The Riddles of the Franks Chest.

As well as trade goods the profound legacy of the vast network of routes across Eurasia was the carriage and exchange of ideas, language, philosophies and religions. This chest (22.9 cm long, 19 cm wide and 10.9 cm high ) was made by a Monk in Northumberland in the 8C. In itself it travelled relatively little distance – it was found in the Upper Loire region of France. But it is the subjects of the carvings on each of its 4 sides and lid which are mind-blowing. Tales from 1000’s of miles across the continent are depicted alongside local Western legends and Christian Bible stories with a commentary carved in both Latin and Anglo-Saxon runes. These stories would not be confined to the learned but would have been well known. Being carved by a religious their content and juxtapositions would have been chosen carefully to portray a Christian ethos to the viewer, but the fun comes because no-one today can agree on how this works.


 In fact, as shown here, there is only one panel that is completely Christian, that of the Adoration of the Three Magi. Right next door to it shows the gory story of Weland Smith. Captured and hamstrung by King Niohad, Wayland gets his revenge by killing the King’s son and making a goblet from his skull. He fills the goblet with drugged wine which he gives to Beaduhild, the King’s daughter, whom he rapes. Then he makes wings from bird’s feathers and escapes.


Other panels show Romulus and Remus suckling a wolf, another the first Roman-Jewish war, another maybe the Fall of Troy, another a grieving horse and the runes, ‘Here Hos sits on the sorrow-mound; She suffers distress as Ertae had imposed it upon her, a wretched den (?wood) of sorrows and of torments of mind.Rushes / wood / biter


I would like to think it has to do with journeys of the inner and outer life perhaps because the dedication around the rim is not to a great lord, but to the whale from whose bones it is made and who within its life swum huge distances.
‘The flood cast up the fish on the mountain-cliff. The terror-king became sad where he swam on the shingle. Whale's bone.’

There you go. Make of it what you will – every other scholar has.