The Water Dragon and the Snake Witch: Two Vendel Period Picture Stones from Gotland, Sweden

The style and iconography of two well-known picture stones are re-analysed. The Hablingbo Havor II picture stone shows a motif that occurs frequently in Gotlandic art from the Vendel Period onwards: the “Water Dragon”. It is suggested that this relates to an ideological connection between the dragon and the sea, where the sea is the dragon that ferries ships to distant shores. This is reflected not only in picture stones, but in Viking Age art in general. The iconography of När Smiss III (the “Snake Witch”) has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but special consideration is given to Peel’s (1999) suggestion that it relates closely to the Vitastjärna myth from the 13th-century Guta Saga. The artistic style of the zoomorphs on both stones (Style II) is typically dated to the Vendel Period. It is suggested that Sune Lindqvist’s insistence that the stones date from before AD 600 comes from a long-standing debate with Nils Åberg over the date and context of the east mound at Uppsala, and by association, the date of the artistic style found on Hablingbo Havor II and När Smiss III. This debate has been resolved in favour of Åberg’s interpretation. These two picture stones represent an artistic tradition that should be dated conservatively from the beginning of the 5th century AD to the middle of the 7th century AD.