Named weapons of different origin and purpose occur in the Old Norse mythology, and some of them are better known than others: Thor's hammer Mjolnir and Odin's spear Gungnir, just to name a few. But named weapons are also present in the more mundane Icelandic sagas, and it suggests that the practice of giving individual names to objects was something that occurred among real people in the Viking society. The named swords, spears and axes, which we can read about in the Icelandic sagas, are not portrayed as especially supernatural. They are, however, sometimes talked about in a special way and considered to be extraordinary in one way or another.What kind of name did people give to weapons, and what might have been the purposes for doing so? It is possible that some weapons told a story through their names and that they because of that also brought fame and glory to their owners. It is also conceivable, considered how some of the swords and spears are described in the Icelandic sagas, that named weapons were seen as almost life-like. This paper discusses some thoughts regarding named weapons in the sagas, the purposes for giving names, and if this practise might tell us something about how people in the Viking age viewed these named, possibly presumed life-like, objects.

This article discusses the difference between identifying and classifying attributes and analyzes the problematic implications if we confuse the two. The empirical material consists of Gallic stone reliefs depicting goddesses with a wheel as attribute. Male deities depicted with wheels have mainly been identified as a Celtic Jupiter or a male sky god sometimes called Taranis. The Gallic goddesses show that the wheel attribute was not an identifying attribute exclusive to this god, but that it rather served as a marker for an activity shared by several deities, both male and female. The articles argument that we need to distinguish between identifying and classifying attributes in order to make a source critical and methodological correct iconographical interpretation, especially when we interpret iconographical representation without the aid of any written sources.

A challenge when interpreting prehistoric art is that we often lack written source material, a contemporary text written by people who lived in the cultural context that is studied. It is therefore not uncommon to use texts that are younger than the material that we want to interpret. This could lead to misinterpretations and circular arguments. Images are cultural products formed by their contemporaries and influenced by older idea traditions. This article presents four criteria that might be worth taking into consideration when interpreting prehistoric religious iconography. The article discusses how one might proceed to study prehistoric religious art and what could be helpful to keep in mind when analyzing religions by means of pictures and material culture.