Art of primary and early history: Germanic art; Oseberg style

The Oseberg style is the first of the Wikingzeit art styles , it is widespread in all of Scandinavia from around the end of the 8th century.

The name goes back to a significant location: in Oseberg on the Norwegian Oslo fjord, a ship's grave was discovered on a country estate in 1904, from which Swedish and Norwegian archaeologists in community work exposed the "Oseberg ship".

They needed two years in order to raise the richly stocked grave find from the Viking era (because they did not really raise it, but rather freely brushed it); The relatively well -preserved long ship can be visited in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo .

The Oseberg style was used to decorate everyday objects and jewelry made of wood and metal , its determining motif is the gripping animal .

That doesn't exist, but his appearance has been well prepared since the second half of the 5th century. At that time, the image art of the post-Christian Germans, frozen in the cultic religious, was given strong inspiration through the influence of outside: in western Scandinavia the spirit of late antique Roman art was still on the move, and the Celts also slowly developed their own art (which had already had Asian steppe peoples such as Skythen and Sarmaten and contributed to every trade contact).

From all this, a few Irish and Anglo -Saxon influences and their own traditions, the Germanic tribes have now developed their animal styles . A wild and colorful collection of stylized animal figures, "further developed anatomically" until the proportions had completely adjusted to the interlocking ornamentation.

Animal style III (or Vendel e period , after a large field of boat tombs that was found in Uppland in Sweden), completed at the end of the 7th century. After that, the original animal shapes dissolved, especially in exuberant tendril and winding thresholds, when the miraculous gripping animal entered the stage and initiated the development of the Oseberg style.

This gripping animal was an animal -like being of such an ability to adapt that the art scientist, according to his own statement, does not want to succeed. No failure, but probably exactly the meaning of the thing or a logical consequence if on the other hand you assume that the shapes of the gripping animal have been fluently adapted to the respective requirements.

The “animal for all cases”, which is as mystical and practical, probably has its role model in the depictions of the deletion of Carolingian and Anglo -Saxon art , which at that time was spread from the Franconian Empire in Northern Europe. At least most of the researchers who work in this direction take this, other authors see the origins of gripping in the then usual (English) book paintings, which repeatedly map Eichhorn -like animals.

The proud, mystical century of the first book illustrations á la cute, fast, cheap (today mostly sexy, fast, cheap) would be discredited because the book paintings at that time of rabbits and other coseful small animals were only swarming-that is probably also a bit brief.

But even if the minority opinion would be correct: you can very well imagine how the descendants of the proud-human gripping animal designers react to the fact that their heraldic animal is said to have had a kind of "naked breast replacement".

At that time, myths and other myths were finally stylized from every mystical picture, the heraldic animals took on almost state -supporting tasks: two griffens still carry the sign the coat of arms of "Sissi" The dukes of Pomerania form the gripping dynasty; Grand Duke Friedrich Franz III donated Grand Duke in 1884. the Mecklenburg Große Order, an award in five degrees ... no chance; And of course there are many other myths around the fabulous “griffin” , which would then look a bit ridiculous.

is also called Broa style with gripping animal motifs from a men's grave near Broa/Gotland after a bronze-gold-

After that, the Vikings developed a few more styles, the Jelling style and the mammelstil , the Ringerike style and the Urnes style , until around 1,100 AD.