In Europe, Scandinavia holds the largest concentration of rock art (i.e. petroglyphs), created c. 5000–first century bc, many of them showing figurative and seemingly narrative representations. In this paper, we will discuss possible narratological approaches applied to these images. We might reasonably distinguish between three levels of pictorial narrativity: representations of (i) single events, understood as the transition from one state of affairs to another, usually involving (groups of) agents interacting; (ii) stories, e.g. particular sequences of related events that are situated in the past and retold for e.g. ideological or religious purposes; and (iii) by implication, master-narratives deeply embedded in a culture, which provide and consolidate cosmological explanations and social structures. Some concrete examples of petroglyphs will be presented and analysed from narratological and iconographical perspectives. We will as a point of departure focus on (i), i.e. single events, though we shall also further consider the possibility of narrative interpretations according to (ii) and (iii).
SummaryScandinavian petroglyphs have given rise to vivid interpretations, often related to Old Norse religion and Indo‐European mythology. However, we still do not know if, how or to what extent these images are really telling stories. In this paper, we shall analyse the ways in which Scandinavian northern and southern traditions (in Alta, Northern Norway and in Norrköping, Middle Sweden, respectively) depict hunting narratives. While the northern tradition may render several phases and procedural aspects of the hunt, the southern one tends to be more focused on the killing itself, or the confrontational aspects of the hunt.A preliminary observation is that the scenes differ in ways that reflect not only different hunting traditions, but also imply different foci of interest. Put in another way, they emphasize different aspects of the hunting activity itself, of what is relevant, worth telling, or ‘tellable’.
The philosophical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned
with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity
have been rather neglected. Within traditional art history, however, the narrative potential of the visual arts has usually been taken for granted, though rarely by attempting
to elucidate any deeper cognitive, semiotic, and philosophical aspects involved. Now,
generally speaking, narratives contribute to the human endeavour to reduce the unpredictability of worldly changes, and human existence in particular, attempting to establish
order in our experiences of transitoriness and existential vulnerability.
The paper discusses some possible criteria of narrativity with regard to their applicability to pictorial objects. It demonstrates thatpictorial works may express or imply high-
-level narrative structures or, put in another way, wider world views or schemata, and that
our comprehension of and need for these schemata can be explained by taking recent
research within cognitive psychology, schema theory, and narratology into account.
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