Aspects of Narrativity in Scandinavian Bronze

Rock art constitutes the most expressive, widespread and accumulated corpus of images with a prehistoric date, the oldest ones dating back to at least 40.000 BCE. In Europe, Scandinavia holds the largest concentration of rock art (i.e. petroglyphs), created c. 9000 – 1st century BCE, numerous of them showing figurative representations. Since the beginning of rock art research in the 18t century, these images have given rise to vivid interpretations, related to stories and myths found in Saami ethnography, Old Norse religion, and Indo-European mythology. However, we still do not know in detail their purpose and meaning, not least their potential narrative content. Are they indeed telling stories, and if so, to which extent? A basic problem concerning these approaches above is the lack of a deeper theoretical discussion concerning what constitutes narrativity in non-verbal, visual media, like petroglyphs in our case. How could we at all know whether they depict events? Despite an increasing interest in narratology within the humanities during the last 50 years, as a research area it is still mostly predominant among literary analysts, linguists, and semioticians. In this paper, I will discuss possible narratological approaches extended to visual media such as petroglyphs. We might reasonably distinguish between three levels of pictorial narrativity: representations of (i) single events, understood as the transition from one state of affairs to another, usually involving (groups of) agents; (ii) stories, i.e. particular sequences of related events that are situated in the past and retold for e.g. ideological purposes; and (iii) by implication, master-narratives being deeply embedded in a culture, which provide cosmological explanations and a pattern for cultural life and social structure. Some concrete examples of petroglyphs will be presented and analysed from a narratological and iconographical perspective. 1. ROCK CARVINGS AND ICONOLOGY Rock carvings, rock art, or petroglyphs are images created by removing parts of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or scratching, normally using lithic flakes or hammerstones as tools. Such petroglyphs, which should be distinguished from petrographs, i.e. images such as cave paintings drawn or painted on rock surfaces, can be found all over the world (except for Antarctica), some of the earliest examples in Australia, as much as 27 ka old. In Europe, the oldest ones were produced since the Upper Paleolithic (40 -10 ka), most of them found in Portugal in the Côa Valley (22 – 10 ka), in Italy in Valcamonica (12 ka) – and not least in Northern Europe, most of them from the Bronze and the earliest Iron Age (1,700 – 200 BCE). Indeed, the largest concentration of European petroglyphs can be found in Scandinavia, with about 30,000 registered sites, c. 20% of them with figurative images and the rest consisting of non-figurative configurations such as cup marks and cupules. As to the motifs of the figurative images, we may discern representations of human figures (e.g. warriors, hunters, dancers), footsteps, prey and domestic animals (e.g. wild boars, bulls, deer), wagons, instruments (e.g. lures), weapons and tools (e.g. bows, swords, axes, ploughs), suncrosses/ -symbols – and a large amount of ships (though, interestingly, no houses). Moreover, the constellations and renderings of these figures are often very vivid and dynamic, suggesting various forms of social (inter-) action, such as fishing or hunting activities, dancing, combat scenes, and also scenes of sexual intercourse between anthropomorphic beings (cf. figure 1). Do rock carvings tell stories? : aspects of narrativity in Scandinavian bronze age petroglyphs Ranta, Michael (Lund University, Sweden) I would like to thank Peter Skoglund, Anna Cabak Rédei, and Tomas Persson for valuable comments and discussions on earlier drafts of this paper. Goldhahn & Ling (2013), p. 270. Cf. Skoglund, Ling, & Bertilsson (2015); Helskog (2012); Ling (2012); Goldhahn & Ling (2013).