Torc

Bronze 4th-century BC buffer-type torc from France

The Dying Gaul

A torc, also spelled torq or torque, is a large rigid or at least stiff neck ring in metal, made either as a single piece or from strands twisted together. The great majority are open at the front, although some had hook and ring closures and a few mortice and tenon locking catches to close them. Many seem designed for near-permanent wear and would have been difficult to remove. Torcs are found in the Scythian, Illyrian^[1] Thracian, Celtic, and other cultures of the European Iron Age from around the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD. For the Iron Age Celts the gold torc seems to have been a key object, identifying the wearer as a person of high rank, and many of the finest works of ancient Celtic art are torcs. The Celtic torc disappears in the Migration Period, but during the Viking Age torc-style metal necklaces, now mainly in silver, came back into fashion.^[2] Torc styles of neck-ring are found as part of the jewellery styles of various other cultures and periods.

Terminology and definition

The word comes from Latin torquis (or torques), from torqueo, "to twist", because of the twisted shape of the collar. The terminals or ends of ancient torcs typically bore sculpted ornaments, frequently globes, cubes, or animal heads, and, less commonly, human figures. Typically, neck-rings that open at the front when worn are called "torcs" and those that open at the back "collars". Smaller bracelets and armlets worn around the wrist or on the upper arm sometimes share very similar forms. Torcs were made from single or multiple intertwined metal rods, or "ropes" of twisted wire, usually gold or bronze, less often silver, iron or other metals, bearing in mind that gold, bronze and silver survive best when buried for long periods. Elaborate examples, sometimes hollow, used a variety of techniques but complex decoration was usually begun by casting and then worked by further techniques. The Ipswich Hoard includes unfinished torcs that give clear evidence of the stages of work.^[3] Flat-ended terminals are called "buffers", and in types like the "fused-buffer" shape, where what resemble two terminals are actually a single piece, the element is called a "muff".^[4]

Origins

Swedish Bronze Age spiral ribbon torc in bronze

Torcs appear in Scythian art from the Early Iron Age, and may have been introduced to continental Celts from this direction around 500 BC. They are also found in Thraco-Cimmerian art. An early Scythian torc is part of the Pereshchepina hoard of the 7th century BC. Later examples are found in the Tolstaya burial and the Karagodeuashk kurgan (Kuban area), both dating to the 4th century BC. Torcs are found in the art of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, with some other elements derived from Scythian art.

On the other hand torcs have predecessors in rigid gold necklaces and collars of the European Bronze Age, which are sometimes also called "torcs", for example, the three 12th–11th-century BC specimens found at Tiers Cross, Pembrokeshire, Wales,^[5] and the Milton Keynes Hoard, which contained two large examples.^[6] There are several flared gold torcs with a C-shaped section in a huge hoard of Late Bronze Age gold from 800-700 BC found at Mooghaun North, County Clare in Ireland.^[7]

Celtic torcs

Gold Celtic torc with three "balusters" and decoration including animals, found in Glauberg, Germany, 400 BC

Depictions of the gods and goddesses of Celtic mythology sometimes show them wearing or carrying torcs, as in images of the god Cernunnos wearing one torc around his neck, with torcs hanging from his antlers or held in his hand, as on the Gundestrup cauldron. This may represent the deity as the source of power and riches, as the torc was a sign of nobility and high social status.^[8] The famous Roman copy of the original Greek sculpture The Dying Gaul depicts a wounded Gaulish warrior naked except for a torc, which is how Polybius described the gaesatae, Celtic warriors from modern northern Italy or the Alps, fighting at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, although other Celts there were clothed.^[9] One of the earliest known depictions of a torc can be found on the Warrior of Hirschlanden (6th century BC), and a high proportion of the few Celtic statues of human figures, mostly male, show them wearing torcs.

