Our knowledge of music in prehistoric Scandinavia is mainly based on finds of instruments. The most remarkable are no doubt the bronze lures of which about fifty specimens and fragments from the period c. 1200–500 BC have been discovered in Denmark as well as a few in southern Sweden, southern Norway, and northern Germany. The lures have normally been found in pairs. This cannot, however, be used as evidence of two-part music and the assumption that they were cultic instruments has been strengthened by depictions of lure players in Bronze Age rock carvings. The bronze lures seem to reflect influences from the south and from Celtic regions.

There are no finds comparable to the bronze lures in the Iron Age; the known musical artefacts from that period are mostly simple instruments such as rattles, bells and flutes, but also a few bridges for string instruments and a cowhorn with finger-holes from Sweden. The most spectacular find from this period is the pair of gold horns, probably wind instruments, that were found in south Jylland but later lost.

The archaeological material clearly reflects musical activity, particularly in southern Scandinavia where most finds have been made. But the instrumental and vocal sound milieus of the prehistoric North cannot be restored from extant instruments or fragments or from rock carvings. When foreign authors, mainly Latin but also Arabic, wrote about Germanic peoples in the first millennium AD they gave some superficial and mainly negative information about vocal music in particular. It is true that their impressions derived mainly from contacts with more southerly Germanic peoples but they may be representative of north Germanic population groups as well.