The Great Beast

The Great Beast is what art historians call a strange animal that appears several times in surviving art from the Viking Age. The Beast looks more like a stag than any other real animal, but it only sometimes has antlers and sometimes it clearly has claws or what look like goat horns. Here is a famous example, from an 11th-century runestone found at St. Pauls Churchyard in London.

Runestone from Jelling in Denmark. The stones at Jelling were set up by Danish Kings, and some scholars think the Great Beast was a symbol of royal power. 

"Weathervane" from Söderala or Heggen, c. 1000. These three pretty much exhaust all the classic Great Beasts, and there seems to be some dispute as to whether any other images qualify as Great Beasts or not.

I think this Swedish silver brooch is pretty convincing, but the site I found it on didn't mention the Great Beast motif and I haven't found it in any lists of Great Beasts.

This handsome fellow, from the Urnes stave church (c. 1130) is another strong candidate.

This thing on the Oseberg Ship is traditionally called a Gripping Beast, and art historians make a hard and fast distinction between Greet Beasts and Gripping Beasts, but couldn't maybe Great Beast grip things?

As to where the image comes from, that is another old argument. The classic examples all come from between 950 and 1050. But this bracteate is usually dated to around 500 AD and it has a pretty good Beast. Mingling animal species just seems to be an ancient human habit, so maybe stags with goat horns and claws just seemed like a great thing to carve.

This mad academic thinks the motif is shamanistic, representing the horse that Odin rode on his vision quests. As you can see in the image above, he finds great beasts all over, sometimes eating gripping beasts. 

Here's a weird thought; does the Great Beast look a little like the mušḫuššu, the "dragon" sacred to Marduk that decorated the Ishtar Gate in Babylon? I suppose that is just the habit of imaginary crossbreeding that I mentioned, but it is certainly not impossible for images to travel many thousands of miles; consider the Three Hares.

I just love these beasts, great, gripping, or little like this one, weaving through the wood and metal tapestry of Norse art, calling our minds away from the mundane to the strange, the magical, the worlds where carved stones ask us to remember dead heroes and gods ride monsters in search of hidden wisdom.