10th century Denmark lies in the twilight zone between history and prehistory. Very few written sources exist from the period, all of them foreign, and most of them written by people whom the Vikings “paid visits” to and so are not necessarily positive in their tone.
Numismatics is an extremely important part of understanding these early days of the Kingdom of Denmark. The coin featured here is a so-called Semi-Bracteate, and it is with the name itself, that we start.
A bracteate is a uniface coin, struck on a very thin flan, leaving a mirror impression of the image on the reverse. A Semi-Bracteate is the same but has writing or images on both sides with mirror images of the opposite sides visible. Some books and catalogs call them Half or ½ Bracteates, but it is not, as many think, a numeric value indicating a value or relative size. Surely it would then be more accurate to call them Double Bracteates? We will stick with the hopefully less confusing “Semi-Bracteate.”
The coin in question was struck under king Harald Bluetooth, who reigned from approximately 958 to 985 AD. His nickname will sound familiar to most, and yes, the wireless technology was named after him. The Bluetooth logo is the runic compound of his initials, H and B; the large runes stone at Jelling tells how he christened the Danes and conquered Norway.
Having gotten the etymology in place we can now turn to the coin itself. And what a coin it is! To most people, the imagery may resemble a Rorschach test, but luckily, we know its origin. What looks like a house, or a face, or house with a face, is in fact derived from Charlemagne’s Dorestadt Deniers, struck almost 200 years earlier, and a one of medieval Europe’s most iconic and instantly recognisable coins. The imagery was first copied by the Danes in the early 9th century on a coin from an extremely rare emission simply known as “the oldest group” (this group and its imagery is exceptionally interesting, but we will dive into that rabbit hole another time).
100 years later that image is reused by the king on his very large Semi-Bracteate emissions. One can only wonder why that image was chosen, what it meant to people at the time, and why the image was still somehow relevant after 100 years, even 200 years after its initial appearance. We cannot say for sure, but the original Dorestadt coinage must have made an enormous impact in terms of silver content, availability and association with power and wealth. For it to make sense for Harald Bluetooth to use the imagery on his coinage, the memory of the image must still be alive, still mean something. (We see a similar reuse of very old imagery in the Celtic coinages and Anglo-Saxon Sceattas, but again, a different story for another day).
For this coin to survive intact is close to miraculous. Weighing only 0.30 grams and thin as a sheet of paper it can break and crumble very easily. Being silver it could have ended up in the smelting pot anytime between the 10th century and today. Luckily it didn’t, it ended up in the magnificent L. E. Bruun Collection along with a number of similar (or slightly different) coins of Harald Bluetooth. There it stayed, safe among the collection’s almost 25,000 objects, like Sleeping Beauty for 100 years, awaiting the moment when it would again be sold into a new collection and bring joy to a new owner.
In February of 2025 the first instalment of the Bruun CCO (Collectors Choice Online) auction will come under the virtual hammer; this coin will be the very first in the sale.
