Overview

The Trundholm Sun Chariot is a Nordic Bronze Age model, about 54 centimetres long, of a horse and a large disc mounted together on spoked wheels. One face of the disc is covered in gold leaf and the other left plain bronze, usually read as the bright day-sun and the dark night-sun. It was found by a farmer ploughing the Trundholm bog on Zealand in 1902 and is a centrepiece of the National Museum of Denmark.

A farmer plowing a bog near Trundholm, on the Danish island of Zealand, uncovered the Trundholm Sun Chariot in 1902: a small bronze horse pulling a bronze disc, one face of the disc gilded with gold leaf and the other left bare, mounted together on a six-wheeled cart. The chariot's horse is shown mid-stride, sculpted with a naturalism unusual for the period, and the whole assembly, horse, disc and six-wheeled base, was cast as separate bronze components later fitted together rather than as a single piece, a level of technical sophistication in Nordic Bronze Age metalworking that the find helped establish. No comparably complete example of this specific sun-and-horse arrangement survives from the same period anywhere else in Scandinavia, making the Trundholm chariot the primary physical evidence for a mythological pattern otherwise known only from more fragmentary rock-carving depictions.