A Re-creation of the Viking Necklace from the Hon Horde |
This Viking-Age necklace of beads and gold pieces was found in a grave at the town of Hon, Norway (near Oslo,) in 1834. (Image from The Viking, Bertil Almgren et al, Tre Tryckare, Cagner & Co., Gothenburg, Sweden, 1972, p. 213.) With the necklace was a horde of gold weighing more than 5.5 pounds. Glass beads may be fairly cheap today, but in Viking times they were treasured. The horde contained gold from Arabic, Byzantine and Frankish sources. Most of it was Frankish. I have seen several pictures of this necklace, and it seems to be strung differently in each picture. Sometimes the gold beads sitting unstrung here are included in the necklace, and sometimes the beads and pendants are in a slightly different order. However, the necklace is always strung so that it will look good when worn in the traditional Viking way: across the chest, attached at the shoulders by two of the large, ornate brooches that wealthy Viking women prized. That is how our friend Annora wears the replica that we made for her.
Here is our re-creation of the Hon necklace. We just did the glass beads, obviously, since the goldwork was a bit more pricey than we could afford. The Hon necklace includes glass beads of many colors and decorative styles, most of which are roughly the same size as modern "pony" beads (5 to 8 mm). When we made the beads for the replica, we had to use various methods to match those used by the beadmakers of antiquity.
The plain beads come in both translucent and opaque glass of varied colors. There are also "melon" beads, which get their distinctive, pole-to-pole ridges by working the molten glass with tools.
There are beads decorated with "stringer:" thin rods of glass applied to the hot surface of the base bead and melted in to form stripes and squiggles of contrasting color.
There are also a few "eye" beads, which were believed to have protective properties: guarding against the "evil eye." These are formed by, in this case, adding a drop of white to a base bead of black, melting the white in, then adding a drop of black over the white, and so on, ending with a nice "pupil" of black, (as the originals had: the better to "watch" for evil).
The History of Beads: from 30,000 B.C. to the Present, Lois Sherr Dubin, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1987.
Making Glass Beads, Cindy Jenkins, Lark Books, Asheville, NC, U.S.A., 1997.
The Viking, Bertil Almgren et al, Tre Tryckare, Cagner & Co., Gothenburg, Sweden, 1972.