I wanted to look at what beads I had, and how they related to different finds – from there I could start sorting out my beads a bit better and perhaps make more historically-informed festoons and necklaces while still using my existing beads.
I’ve sorted them by location, though I’ll be breaking each into a separate post.
Norway
White glass Viking Age beads from near the municipality of Øvre Eiker, in the county of Buskerud, Norway. Order no. Cf24332_A Museum number C750,751m.fl.
I bought a few multi-packs of glass beads from the dollar store, and in the packages were a number of opaque white glass beads. While some of them were spherical, there were a number that had a shape more similar to the beads in this example to the left.
This photo was found on Pinterest, but unfortunately the link to the Norwegian museum is down. It is listed as dated to the Viking Age, and was found near the municipality of Øvre Eiker, in the county of Buskerud, Norway. The Order number is Cf24332_A, Museum number C750,751m.fl. In case I want to do additional research on this piece.
The largest bead looks to be about 0.9 cm wide, and most of the beads are shaped like a modern pony bead (a cylinder), though they’re all slightly different. At least one looks like more of a drum-shaped bead (sort of a squashed sphere) Since I can’t entirely control the size of the beads I have, I chose for shape first, and then size.
In my spreadsheet, I noted these beads as Norway C750.
Beads from the Historisches Museum Oslo
Blogger Glaumbaer went to a Norwegian museum (Historisches Museum Oslo) shared photos on their blog of some beads. This one in the photo to the right is “Nummer 18-34“. The blogger didn’t write much about the beads themselves; they did link to a photo of the display explanation – but unfortunately
it’s very small, a bit blurry, and… in Norwegian.
In my spreadsheet I’ll refer to this display as Norway 1834.
Beads from Historisches Museum Oslo
The next set is also from the Historisches Museum Oslo, and again there is no usable description available. It’s called Nummer 36-55 on the blog.
In my spreadsheet I have referred to this group as Norway 3655.
However….
Since most of my bling is NOT based on Norway finds, I am not planning to refer to Norwegian Viking Age beads a lot for my own costume jewelry.
Stay tuned
As I mentioned in my Brooches post, this is just one of a VERY long series of posts to help me date and place my Viking Age jewelry, all with the hope of a more historically plausible costume. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing many more items and the information I was able to find about them. Stay tuned!
If you’re finding this post well after the original publication date, you can follow the “Dating & Placing” tag to see more posts from this category.
Dawn's Dress Diary 