Bronze tools were a great advance on stone tools but bronze was even more important for making status symbols, such as weapons, jewellery, razors, horned helmets, lurs (horns) and fittings for wheeled vehicles, and cult objects such as the magnificent ‘Sun Chariot’ from Trundholm in Denmark, a model of a four-wheeled horse-drawn wagon carrying a brilliantly gilded sun disc. The horned helmets, misinterpreted by antiquarians in the nineteenth century, helped give rise to the romantic, but mistaken, belief that Vikings wore horned helmets. Sadly, Vikings never wore horned helmets. The Bronze Age elite probably also achieved close control over the use and distribution of amber. Amber beads and other ornaments are common offerings in Stone Age graves in Scandinavia, but they are virtually absent from those of the Bronze Age. Amber is so light that it floats in salt water – another property that made it remarkable to the ancients (it also burns) – and is washed up on beaches around the North Sea and the Baltic for anyone to pick up. However, it appears that the elite claimed ownership of all amber washed up in their territories and could prevent others using it so they could prioritise its use for export.
It is during the Bronze Age (c. 1800 BC – c. 500 BC), that the importance of seafaring in Scandinavia first becomes obvious. No Bronze Age ships have yet been found in Scandinavia but representations of them are everywhere, carved on rocks and etched into bronze vessels and tools such as razors, and most prominently as stone ship-settings. The latter are groups of large stones arranged to form the outline shape of a ship that were used to mark graves. Sometimes taller stones are placed at the ends of the settings to give the impression of raised prows and, more rarely, there are raised stones in the position where, in a real ship, a mast would have been. Most ship-settings range in length from around 6 feet (1.8 m) to 50 feet (15.25 m) but the longest, the now largely destroyed setting at Jelling in Jutland, is about 1,100 feet (335 m) long. Over 2,000 settings survive, with a major concentration on the Swedish island of Gotland, but these are probably only a fraction of those originally built. Many of the survivors are now incomplete as a result of farmers removing stones to build walls or clear land for the plough, and it is likely that many more have been completely destroyed in this way. The first ship-settings were built in the second half of the Bronze Age and they continued to be built almost until the end of the Viking Age, nearly 2,000 years later. It is impossible to be certain what beliefs were associated with these symbolic ships or, for that matter, that those beliefs remained the same throughout the long period in which the settings were built, but they were probably intended in some way to transport the soul of the deceased to the afterlife. The use of real ships in burials, which began in the centuries immediately before the Viking Age, was probably a development of these beliefs.
Even more numerous than ship settings are petroglyphs showing large canoe-like boats crewed by warriors armed with spears and axes, as well as wheeled vehicles, animals and sun discs. The boats are always shown in silhouette and have distinctive double beaked prows at each end. No other details of the boats’ construction are shown on the petroglyphs, however. The boat petroglyphs are usually carefully sited in natural channels on the rocks, along which rainwater and melted snow would flow to create a lifelike scene. It is unlikely that the petroglyphs were carved simply because Bronze Age people liked to see pictures of boats. They probably depict mythological scenes or had some ritual purpose. The ships are often associated with petroglyphs of sun discs which, with artefacts like the Trundholm Sun Chariot, should probably be interpreted as evidence of a solar cult. Solar cults were widespread in later Bronze Age Europe and are indicative of an increasing importance of sky gods, which were, of course, the dominant gods of the Norse pantheon in Viking times. Another religious change that affected much of Europe in this period was the adoption of cremation as the normal way to dispose of the dead. This was accompanied by a decline in the practice of placing grave goods in burials. Clearly these developments must reflect a major change in attitudes to afterlife. The valuable metalwork that would have gone into graves was now buried as votive hoards in bogs. As places where the separate realms of earth, water and air mingled, bogs were seen as particularly numinous places. However, votive hoards were not merely a way of appeasing the gods; they helped maintain the status of the elite by creating an artificial shortage of metals.
Because of environmental changes most Bronze Age petroglyphs cannot now be appreciated in their original context. A good example is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tanumshede in Bohuslän on Sweden’s west coast, where there are around 600 petroglyphs spread over a 126 acre (51 hectare) site. When originally carved the Tanumshede petroglyphs were on the shore of a shallow fjord, but they are now well inland and surrounded by pine forest. During the Ice Age, the enormous weight of the Scandinavian ice sheet depressed the land surface by over 2,000 feet (610 m). When the ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and this vast depression flooded, forming the Baltic Sea. Relieved of its burden, the land, more slowly, began to rebound and will continue to do so for thousands of years to come. This process, which is known to geologists as isostatic uplift, means that Scandinavia’s coastline has been constantly changing throughout human history. Fishing and trading communities that depended on access to the sea have often been forced to relocate themselves as the uplift has left them high and dry. The Baltic Sea is steadily shrinking and in about 2,000 years time its northern arm, the Gulf of Bothnia, will be mostly dry land.
During the Iron Age (500 BC – AD 800), Scandinavian society gradually acquired the characteristics that directly caused the Viking expansion. The Scandinavian Iron Age is conventionally divided into three periods, the early or pre-Roman Iron Age (500 BC – AD 1), the Roman Iron Age (AD 1 – 400), and the Germanic Iron Age (400 – 800). The introduction of iron had an immediate and dramatic impact in Scandinavia. Scandinavians had been totally reliant on imported bronze to make tools and other artefacts but bog iron, a low grade, easily worked, iron ore that accumulates in bogs and marshes, is abundant throughout Scandinavia. This new-found self-sufficiency caused the decline of the long-distance trade systems that had sustained the Bronze Age elites. With their control over the distribution of metals broken, their status and power collapsed, and it is five centuries before there is evidence for the re-emergence of a social elite.