Viking Silver Hoards (e.g., Galloway Hoard)

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

In the luminous flux of Bergson’s metaphysics, the Viking Silver Hoards emerge not as static treasures buried in earth but as living nodes in a temporal network of movement, memory, and becoming. These collections of silver arm rings, ingots, pins, and intricately worked vessels reflect more than historical wealth; they are matter infused with intention, travel, violence, tribute, and alliance. Understood through Creative Evolution, these hoards reveal themselves as crystallized action—the silver not merely stored but dynamically suspended in a state of readiness for new encounters, barter, or redistribution.

For Bergson, duration (la durée) is not a sequence of static events but a flow of qualitative change. The hoards, thus, are not objects halted in time but reservoirs of pure memory (mémoire pure), a memory not located in the brain, but ontologically present in matter itself. Each silver torque or fragment carries within it the accumulated tensions of migratory paths, intercultural collisions, and shifting tribal allegiances. Their burial was not a pause, but a contraction of duration—a compression of multiple potential futures into a silent, subterranean present.

Bergson reminds us that perception is a selection from the whole of reality, sculpted by the needs of action. The hoards can then be seen as perceptual acts: what was chosen to be hidden, what memory was protected, and what identity was momentarily paused. The silver’s shine, dulled by earth yet never extinguished, reflects this metaphysical residue—the persistence of a future that was imagined but never enacted. These caches are more than economic; they are metaphysical prosthetics of movement, simultaneously retreating from and pressing toward the real.

Thus, the Viking hoards—infinitely divided, never entirely owned—embody the Bergsonian notion that to possess something is not to hold it in stasis, but to engage with its momentum. Silver, as flowing wealth, is consciousness in mineral form: it slips through hands, maps territories, negotiates memory. As such, it is never truly buried—it is merely deferred in becoming.