Other possible functions that have been proposed for torcs include use as rattles in rituals or otherwise, as some have stones or metal pieces inside them, and representations of figures thought to be deities carrying torcs in their hand may depict this. Some are too heavy to wear for long, and may have been made to place on cult statues. Very few of these remain but they may well have been in wood and not survived. Torcs were clearly valuable, and often found broken in pieces, so being a store of value may have been an important part of their use. It has been noted that the Iberian gold examples seem to be made at fixed weights that are multiples of the Phoenician shekel.^[10]

With bracelets, torcs are "the most important category of Celtic gold", though armlets and anklets were also worn; in contrast finger-rings were less common among the early Celts.^[11] The earliest Celtic torcs are mostly found buried with women, for example, the gold torc from the La Tène period chariot burial of a princess, found in Waldalgesheim, Germany, and others found in female graves at Vix in France (illustrated) and Reinheim. Another La Tene example was found as part of a hoard or ritual deposit buried near Erstfeld in Switzerland.^[12] It is thought by some authors that the torc was mostly an ornament for women until the late 3th century BC, when it became an attribute of warriors.^[13] However there is evidence for male wear in the early period; in a rich double burial of the Hallstatt period at Hochmichele, the man wears an iron torc and the female a necklace with beads.^[14] A heavy torc in silver over an iron core with bulls head terminals, weighing over 6 kilos, from Trichtingen, Germany, probably dates to the 2nd century BC (illustrated). ^[15]

The Newark Torc

Many finds of torcs, especially in groups and in association with other valuables but not associated with a burial, are clearly deliberate deposits whose function is unclear. They may have been ritual deposits or hidden for safekeeping in times of warfare. Some may represent the work-in-progress of a workshop.^[16] After the early period, torcs are especially prominent in the Celtic cultures reaching to a coast of the Atlantic, from modern Spain to Ireland, and on both sides of the English Channel.

In roughly the 3rd to 1st centuries BC some very elaborately worked torcs with relief decoration in a late form of La Tène style have been found in Britain and Ireland. There may be a connection with an older tradition in the British Isles of elaborate gold neckwear in the form of gold lunulas, which seem centred on Ireland in the Bronze Age, and later flat or curved wide collars; gold twisted ribbon torcs are found from both periods, but also imported styles such as the fused-buffer.^[17] The most elaborate late Insular torcs are thick and often hollow, some with terminals forming a ring or loop. The most famous English example is the 1st-century BC multi-stranded electrum Snettisham Torc found in northwestern Norfolk in England (illustrated),^[18] while the single hollow torc in the Broighter Gold hoard is the finest example of this type from Ireland, also 1st century BC.^[19] The Stirling Hoard, a rare find in Scotland of four gold torcs, two twisted ribbons, dating from the 3rd–1st century BC was discovered in September 2009.^[20]

Torc from Burela, Galicia, with double moulding scotiae terminals, and hoop decoration. At 1.812 kilos, the heaviest Iberian torc.^[21]

The Roman Titus Manlius in 361 BC challenged a Gaul to single combat, killed him, and then took his torc. Because he always wore it, he received the nickname Torquatus (the one who wears a torc),^[22] and it was adopted by his family. After this, Romans adopted the torc as a decoration for distinguished soldiers and elite units during Republican times. A few Roman torcs have been discovered.^[23] Pliny the Elder records that after a battle in 386 BC (long before his lifetime) the Romans recovered 183 torcs from the Celtic dead, and similar booty is mentioned by other authors.^[24]

It is not clear whether the Gallo-Roman "Warrior of Vacheres", a sculpture of a soldier in Roman military dress, wears a torc as part of his Roman uniform or as a reflection of his Celtic background. Quintilian says that the Emperor Augustus was presented by Gauls with a gold torc weighing 100 Roman pounds (nearly 33 kilos),^[25] far too heavy to wear. A torc from the 1st century BC Winchester Hoard, is broadly in Celtic style but uses the Roman technique of laced gold wire, suggesting it may have been a "diplomatic gift" from a Roman to a British tribal king.^[26][27]

A very late example of a torc used as ceremonial item in early Medieval Wales can be found in the writings of Gerald of Wales. The author wrote that there still existed a certain royal torc that had once been worn by Prince Cynog ap Brychan of Brycheiniog (fl. 492 AD) and was known as Saint Kynauc's Collar. Gerald encountered and described this relic first-hand while travelling through Wales in 1188. Of it he says, "it is most like to gold in weight, nature, and colour; it is in four pieces wrought round, joined together artificially, and clefted as it were in the middle, with a dog's head, the teeth standing outward; it is esteemed by the inhabitants so powerful a relic, that no man dares swear falsely when it is laid before him."^[28] It is of course possible that this torc long pre-dated the reign of Prince Cynog and was a much earlier relic that had been recycled during the British Dark Ages to be used as a symbol of royal authority. It is now lost.

