got another boat and a serpent.
So what does this all mean? It seems like a strange grouping of animals and boats and suns.
What are we talking about here? It's all a bit odd but let's go into detail. So actually what these
razors are showing are the movement of the sun over the course of the day and we're starting here
just before dawn and actually we're under the water which is why we have a fish here.
So first we have this boat which is the night boat and as the sun moves under the sea during
the night it can only be fetched up by this character which is a fish. Obviously fish are
under the sea so that makes sense. So the fish captures the sun and moves it onto the morning
boat. The morning boat then slowly moves towards the shore and it encounters, sometimes not always,
this bird which you can see together next to the fish. The bird might take the sun and then move
it up to our next character which is the sun horse but sometimes the bird isn't there because there
seems to be variations in this myth. So we see here this amazing sort of fully blown beautiful
boat with this full sail and you see these two beautiful suns sitting on there and it's waiting
for a really important character which is this little squiggly guy which becomes the sun horse.
Sometimes it gets the sun directly from the boat, you can see that here. Sometimes the sun
horse actually gets the sun directly from this bird which flies up to it up in the midday sky.
And this sun horse he is taking the sun through the sky
over the course of the afternoon into the evening and it's coming to another boat
and this boat is sitting on the shore. And as that boat moves off
towards the horizon and the end of the day we get this this amazing creature which is the serpent.
The serpent you can see actually starts hiding the sun and what it's doing it's pulling the sun
under the water. So you know it's literally pulling it down into the depths of the sea
as the sun sets and it goes back under the water and travels on the night boat until
it meets its important fish that brings it back up to light again the cycle restarts.
And so we see the full day of explanation of how the sun actually moves
and it only can move because it's connected to these amazing creatures.
So how do we know these objects are connected to the sun cycle mythology?
At this time we have no writing, we have no written record. So how do we know?
Hundreds of these razors have been found across Scandinavia and northern Europe
and an archaeologist named Flemming Kaul at the National Museums Denmark has done a huge amount
of research around the sun cycle. He spent hundreds of hours, as curators often do,
looking at all these razors; hundreds of them, drawing them and actually studying
the motifs very, very closely. And you can see what we've just pointed out to you
is that all the motifs actually overlap. So you start to get a story and a sequence
of the sun movement and the sun kind of batting between these different animals and the boats
and actually they've got directionality built into them. They all face right so the boats face
right and the animals generally face right so we have a direction of movement across the razors as
they move across the sun cycle and that reflects the way the sun moves over the course of the day
if you're in the northern hemisphere and you actually observe it in the sky the sun
looks like it's moving from the left across the sky. So it's reflective of people's observation
of the world which is really fascinating. I'm going to talk about death now. Is that okay?
So we have hundreds of these razors but where are they found there's a
really interesting story here because all these razors have been found with cremation burials
but interestingly they're in the cremation in the in the urn with the cremated remains but
they're not burned so they're put placed into the remains afterwards but they're placed in
already knackered, they're used objects. they're not brand new, pristine objects. They might have
been used also as part of the burial rituals of kind of you know cleaning the body before you know
you sort of undertake your cremation, but they're certainly personal objects. And something that's
really fascinating with them is that they seem to be associated with the individuals, primarily men,
and we think that maybe they're even given to men adolescence at puberty as part of maybe
initiation rite that kind of brings you into this like secret knowledge around sort of the solar
power and these religious ideas connected to the sun cycle. But what's really fascinating
is that each individual has one razor so they're associated with a part of the story a part of the
sun cycle maybe a particular animal like this amazing sun horse which obviously might be the
most powerful animal we don't know or maybe the fish or the sea serpent so they have this
personal connection to these kind of deities of the sun cycle and possibly you know this is
connected to the time of birth you know where they burn in the afternoon in the morning maybe
that's how you get connected to the fish or the or the sun horse. Maybe it's even a name that you
take on as part of your identity? The really key point here is that all of these objects,
all these razors, have been found individually in separate archaeological sites. So really to
piece together the story it was a massive jigsaw puzzle and that's why it took so much effort
by Flemming Kaul to kind of get this all in together and into a story that we can understand
today and then connect it out to all these other amazing objects we have during this time.
So it's a real sort of detective story that we're seeing here coming together to tell us
this wonderful mythology that we never thought existed you know almost 4 000 years ago. Thanks
so much for joining me in this exploration of the strange mythological world of the sun in Europe.
Hopefully you'll learn a lot more from this and come see the exhibition if you want to hear more.