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Although southern England is traditionally thought of as 'Saxon' territory, the quoit brooch was worn in the AD400s by Angles, Jutes, and Danes. They were not Saxons. And even more so than Seiichi Suzuki, Barry M. Ager connects the Quoit Brooch to Scandinavia and the Anglian homelands. In The Smaller Variants of the Anglo-Saxon Quoit Brooch, he writes: "The Quoit Brooch Style...shares a number of important features...with the Scandinavian Sosdala style of the late 4th and early 5th centuries...that its origins lie in southern Scandinavia and that its oldest parallels are to be found in the metalwork of the Jutland peninsula during the earlier part of the 5th century...All varieties of Anglo-Saxon annular brooch, including the quoit brooch, can be shown to derive from north Germanic, predominantly Scandinavian, annular types...In view, therefore, of the many close links that exist between the Quoit Brooch Style and southern Scandinavian metalwork...some of which cannot be paralleled anywhere else, the balance of the evidence weighs overwhelmingly in favour of a southern Scandinavian origin." |
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