Scandinavia is home to prolific and varied rock art images among which the ship motif is prominent. The authors suggest that concepts such as iconicity, indexical relationships, scripts, and mini-narratives could be fruitfully employed in research on Scandinavian rock art and beyond. Many spear images may be regarded as mini-narratives and mnemonic devices intended to represent schematized action sequences. how the spears direct attention to possible targets, arguably corresponding to action scripts well-known to Bronze Age communities. They reveal different kinds of indexical relationships, i.e. Images of spear use in the provinces of Bohuslän and Östergötland in Sweden, given their diversity and indexical qualities, are well-suited to such a study. Here, the authors adopt a more focused narratological approach that takes the concept of (visual) narrativity into consideration and draws on studies by literary analysts, cognitive psychologists, and semioticians.
Their interpretations have frequently been based on inspections of rock art panels combined with knowledge from ethnographic and historical sources. Researchers have long discussed whether Scandinavian rock art reflects narratives. In doing so, it also emphasizes the endurance of Prehistoric Scandinavian symbolic structures overall. Could this represent a case of prehistoric continuity? By presenting and comparing the Iron and Bronze Age evidence, this paper suggests a possible continuity in representations of warrior rituals on figurative material, underlining the importance of advertising a warrior identity and mentality in Prehistoric Scandinavian communities.
Several examples of Bronze Age rock art display scenes of weapon-bearing figures, performing ritualistic motions that some have interpreted as dancing. Yet certain symbols attributed to this Indo-European system seem to have striking parallels in later Norse religious iconography-symbols such as weapon dancer imagery. Different forms of material culture-including rock art and metalwork-and allusions to texts such as the Vedic Rig Veda, have led many to suggest the existence of a shared belief system with an Indo-European solar focus. The past fifteen years have witnessed increasing effort to study and understand the belief system of Bronze Age Scandinavia.
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