The Fuller Brooch and Anglo-Saxon Depictions of Dance Martha Bayless

The Fuller Brooch and Anglo-Saxon depictions of dance MArtHA bAyLEss AbstrAct The scattered nature of references to dance and the ambiguity of its vocabulary have obscured Anglo-Saxon dance practices, but evidence suggests that dance was a signifi- cant cultural phenomenon. The earlier centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period saw the depiction of weapon dances, and later sources also allow us a glimpse of lively secular dance. Performance traditions may have included dance combined with satirical songs, as well as possible secular ritual dance. Finally, scripture provided examples of both holy dance and lascivious female dance. Contemporary iconography of these dance practices, combined with continued associations between dance and music, allow us to understand the conventions in the depiction of dance, and in turn these suggest that the figure of ‘Hearing’ on the Fuller Brooch, traditionally regarded as running, is in fact dancing. The images on the Fuller Brooch, an Anglo-Saxon silver and niello disc depict- ing five human figures in its centre, have long been the focus of scholarly attention. E. T. Leeds first identified the iconographic scheme of the figures in a 1949 letter to R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford: I had already on the Wallingford sword detected the four symbols of the evangelists, and wondered if the disc could yield some similar interpretation. But the figures round the centre had an almost too jaunty look to be biblical. They seemed to belong to civil life. And yet they are symbolic enough; for I have no doubt whatever that they can, with the central figure, be interpreted as the five senses, read as follows Taste Smell Sight Hearing Touch1 In an 1952 exposition of the brooch’s iconography, Bruce-Mitford elabo- rates on Leeds’ interpretation, commenting: ‘They do however fit the roles of the Senses satisfactorily, if HEARING, that which shows a running figure with a hand raised towards the ear, may be taken as representing a man responding 1 Quoted in R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, ‘Late Saxon Disc-Brooches’, Dark Age Britain, ed. D. B. Harden (London, 1956), pp. 171–201, at 184. 183 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:10:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100080261 9781108419253book.indd 183 04/07/2017 12:08 Martha Bayless to a call.’2 Bruce-Mitford reiterated this interpretation in other descriptions, for instance in a longer exposition of the figure: ‘Hearing is somewhat cramped for space, but one hand is raised towards the ear, while the figure is shown running. He can be regarded as having heard a cry and shown moving in answer to it.’3 The understanding that the figure of Hearing is running has remained undis- puted ever since. I would like to propose, however, that the figure representing Hearing on the Fuller Brooch is not running but dancing. In this it conforms to other Anglo-Saxon depictions of dance and to iconography which depicts dancing and sound as intimately connected. Unlike depictions of running, which are quite rare, a number of depictions of dancing survive from Anglo- Saxon England and the early medieval world. To establish the iconography of dance, and the actual dance traditions that influenced the iconography, it will be helpful to lay out the evidence for dance from the Anglo-Saxon period. tHE VocAbuLAry oF DAncE The traditional starting-point of many fields of enquiry, vocabulary, has little to offer scholars in the field of Anglo-Saxon dance. Neither Latin nor Old English provides unambiguous terms for dance. Terms found in Latin, particularly in the Vulgate, include saltare (‘to dance, leap’) salire (‘to dance, jump’), subsilire (‘to dance, jump’), transilire (‘to dance, jump across’), psaltrice/saltrice/saltatrice (‘female dancer’) and chorus (‘group/dance/architectural choir’).4 The non-biblical term psaltria (‘music-girl/erotic dancer’) will be taken up below. A particularly problematic Latin term is tripudium, which in the Classical period denoted a dance, particularly a solemn religious dance, but which had expanded in later eras to signify any form of solemn rejoicing. The term thus at first seems to promise descriptions of dance, but in fact this meaning had apparently died out by the time it was employed in Anglo-Saxon England. The word appears, for instance, in a letter of Aldhelm: ‘natalis Domini sollemnitatem ibidem in consortio fratrum trepudians . .’, but this is overwhelmingly likely to denote rejoicing rather than dance.5 We see this meaning again in Lantfred’s account 2 R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, ‘The Fuller Brooch’, Brit. Museum Quarterly 17 (1952), 75–6, at 76. 