A hand-painted Viking shield featuring a horse motif, an animal that held deep significance in Norse culture — from Odin's eight-legged steed Sleipnir to the horse sacrifices and feasts documented as part of Viking Age religious practice.
Horses held genuine religious and cultural significance across the Viking world, most famously embodied by Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse ridden by Odin himself, born of Loki in one of Norse mythology's stranger tales. Beyond myth, horses were also central to real Viking Age religious practice, with horse sacrifice and ritual horse-meat feasting documented as part of Norse pagan worship, and horse burials found alongside human graves as marks of status and companionship into the afterlife.
Deepeeka's reproduction is built from stout plywood, its rim bound in tightly stitched rawhide and its face hand-painted, with an antiqued steel boss at the centre offering ample room for the hand and three riveted wooden reinforcing bars on the reverse, the central one leather-wrapped as the grip.
Use for:
- Viking living history and shield-wall display
- Museum-style display on a wall mount or stand
- Norse mythology-themed home decor and collections
- Historical events and Viking markets
- Costume dressing and themed photography
- Collectors of Norse symbolism and mythology
