Yggdrasil · Humankind

The Maker of the Franks Casket: Stories Carved into Whale Bone

An Anglo-Saxon whale-bone box that carves Weland the smith beside the Magi; its maker is unknown.

Myth and literature

The story

Direct evidence: this is a surviving object, an Anglo-Saxon casket, and it is not a Scandinavian or Viking-age piece and tells us nothing about Álfheimr.

The Franks Casket is a small lidded box carved from whale bone, now in the British Museum. Its panels set scenes from different traditions side by side: the Germanic legend of Weland the smith, the Adoration of the Magi, Romulus and Remus, the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans, and a lid panel with an archer defending a building. Weland is the English form of Völundr, the smith of the Norse poem Völundarkviða, which is why the casket appears under the Alfheim tab: Völundr is called a lord of elves in that poem. The box itself is English. It is generally placed in Northumbria in the early eighth century, and its carvers had no known link to Norway, Denmark or Iceland. Who made it, who ordered it and where it was made are not known.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: the object, its panels and inscriptions, and its later history. The Wikipedia article reports that it was once in the church of Saint-Julien at Brioude in France, that a family at Auzon used it as a sewing box, and that the antiquary Augustus Wollaston Franks bought the parts from a Paris dealer in 1857 and gave them to the museum in 1867. The missing end panel was sold to Florence and identified as part of the casket in 1890.

What is not recorded: its maker, patron and workshop. The Wikipedia article reports that Leslie Webster regards it as probably made in a monastery by someone of great learning and ingenuity, and perhaps meant for a secular, probably royal, recipient; Ripon has been suggested as a place. Scholars disagree about the meaning of several panels, especially the Florence one, and about the lid figure named Ægili. The casket shows how an English maker in the early eighth century knew a Weland story. It says nothing about elves or Álfheimr.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The British Museum holds the casket as object 1867,0120.1 and describes it as a lidded box of whale bone carved in relief with scenes from Roman, Jewish, Christian and Germanic tradition. Five decorated panels survive in the museum’s own box; the right end panel is in the Bargello museum in Florence, and a cast or replica stands in its place in London. The panels carry texts in Old English and Latin, written in runic letters, some of them in a coded form, and in Roman letters. The Wikipedia article gives the date as the early eighth century, probably its first half, and cites the British Museum for placing it in Northumbria, while noting that other scholars have proposed Mercia or a seventh-century date. It also reports measurements of about 23 by 19 by 11 centimetres, and that the front inscription is a riddle about the whale whose bone was used.