3 Bruce-Mitford’s exposition on the iconography of the Fuller Brooch was published three times. It first appeared in Bruce-Mitford, ‘Late Saxon Disc-Brooches’, with this passage at p. 186 (and similarly on the figure in the same article, ‘One is shown running, with a hand raised to his ear . .’ (p. 177)). It was also printed as Appendix B in D. M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Ornamental Metalwork, 700–1100, in the British Museum (London, 1964), pp. 91–8; and again as ‘Late Saxon Disc-Brooches’, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology: Sutton Hoo and Other Discoveries, ed. R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford (London, 1974), pp. 303–45, at 317–25. 4 On these terms, see E. Stanley, ‘Dance, Dancers and Dancing in Anglo-Saxon England’, Dance Research 9 (1991), 18–31. 5 Aldhelm, Epistola 1, ed. Ehwald, MGH, Auct. Antiq., pp. 475–8; the passage has been translated as ‘to celebrate joyfully in the same place the approaching feast of our Lord’s 184 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:10:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100080261 9781108419253book.indd 184 04/07/2017 12:08 The Fuller Brooch and Anglo-Saxon depictions of dance of the miracles of St Swithun, where a hunchback is instructed: ‘quiesce paulu- lum et sic utriusque sanitatis tripudium percipies sempiternum . .’, ‘lie down a little while . and you shall thereby receive the eternal joy of well-being in either life . .’6 Clearly tripudium here refers to ethereal joy rather than to physi- cal dancing. Further confirmation that Anglo-Saxon usage of the term refers to rejoicing is suggested in the gloss in Aldhelm’s De Virginitate: tripudio .i. gaudio, feowunge;7 other glossaries have similar equivalencies such as tripudium: gefea and tripudiare: laetare et exultare.8 By contrast, no Anglo-Saxon glossary defines tripudium as dance. From these and other examples it is clear that an Anglo- Saxon text with the term tripudium cannot be taken to be describing dancing; and no text in which the term is used, and which provides an indubitable and informative actual description of dancing, is known to me. The imprecision of the Latin terms is paralleled by Old English terms for dance, which included forms of hleapan (‘to dance/leap’), tumbian (‘to dance/ caper/tumble [gymnastically]’) and hoppian (‘to hop/dance’).9 These seem to have no practical distinction, although one glossary item may suggest that dancers performed for spectators: this is the implication of a definition in Ælfric’s Glossary, reading histrio: tumbere oððe gligman (‘performer: dancer or minstrel’), suggesting that a performer might be someone who danced.10 The great majority of these terms appear in biblical passages, and thus provide no direct testimony for Anglo-Saxon dance. As a whole, the conclusion of one scholar summarizes the value of surviving dance vocabulary succinctly: ‘The words that might mean dancing, or might be connected with dancing, in the texts in which they survive, provide no little measure of textual and semantic difficulty, but hardly any firm information about dance, dancers and dancing in Anglo-Saxon England.’11 longed-for birth, in the company of the brethren’: Aldhelm: the Prose Works, trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (Cambridge, 1979), p. 152. 6 Lantfred’s Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni is edited and translated in M. Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford, 2003) with this passage at pp. 268–9. 7 A. S. Napier, Old English Glosses (Oxford, 1900; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), p. 31. See also L. Goossens, The Old English Glosses of MS. Brussels, Royal Library 1650 (Brussels, 1974), l. 44. 8 The Antwerp–London Glossaries, ed. D. W. Porter (Toronto, 2011), p. 111, l. 2296; similarly J. H. Hessels, An Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1890), section 18 l. 241, with Tripudium: uictoriae gaudium at 18.257 (p. 116), Tripudiantes: exultantes at 18.262 (p. 111) and Tripudiare: uincere at 18.265 (p. 116). 9 These terms are also discussed by Stanley, ‘Dance’. In addition, the term saltingum appears once, in the phrase ‘mid saltingum and tumbincgum . .’ from the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang; The Old English Version of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang together with the Latin Original. ., ed. A. S. Napier, EETS, os 150 (London, 1916), 78–9. 10 J. Zupitza, Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar, 3rd ed., with introduction by H. Gneuss (Hildesheim, 2001), p. 35. 11 Stanley, ‘Dance’, p. 29. 185 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:10:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100080261 9781108419253book.indd 185 04/07/2017 12:08 Martha Bayless WArrior DAncEs Information on Anglo-Saxon dance must rely, then, on other kinds of evidence, most especially on the evidence of images.

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