Bronze to bronze

I own a copy of a Viking trefoil brooch.,

It is bronze, heavy enough to feel serious in the hand, and shaped like three rounded leaves meeting in the centre. In Icelandic it is called Þríblaða næla. It has strength in it, a sense of purpose. It feels made for wool, linen, cloak, weather and movement; not jewellery that exists only to glitter, but jewellery that fastens, holds, declares and endures.

My father gave it to me.

He is dead now, and perhaps that is one reason the brooch matters more than it once did. It is not only an object I own, but something that passed from his hand into mine, carrying with it his love of Icelandic history, his imagination, and his way of seeing the past as something still alive in the landscape.

For years, the brooch was simply mine. I kept it because I loved it. Sometimes I wore it. Sometimes I held it. Mostly it lived quietly among my things, carrying my father’s presence without asking anything of me.

Then I began researching the young Viking woman who's remains were found on Vestdalsheiði. She had lain undiscovered for over a thousand years. Her remains had been scattered by time, weather, water and earth, but what was found with her was extraordinary: five brooches and more than five hundred glass beads.

She was heavily adorned, and that fact kept troubling me. Why so many brooches? Why so many beads and so many broaches?

Was she wealthy? Was she of high status? Was she travelling? Was she marked out in some way?

Or was she a Völva, one of the women who stood between worlds, called upon to listen, see, warn or bless when ordinary knowledge was no longer enough?

The questions would not leave me alone.

When I learned about the brooches, I was strangely moved to realised that I had one too, albeit a copy. My father’s trefoil brooch, suddenly became much more specific. It was no longer only a beautiful object, or a memory of him, or a link to the old stories I had grown up with. It became part of a thread leading towards the young woman on the heath.

That thread tightened when I saw her brooch for myself.

It was in the museum at Egilsstaðir, behind glass, lying under careful light with the other objects found with her. I had already imagined her many times but reading about a woman is not the same as standing in front of something she once wore.

The trefoil brooch stopped me.

It was greened and weathered by age, its bronze surface carrying that blue-green bloom of time, but the shape was still unmistakable: three rounded arms meeting at the centre, patterned, balanced and purposeful. Once it would have been brighter. Once it would have caught the light. Once it would have fastened cloth against her body.

Standing there, looking at it through the glass, almost close enough to touch but separated by everything that time and museums must place between us, I felt her more deeply than I had before. She became real to me in a way that research alone could never have made her real. Not an archaeological theory. Not only a mystery. Not even “the possible völva.” She became a young woman who had once worn beautiful things. A woman who had dressed herself, or been dressed by someone else. A woman who had carried bronze and beads, colour and meaning, on her body.

And I had a brooch like it.

Not original, of course. Not ancient. Not valuable in the way hers is valuable. But shaped in the same old form, three-lobed and strong, made to echo the kind of brooch she had once worn.

My father would have understood why that mattered.

He was a writer of Icelandic historical fiction, and in our house the past was never simply gone. It lived in books, maps, place names, ruins and long walks through wet Icelandic landscapes where he tried to follow the paths of his characters and our ancestors. He liked to stand where people before us had stood. He liked to feel what remained in a place.

Sometimes those walks were beautiful and sometimes they were miserable. There was rain, cold fingers and my father's terrible sense of direction and always some landmark that was 'just over the next hill'.

But those walks shaped me. They taught me that the land is layered, that a place is never only what is visible in front of you. It holds names, footsteps, stories, losses, ghosts and presences. My father showed me that if you listen, there are voices in the landscape. Not always clear voices, not voices in ordinary speech, but echoes, traces, atmospheres; the feeling that something has happened here and that the land remembers.

Perhaps that is why the brooch stayed with me. It was a small bronze doorway into the world he had spent his life imagining, and into the older Iceland that has always lived just beneath the modern one.

A trefoil brooch is an intimate object. It does not stand apart from the body like a monument or a weapon. It belongs to the arrangements of daily life: fastening a cloak, holding fabric against wind, sitting at the chest or shoulder where it can be seen. Viking-age jewellery was practical, but it was never only practical. It showed something about a person: status perhaps, taste, connection, belonging, the world she was part of.

A woman wearing such a brooch was not invisible.

So much about the young woman on Vestdalsheiði has been lost. We do not know her name. We do not know who loved her, who feared her, who expected her back, or who failed to come for her. We do not know whether she was truly a völva, though that word keeps pulling itself towards her. We do not know whether she went to the river source deliberately or whether something went terribly wrong. We do not know whether the cave was shelter, sanctuary, ritual place, or the place where her strength finally gave way.

But we know she had objects.

Brooches and beads; things chosen, worn, carried, handled. Things that had weight and texture. Things that belonged to the intimate arrangements of a life.

When I imagine her walking across the heath, I see the beads first because there were so many of them: glass beads, coloured beads, small bright things that once caught the light and perhaps made the faintest sound as she moved. But now I see the brooch too. Bronze against wool. A cloak fastened against weather. A young woman carrying part of her world on her body as she crossed into a place from which she would not return.

When we went to her cave, her resting place, I brought my brooch with me.

I had packed it deliberately, though I did not make a great announcement about it. It felt private, and perhaps a little strange, even for me. But I knew I wanted to carry it there. Not as a reenactment, not as a claim, not as if my replica could stand in for what had been lost, but as a greeting.

Bronze to bronze.

Woman to woman.