Animal art is one of the more mystical aspects of Scandinavian Iron Age culture. It has foremost been regarded in the light of art and style history. Interpretation has also ? mainly from the 1990s and onwards ? been made through iconographic analysis. But the problem here is that iconography requires textual analogy, something that the Scandinavian Iron Age lacks.The purpose of this paper is to lift some of the ?mystical fog? that engulfs the scandinavian animal art, by developing a method for interpretation of pre-historic images that evades the flaws in the iconographic method.