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Description: | Copper alloy gilded early medieval mount. The mount has a detailed style 1 zoomorphic design on the front dating to the latter half of the 6th century. The hind leg and eye of a quadruped can be seen. The reverse is plain and undecorated with no sign of gilding and is quite worn and corroded. It appears that there are no original surviving edges on the piece and these have all broken away. The mount is reminiscent of the ??Van Dyke?? mounts found on Anglo-Saxon drinking horns such as those found at Sutton Hoo or Taplow. These are elongated triangular mounts found around the rim of the horn (see British Museum Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities, 1923, page 64, Fig.71).
A second possibility for the mount is that it forms part of a strap-end or girdle-tab. A similar parallel can be seen in the British Museum Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities, 1923, page 57, Fig.62 on which two style 1 Teutonic quadrapeds are represented (see attached images).
A third possible function suggested by Dr Tania Dickinson (University of York) is that the mount is one half of the upper or lower face of a sword hilt-guard. These consisted of two plates sandwiching an organic core round the sword tang; either side of the tang these plates would have had the elongated trapezoidal shape and a rivet/rivet-hole at the rounded point edge, both of which are represented by the Corpusty piece. See W. Menghin, Die Schwert im fruehen Mittelalter (1983), 92-4 and 331-2: Typ Faversham-Endrebacke.
In particular, the sword hilt from Vrena, Sweden (Mengin's no. 39 on p. 332) depicts a Style I figure very similar to this one. The attached scan from E. Behmer, Das Zweischneidige Schwert der Germanischen V??lkerwanderungszeit (1939), Taf XXX1,1 - shows the the sword hilt-guard from Vrena, Sweden. This piece piece might indicate a copy of a Scandinavian type. | Subjects: | Anglo-Saxon | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Marshall, Anna - Portable Antiquities Scheme | Identifier: | http://www.findsdatabase.org.uk/hms/pas_... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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