Old Work

This is a bit about a project my wife and I did back when we were active in the SCA.  This is at least 17 years old, though I really don't recall exactly when we made it.  Back then, there was very little available online.  Our information all came from books.  One of the most famous strings of beads found in a Viking context was from the Hon Hoard.  Most Viking hoards were piles of several pounds of silver jewelry and coins.  With a few other bits of valuable stuff mixed in, perhaps.  The Hon hoard was almost exclusively gold.  Except for this necklace:

We have seen this necklace assembled several different ways in several different books.  Sometimes with all the gold bits (taken from book mounts and at least one coin) and sometimes without.

Our own recreation was made without the gold.  We didn't have the skills or equipment at the time to do the metal work.

 The Hon necklace has several of these little dangles holding from one to several beads on wire loops.  I've seen that replicated elsewhere, but it doesn't appear to be common with Viking bead strings.  Since information was scanty back then, the impression was that this was part of every Viking necklace.

Notice how simple, plain white seed beads are quite a bit more showy when displayed that way?  About the most complex beads in this necklace are the zigzags shown here.  Told you we'd been at it for a while!

Many of the beads in the Hon necklace (and of course our recreation) are really just seed beads.  A glass bead is inherently lovely, even as a small seed.  We forget that sometimes when we are trying to make fancy things.  While most of the individual beads online from Viking finds are the fancy ones, I am pretty sure the vast majority of the beads made and worn a thousand years ago were simple seeds.

And here's the finished string of beads.  We made this as a gift for a friend in the SCA who actually understood the work and effort represented here.  She wore it for years with her SCA garb, hung between two brooches.  Nowadays, that's understood to be the way Viking women wore their beads, but it was still sort of a new thing to think of necklaces that way 20 years ago.  I sometimes wonder if we will have a completely different understanding of Viking clothing in another 20 years.  Part of the fun the SCA is to experiment with the clothing and see how practical a particular reconstruction actually is.

Our friend made a very amusing comment when we gave this necklace to her.  "Now I just need to bury it in the ground for a thousand years and it will look perfect!"

Other people will use etching creams to artificially age their beads and make them look more like the examples in the museums.  

But there is a fundamental flaw in this thinking.  When the Hon necklace was new, it was as shiny and sparkling as our version.  If a person wants to dress as an authentic Viking woman, she would be better off with a string of sparkling simple seed beads than with a string of fancy beads that are etched to look faux-old.