 I'd like to thank the organizers for accepting my paper, although I can hardly be considered an early career researcher. I'm enjoying the company of the future faces of Viking studies, we hope. Today, I want to challenge the long-held assumption that Scandinavian Viking art of a period of approximately 750 to 1100 necessarily should be equated with animal-style art. And I want to combat the perpetuation of this belief, which has been, I would say, vitrified into a presumption that the Vikings only produced and were only concerned with animal art. And I brought this subject to a couple of other audiences, but I wanted to bring it to the EAA to get kind of a broader reaction as I get a little bit farther into this project. The animal-style is so ubiquitous in the Viking world that the Swedish artist-starring Leonard Carlson in 1983 proclaimed that, and I quote, in the North, animal art is almost the only and totally dominating art form, end quote. And in 1966, David Wilson had declared that, quote, animal art was the only art which really satisfied the Viking mind, end quote. So where did these assumptions come from? The paradigm has its basis in the typological studies of the later 19th century. The study of Viking-age art and its predecessors has focused on meticulous stylistic analyses of objects decorated in the so-called animal styles, ranging from the migration period of the 5th and 6th centuries through the Vendal or Merovingian period, and then extending on through the Viking age from the late 8th century to as late as the 11th century. Part of what's been so important about animal ornamentation is that it forms the basis for a Montelian typological, chronological underpinning of the study of this aspect of material culture, which is possible because minor details of the animals changed rather rapidly. Thus, the animals can be used as the organizing principle for our understanding of the chronology of styles, especially in the absence of otherwise dataful context. As long as the animal art could be considered the status quo, researchers were quite happy to consider the rather rare figural pieces as overwhelmingly important for the interpretation of mythology. The largest category of anthropomorphic figures from before and during the Viking age are the gold guber, or gold foil figures, which could be pressed as multiples and thus are quantitatively constituted very large number of the human motifs. But the images are very small and quite abstracted. The next largest quantity are represented by human representations on clothing and objects of personal adornment, mostly brooches and pendants. Human images on monumental stones, in particular the Gotlandic picture stones and also some of the Swedish bro stones in particular, are fewer in number, but are very significant in size and narrative potential. And one-of-a-kind plastic three-dimensional sculptures of human are quite rare. Finally, textiles and wooden transport conveyances, that is, the Oseberg ship and cart, though rarely preserved, the wood is rarely preserved, also shows some important human imagery. It's been common, although problematic, to label certain of these humanoid figures as based on Old Norse mythological beings described in 13th century and later Icelandic sources, which were written by Christians. Although there is continuity in the use of the animal styles from the 5th through the 11th centuries, neither the styles nor the myths, that might have been referenced, remain static for this long period of time. So any identifications of specific deities have to be considered very cautiously. And I do concur with Nikkela Hembrek that only a few motifs can be plausibly identified with narratives preserved in medieval motifs. And Thor Fishing, which we see here on the left side, is one such identifiable motif that's recognizable from a narrative and is seen here on a rune stone in Sweden. On the other hand, I don't believe that some of the images, particularly on textiles, as well as some of the scenes on Gottleidig picture stones have been successfully explained. Perhaps we simply cannot explain it because we may lack pertinent extent tests. More common than the few narrative scenes that can be identified are simple human figures with or without distinguishable attributes. For instance, these depictions of women holding drinking horns or holding shields. And they've been identified as vocaries or shield maids for so long that we just call them all vocaries by convention, whether we're completely convinced that they all should be that or not. And in particular, I just want to remind us that, there are shades after what we just said. We have a real woman who was buried at Birka with a shield and well, excuse me, sword and is she a female Viking warrior or not? I know the latest questioning. But we do at least have women with these objects, not just a mythical being. So back to the figures. So although there is continuity in the use of animal styles through this long period, I do agree with Conhoi Umiessen as well that neither the styles nor the myths that might have been referenced remain static through this long period of time. So these identifications have to be considered very cautiously. And furthermore, Helmberg also just declares that the attributes of weapons and drinking horns, for instance, are not suitable for identifying figures from myth and legend. And in addition, just for example, there's still great disagreement about whether this tiny figure, only 18 millimeters, this cast-silver seeded figure from Lyra cannot be identified as Ovan on his throne with his ravens Huergen and Munen flanking him or is it a seeded woman with generic birds, for some other reason. Now these motifs of single figures with or sometimes without attributes are even more difficult to identify than larger compositions. James Graham Campbell suggests that the small three-dimensional figurines may have served as gods