Sun and moon jewellery is often sold as a symbol of balance and left at that. The real history is older and stranger: a gilded bronze disc in a Danish bog, a Gaulish calendar that tried to make the moon and the sun agree, and two Norse siblings chased across the sky by wolves.
The sun and the moon are the two lights everyone on earth has always been able to see. They are also the two that refuse to keep the same time. The moon's month doesn't divide neatly into the sun's year, and almost every culture that tried to build a calendar ran straight into that problem. Perhaps that is why, again and again, people have drawn the two together: as partners, as rivals, as the two faces of one thing.
A disc with a day side and a night side
In 1902 a farmer ploughing a drained bog at Trundholm, on the Danish island of Zealand, turned up a small bronze horse on wheels, pulling a large disc. It is usually dated to around 1400 BC, in the Nordic Bronze Age, and it is now one of the best-known objects in the National Museum of Denmark.
The detail that matters here is the disc. One face is covered in gold leaf. The other is plain bronze. The usual reading is that the gold side is the sun crossing the day sky, and the dark side is the same sun making its hidden journey back through the night. One object, two faces, depending on the hour.
It is a long way from a Bronze Age bog to a pendant, but the idea is the same one: something that shows a bright face and a dark face, and turns from one to the other.
The Celts counted by nights
When Julius Caesar wrote about the Gauls in the first century BC, one of the things he noticed was that they measured time by nights rather than days, so that a birthday or the start of a month began at nightfall. English still carries a trace of the same habit in the word fortnight, from fourteen nights.
The most remarkable evidence of how the Celts kept time was found in 1897 at Coligny, in eastern France. It is a large bronze tablet, broken into fragments, engraved with a calendar in the Gaulish language from around the second century AD. It covers five years, sixty-two months, and it is lunisolar: its months follow the moon, and extra months are added at intervals to keep them in step with the sun's year. It is, in effect, a long-running attempt to make the two lights agree.
Sól and Máni
In Norse myth, as Snorri Sturluson wrote it down in Iceland in the thirteenth century, the sun and the moon are a sister and a brother. Sól drives the horses that pull the sun. Máni steers the moon and decides its waxing and waning. Each is chased across the sky by a wolf, Sköll after the sun and Hati after the moon, which is why, the story says, they never stop moving.
It is a darker picture than the gentle "balance" of modern jewellery descriptions, but it has the same shape. Two lights, bound to each other, never quite in the same place.
Bright, in Chinese
One more, from much further east. The everyday Chinese word for "bright", which also means "clear" and turns up in the word for "tomorrow", is written by setting the sign for the sun beside the sign for the moon. Children learn it early. It is perhaps the shortest description of the idea anywhere: put the two lights together and you get brightness.
What it means when someone wears one
There is no single answer, and that is part of the appeal. For some people a sun and moon piece is about two people, one more outward and one more inward, who make sense together. For others it is about holding two sides of one character, the public one and the quiet one. If you work nights, the appeal may be more literal. And some simply like that it is one of the oldest images there is.
We don't think a pendant changes anything about the person wearing it. What it can do is carry a meaning you chose, close to you, every day.
The pendant we made
Most sun and moon jewellery places the two side by side, or merges them into one face. We wanted them whole, so our Sun and Moon Pendant turns. The carved disc hangs on two pivots inside a Celtic plaited ring, and a push of the thumb takes you from one face to the other, a little like the Trundholm disc.
On one side is a sun face with its eyes lowered, its rays cut one by one, and a natural garnet set in the brow. On the other is a crescent moon in profile with a natural Swiss blue topaz, against a hammered silver sky with eight small stars. The sun, the moon and the stars are fire-gilded in 24K gold, fused into the silver at around 900°C and finished by hand under a 40× microscope. Everything else is S925 sterling silver, oxidised so the gold stands out.
Wearing it
- Size: the pendant is 30 × 30 mm and 5 mm deep, and weighs 22 g. That is large enough to read across a room and small enough to sit under an open collar.
- Chain: it comes on a 65 cm (26 in) titanium bead chain, which on most men sits around the middle of the chest. An oxidised sterling silver wheat chain is available as an upgrade.
- Which face out: whichever suits the day. You could turn it with the time, sun in the morning and moon in the evening, or simply leave it on the side you like best.
- Engraving: the outer rim is left plain, and we engrave a name, a date or initials there for free. It sits on the edge, so it doesn't interrupt either face. Engraved pieces are made for one person and can't be returned unless they arrive faulty, damaged or not what you ordered.
For care, wipe it dry after wear and keep it away from hard knocks; topaz is hard but can split if it takes a sharp blow on one plane. If the disc ever turns stiffly, a little warm water and a soft brush at the pivots is all it needs.
Sun and Moon Pendant · Son of the Forest Ring · All necklaces
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