The Gundestrup Caldron

I leaned back in my recliner listening to the television.  That’s what I do every evening.  Usually I tune the set to whatever is being broadcast on PBS.  With eyes half-closed I heard a man talking about bodies buried in the peat bogs in Ireland and Denmark.  No one knows who they were; the evidence shows that they were murdered around 300 B.C.  A dismal subject to listen to on a night when I was already half-sick and feeling depressed.  Yet I am always interested in programs about history, even ancient times, and art.

The narration changed to the artifacts buried with the bodies.  Hearing the words “Gundestruup Caldron” I opened my eyes.  The television screen showed a closeup strange figures incised on a huge silver bowl. . 

I sat up in my chair.  I had read about the Gundestrup Caldron before Wally and I made our trip to Denmark in 1975.  It is considered the finest piece of Iron Age art ever found.  It is certainly the largest and most elaborate.  I remembered the thrill I felt when I walked into a gallery in the National Museum of Denmark and saw the caldron, as big as a bathtub, right in front of me. 

The caldron is decorated with strange figures of humans, animals, and mythological beasts. The representations of people were as distorted and weird as the figures of dragons and griffins.  I  admired the workmanship of the craftsmen who hammered out these strange figures, but I had no idea what they represented.  

On television a man tried to show a link between the figures on the caldron and the murdered men.  One of the panels on the caldron shows a man dumping a smaller man into a caldron.  Were the men killed as part of some pagan religious ritual?  Why were they buried in the bog when at that time common people were cremated?

I looked up the Gundestrup caldron on Wikipedia.  No one knows who made it or where.  Were they Celts or Norsemen or Thracians?  It is made of silver which may have come from France or Germany.  It is made of plates soldered together with lead from England.  The experts disagree on the meaning of the large human figures.  Were they gods and goddesses?  Some seem to be Celtic deities; others may be Greek.  On television a pair of small animals were identified as “pigs”; an expert on Wikipedia described them as “boars.”         

The Gundestrup Caldron is comes from a time which is totally beyond anything which I have experienced.  How difficult it is to know what really happened 200 years ago, much less 2,000 years ago!

The old ladies who live in the retirement home where I live do not watch PBS.  None of them have heard of the Gundestrup Caldron.  They could not care less about the prehistoric Celts.  They are totally ignorant of history before 1776, yet they are absolutely certain what it was like when Jesus was preaching on the shores of Galilee. .