Nordic Bronze Age warrior

Warrior from the early NORDIC BRONZE AGE. Updated version with a new shield, of an earlier type, based on a wooden reconstruction owned by Jonas Radtke with bronze nails and hypothetical decoration painted by Dimicator. I got rid of the shield used in the previous version of this illustration because it was of a very Late Bronze Age type (type Herzsprung) that didn’t combine well with the Early Nordic Bronze Age sword and axe, but I used because I couldn’t find much information about Nordic Bronze Age shields besides the very late bronze votive ones.

The clothes are based on two Danish burials, the Trindhøj man (1347 BC) and the Muldbjerg man (1376 BC), which consist of a woollen wrap-around garment, a woollen belt and woollen foot wraps. There is no evidence of dyes in the Nordic Bronze Age, so the clothes would be of the natural colours of the sheep. This doesn’t mean that dyed clothes couldn’t have existed, but they may have been so rare that none has survived. This warrior wears his hair in a mullet, based on the burial of the man from Lille Dragshøj, of which only the scalp with the mullet has survived. The shoes are based on a pair found in Ørboekgård (Jutland) dating to 920-807 BC (very late Bronze Age). The sword is based on a find from Stensgård (Denmark) and belongs to an eastern European type that spread to Scandinavia at the beginning of the Nordic Bronze Age. The references for the sword and axe are modern replicas by Ørjan Engedal (Bronze Age Warriors Series).

THE NORDIC BRONCE AGE lasted from 2000 BC to 500 BC. For comparison, it started when the last mammoths went extinct in Siberia and ended around the time of the Persian invasion of Greece. During the Bronze Age, Scandinavians exported Baltic amber to the rest of Europe, as far as Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, pharaonic Egypt, and Mesopotamia. In return, Scandinavians imported blue glass beads from the eastern Mediterranean. The Nordic Bronze Age was followed by the Pre-Roman Iron Age, known in archaeology as the Jastorf culture, period at the end of which the Roman author Tacitus referred to the tribes of northern Europe as “Germani” and their land as “Germania”.