of the pouch or pocket gods he extrapolates as referred to in health rather saga and a few other places as well. In that case, a man carried a small image of Thor with him. But we don't know what these portable gods looked like. Now some of the images that we find may represent gods and heroes, but others may depict living, breathing, Viking age men and women. And from three-dimensional figures, three-dimensional sculptural work, we may learn something else about Viking age people than we do from images of abstract animal art. And some of the images such as hair, we see costume and hairstyles here of women that we do recognize from burials. And the billowing pantaloons that we see here on a very small figure from a bokra that it can be compared to images from large tapestries and a galleon picture stone. And it's also can be compared with textile fragments found at Hithibit. So whether some anthropomorphic figures depicted contemporary Viking age people or their conceptions of gods and goddesses in the form of human men and women, we have the opportunity to kind of take a peek at what people look like in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries. In any case, though, the corpus of human figures that we have available to study is growing. And it's being transformed by the flood of metalwork found by detectorists, including the many objects with soomorphic ornamentation, but also some with figurative subjects, particularly three-dimensional cast figures and brooches. And for over a generation now, metals are taken, particularly in Denmark, also in Poland and a few other places, well in England, needless to say, has greatly increased our quantity of Viking age artifacts, although the reporting and the publication of these vies is really inconsistent. In, I could say, greater Denmark, including Skona, as well as Hedvig and Schleswig, urban settlement excavations, making use of metal detectors at, do we want to call them several places or proto-towns or whatever we call them, for instance, Tissue, I've seen here, and also Lyra and Hedvig and Ubokrab and so on, are revealing numerous workshop sites and examples of figurative art. And small three-dimensional sculptural art has been discovered at such locations. Now, in contrast, many of the emblematic examples of the styles of soomorphic art were discovered in burial contexts. For instance, the early styles of Vendel and Throa, and particularly from the top here, the classic Viking animal age, the animal style phases of Oseberg, Bore, Yellinge, and Mannen, all from burials. So the early study of the Vikings focused on burials and sometimes hordes, and the primary ornamentation discovered on objects from these contexts was zoomorphic. So it may be possible some of the animal figures designated familial or other affiliations. Human-figural art may have had different functions from then animal-style art, and the new finds were metal detecting and large-scale settlement excavations are leading to new interpretations. And whether these newly found objects are stray finds or lost objects or the detritus from settlements, they include a greater proportion of human-figural art than the burials and hordes that were the focus of early investigations. And this is really becoming the focus of my current investigations, but I don't have the numbers to show you everything yet. So I ask, why are we finding more anthropomorphic art in non-burial contexts? And what does this mean about the use of this art? Well, unfortunately, whereas animal-style art is expedient for determining relative chronology of an isolated work of art, without context it can be notoriously difficult to date an undecorated three-dimensional sculpture unless it's part of an object that can be dated by its form, such as a brooch, and so on. In 2003, Torstenka Pella published a short piece on hidden people in Germanic ornamental art from the migration period through the Viking Age. And many of the examples he cited are from the earlier periods, but he also included the Viking Age. Headless man heads broken off on the horned disc from the River Thames, humans carved in wood on the Osprey cart, and the man being swallowed by a snake-like creature on the mammoth horse collar. These examples do fit neatly into the schema of animal-style art and can be used as a bridge for chronologically placing some anthropomorphic motifs in relation to the animal styles in which they were enveloped. With new finds, the overall picture of Viking arts changed since Odeclan Jensen and David Wilson wrote Viking art in 1966. In James Graham Campbell's new version of Viking art, about half a century later in 2013, he included several of the new finds, but he still referred to these works as an, I quote, atypical ventures into representational art, I quote. He maintains, and I get a quote, the main history of Viking art has to be written from a study of the decoration of ornamental metalwork. But I protest that we no longer can insist that it must focus only on the animal art. The works of Bill Wilson and Graham Campbell and also Figurissong and others continue to form the topological, chronological backbone of Viking art, and rightly so. They and others built up a detailed typology which together with carbon-14 dating, dendrochronology, and numismatic analysis has allowed this construction of a detailed chronology of Viking art. Yet, figurative art has emerged to be more than a minor afterthought among Vikings. The flood of new pieces found by metal detecting and on settlement excavations has brought a wider variety of art and another view of Viking visual culture to our attention. As more examples of this art come to light, we glimpse a view of Viking art and people that have previously been nearly unknown. So now I say that we really must regard figurative art as something other than an oddity, as something going beyond the vitrified old paradigm. So, thanks, thank you very much.