page_title: Franks Casket
section_title: The Penance of Rhiannon?
hierarchical_section_title: Franks Casket / Description and interpretations / Right panel / The Penance of Rhiannon?
context_page_description: The Franks Casket is a small Anglo-Saxon whale's bone chest from the early 8th century, now in the British Museum. The casket is densely decorated with knife-cut narrative scenes in flat two-dimensional low-relief and with inscriptions mostly in Anglo-Saxon runes. Generally reckoned to be of Northumbrian origin, it is of unique importance for the insight it gives into early Anglo-Saxon art and culture. Both identifying the images and interpreting the runic inscriptions has generated a considerable amount of scholarship.
  The imagery is very diverse in its subject matter and derivations, and includes a single Christian image, the Adoration of the Magi, along with images derived from Roman history and Roman mythology, as well as a depiction of at least one legend indigenous to the Germanic peoples: that of Weyland the Smith. It has also been suggested that there may be an episode from the Sigurd legend, an otherwise lost episode from the life of Weyland's brother Egil, a Homeric legend involving Achilles, and perhaps even an allusion to the legendary founding of England by Hengist and Horsa.
context_section_description: Ute Schwab (2008), following Heiner Eichner (1991), interprets the left and central scenes on the right panel as relating to the Welsh legend of Rhiannon.  According to the Mabinogion, a medieval collection of ancient Welsh stories, Rhiannon was falsely accused of murdering and eating her infant son Pryderi, who, according to Schwab, is represented by the swaddled infant in the central scene.  As a penance, she was required, as depicted in the scene on the left,
  "to sit beside the horse-block outside the gates of the court for seven years, offering to carry visitors up to the palace on her back, like a beast of burden....  Rhiannon's horse-imagery and her bounty have led scholars to equate her with the Celtic horse-goddess Epona."
caption: Rhiannon riding in Arbeth, from The Mabinogion, translated by Charlotte Guest, 1877
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