For the past several years, Norwegian historian of religion Maria Kvilhaug has operated under the name The Lady of the Labyrinth, a name which derives from a Mycenaean Greek Linear B tablet found in Knossos (Gg 702). Knossos is a remarkable Bronze Age site on the island of Crete, a location famous today for its representation in later ancient Greek folklore as the site of a labyrinth, an intricate maze, wherein awaits a fantastical, ferocious beast, the ‘Bull of Minos’, the Minotaur (ancient Greek Μινώταυρος). What the concept of the labyrinth meant to the region’s Bronze Age inhabitants remains a mystery, although some aspects seem more or less certain—for example, there are strong indications the symbol and concept were associated with dance. Whatever the case, the labyrinth appears to have been of both great age and importance to the people of Crete, and labyrinth motifs appear on coins unearthed in Knossos dating from 350 to 200 BCE, long after Linear B fell out of use.

The Knossos site is also notable for its Linear B inscriptions, a (relatively) recently deciphered script with great implications for Classical studies and Bronze Age studies more broadly: In use by the Mycenaean Greeks around 1450 BCE, Linear B was finally cracked in 1952 by English self-taught classical philologist Michael Ventris and English classical philologist John Chadwick. The deciphered Linear B subsequently toppled many theories about the development and prehistory of Ancient Greece and what would become the Classical world, and greatly altered subsequent understanding of the development of ancient Greek culture—and the Bronze Age more broadly. Tantalizingly, Linear A and other scripts in the region remain undeciphered.

Knossos isn’t the only place where one may find labyrinths. The symbol and concept subsequently appear throughout Europe, in Asia, and even in the Americas. In Northern Europe, stone representations of labyrinth symbols are known from what is now Norway, Finland, Estonia, and possibly Denmark, but in Sweden they are most numerous. Much like other ancient Germanic monuments, such as stone ships, the labyrinths receive no evident mention in the ancient Germanic textual record, another example of the limitations of the ancient Germanic written record.

Kvilhaug publishes both fiction and nonfiction, drawing inspiration from the ancient Germanic corpus, and places a special focus on Germanic goddesses in a comparative perspective.

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