Shapes and decoration

Most Achaemenid torcs are thin single round bars with matching animal heads as the terminals, facing each other. Some Early Celtic forms are heavily decorated at the front, with animal elements and short rows of "balusters", rounded projections coming to a blunt point; these are seen both on the sculpted torc worn by the stone "Glauberg Warrior" and a gold torc (illustrated) found in the same oppidum. The Vix torc has two very finely made winged horses standing on fancy platforms projecting sideways just before the terminals, which are flattened balls under lions' feet. Like other elite Celtic pieces in the "orientalizing" style, the decoration shows Greek influence but not a classical style, and the piece may have been made by Greeks in the Celtic taste, or a "Graeco-Etruscan workshop", or by Celts with foreign training.^[29] Spiral ribbon torcs, usually with minimal terminals, continue a Bronze Age type and are found in the Stirling Hoard from Scotland, and elsewhere. Other Celtic torcs may use plain or patterned round bars, two or more bars twisted together, or woven gold wire. The "buffer" form of terminal was the most popular in finds from modern France and Germany, with some "fused buffer" types opening at the rear or sides. In both buffer types and those with projecting fringes of ornament, decoration in low relief often continues back round the hoop as far as the midpoint of the side view. In Iberian torcs thin gold bars are often wound round a core of base metal, with the rear section a single round section with a decorated surface.

The c. 150 torcs found in the lands of the Iberian Celts of Galicia favoured terminals ending in balls coming to a point or small buffer ("pears"), or a shape with a double moulding called scotiae.^[30] The pointed ball is also found in northern Italy, where the hoops often end by being turned back upon themselves so that the terminals face out to the sides. Both of these mostly used plain round bars or thin rods wound round a core. In the terminals of British torcs loops or rings are common, and the main hoop may be two or more round bars twisted together, or several strands each made up of twisted wire. Decoration of the terminals in the finest examples is complex but all abstract. In these two types the hoop itself normally has no extra decoration, though the large torc in the Irish Broighter Gold hoard is decorated all round the hoop, the only Irish example decorated in this way.

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  Hallstatt culture gold torc or collar with fastening, c. 550 BC

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  Model chariot from the Oxus Treasure, with both figures wearing torcs

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  Achaemenid torc from Persia, c. 350 BC, Susa, with ribbed hoop, animal head terminals, and stone inlays

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  Gold Celtic torc found in Vix, France, 480 BC; see text.

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  French fused-buffer type with "muff", c. 350 BC

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  North Spain, 4th - 2nd centuries BC

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  The Snettishham Torc

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  Northern Galician torcs.

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  Torc terminal from A Guarda, Galicia. Museo do Castro de St. Tegra.

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  A simple torc. Museo das Peregrinacións, Santiago de Compostela.

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  Northern Gallaeci torc (Artabri type with "pear" terminals), showing construction, and decoration of the hoop

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  The Trichtingen silver torc with bull heads, perhaps 2nd century BC

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  The Snettisham Hoard, perhaps the stock of a goldsmith, showing the variety of British forms, c. 75 BC

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  The Gallo-Roman "Warrior of Vacheres"

See also

• Manillas

Notes

References

• Brailsford, J. W., "The Sedgeford Torc", The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1/4 (Spring, 1971), pp. 16-19, JSTOR
• González-Ruibal, Alfredo, "Artistic Expression and Material Culture in Celtic Gallaecia", E-Keltoi, Volume 6, online
• Green, Miranda, Celtic Art, Reading the Messages, 1996, The Everyman Art Library, ISBN 0297833650
• Laing, Lloyd and Jenifer. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992 ISBN 0-500-20256-7
• "Treasures": Treasures of early Irish art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., an exhibition catalogue from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on torcs (cat. no. 4,6,8,10,14,15,21)
• Wallace, Patrick F., O'Floinn, Raghnall eds. Treasures of the National Museum of Ireland: Irish Antiquities, 2002, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, ISBN 0-7171-2829-6