The Vikings had a big influence on me as a child - I still love that film!
And now Kirk Douglas is 100 years old - some good news in a year with so many celebrity deaths.
Showing posts with label Vikings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vikings. Show all posts
Saturday, 10 December 2016
Happy Birthday, Kirk Douglas
The Vikings had a big influence on me as a child - I still love that film!
And now Kirk Douglas is 100 years old - some good news in a year with so many celebrity deaths.
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
Viking Carrots
I was flicking through the Amnesty International gift catalogue today when I saw something that made me wince slightly (speaking as a Viking re-enactor).
The idea is great - get kids growing vegetables under the pretext that they're "Growing and Eating like a Viking". Trouble is, the crop they are encouraged to grow is carrots.
Vikings didn't know about carrots.
One of the early references to carrots in Europe was the rather lovely book The Menagier of Paris, a manual written by an older man to instruct his new young wife in her household duties - including gardening, and including exciting new vegetables like carrots! The book was written in the 14th century. And the carrots were white, or purple, or yellow. Orange carrots that we know and love now were bred in the Netherlands, to celebrate their prince, whose title was "of Orange". Which was a place, as well as a colour.
So, it's not quite as bad as horns on helmets (Vikings never wore them - however the silly little bird on Kirk Douglas's helmet in the film The Vikings is totally authentic), or the scene in Noggin the Nog where he's planting potatoes in his garden when he's called to his throne room to give an audience (potatoes came later, too, and from much further south in the New World than the Vikings ever reached).
I wonder what the "Viking feast" is like, as described in the Viking recipe that comes with the pack....
The idea is great - get kids growing vegetables under the pretext that they're "Growing and Eating like a Viking". Trouble is, the crop they are encouraged to grow is carrots.
Vikings didn't know about carrots.
One of the early references to carrots in Europe was the rather lovely book The Menagier of Paris, a manual written by an older man to instruct his new young wife in her household duties - including gardening, and including exciting new vegetables like carrots! The book was written in the 14th century. And the carrots were white, or purple, or yellow. Orange carrots that we know and love now were bred in the Netherlands, to celebrate their prince, whose title was "of Orange". Which was a place, as well as a colour.
So, it's not quite as bad as horns on helmets (Vikings never wore them - however the silly little bird on Kirk Douglas's helmet in the film The Vikings is totally authentic), or the scene in Noggin the Nog where he's planting potatoes in his garden when he's called to his throne room to give an audience (potatoes came later, too, and from much further south in the New World than the Vikings ever reached).
I wonder what the "Viking feast" is like, as described in the Viking recipe that comes with the pack....
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
Who Carved the Lewis Chessmen?
One of the blogs I visit regularly is God of Wednesday. Nancy Marie Brown's blog about Iceland - the horses, the landscape and the history and folklore. Just recently she's been talking about the book she's written called Ivory Vikings, in which she considers the history of the Lewis chessmen in relation to Iceland.
Her theory is that the chessmen were carved on Iceland, which was certainly a source of walrus ivory, by Margaret the Adroit, hailed as the best carver in Iceland in the Saga of Bishop Pall. She was a member of his household.
The idea that Iceland was the source of the chessmen had been written off by earlier scholars, who had the idea that Iceland was a poor backwater, incapable of producing artists of the calibre of the carver of the chessmen, and too poor to afford the large amount of walrus ivory that went into the pieces. However, Nancy Marie Brown argues that Iceland was going through a Golden Age at this time, and Bishop Pall was wealthy, well-educated nobleman, with several artists in his retinue, including Margaret.
To me, this seems the best theory that's been put forward so far.
Her theory is that the chessmen were carved on Iceland, which was certainly a source of walrus ivory, by Margaret the Adroit, hailed as the best carver in Iceland in the Saga of Bishop Pall. She was a member of his household.
The idea that Iceland was the source of the chessmen had been written off by earlier scholars, who had the idea that Iceland was a poor backwater, incapable of producing artists of the calibre of the carver of the chessmen, and too poor to afford the large amount of walrus ivory that went into the pieces. However, Nancy Marie Brown argues that Iceland was going through a Golden Age at this time, and Bishop Pall was wealthy, well-educated nobleman, with several artists in his retinue, including Margaret.
To me, this seems the best theory that's been put forward so far.
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Viking Women Warriors
There's been a recent study showing that 50% of the burials at a particular Viking site were women who had come from Scandinavia - they can tell this by isotopes in the bones - and some of those women were buried with weapons.
This does not mean that half of all Viking warriors were women. For a start, the sample is too small to extrapolate like that. It does mean that people should stop making assumptions and start looking at the evidence.
Previously, it has been assumed that a man buried with a sword was a warrior, and that a body with a sword was always a man. Occasionally, it has been shown that women were buried with weapons, but instead of making the same assumptions as one would if it were a man, the excuses begin - oh, it didn't mean she fought; it was just a symbol of authority. There's a burial from the Isle of Man which is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon Women by Christina Fell which always cheers me up when I re-read it, because there is no doubt that this was a woman who fought, and did embroidery as well. Why shouldn't that be true? And why shouldn't men be allowed to both fight and do embroidery?
Not everyone fits into neat little gender-assigned boxes, and things which are "obviously" feminine in one generation or in one part of the world can be "obviously" masculine elsewhere. I once saw a documentary which included a group of people in Madagascar or somewhere similar where only the men did embroidery, because the women "obviously" didn't have the fine motor skills necessary for the best work.
There's another class of burials which are obviously of women, but who have a "sword-like" object with them. And instead of saying "It's a sword", this has been interpreted as being a tool for weaving. Having done a bit of weaving, frankly I doubt it.
Let's look at the evidence, rather than the assumptions, which will undoubtedly show us that the past was more interesting and with greater variation than we ever assumed.
This does not mean that half of all Viking warriors were women. For a start, the sample is too small to extrapolate like that. It does mean that people should stop making assumptions and start looking at the evidence.
Previously, it has been assumed that a man buried with a sword was a warrior, and that a body with a sword was always a man. Occasionally, it has been shown that women were buried with weapons, but instead of making the same assumptions as one would if it were a man, the excuses begin - oh, it didn't mean she fought; it was just a symbol of authority. There's a burial from the Isle of Man which is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon Women by Christina Fell which always cheers me up when I re-read it, because there is no doubt that this was a woman who fought, and did embroidery as well. Why shouldn't that be true? And why shouldn't men be allowed to both fight and do embroidery?
Not everyone fits into neat little gender-assigned boxes, and things which are "obviously" feminine in one generation or in one part of the world can be "obviously" masculine elsewhere. I once saw a documentary which included a group of people in Madagascar or somewhere similar where only the men did embroidery, because the women "obviously" didn't have the fine motor skills necessary for the best work.
There's another class of burials which are obviously of women, but who have a "sword-like" object with them. And instead of saying "It's a sword", this has been interpreted as being a tool for weaving. Having done a bit of weaving, frankly I doubt it.
Let's look at the evidence, rather than the assumptions, which will undoubtedly show us that the past was more interesting and with greater variation than we ever assumed.
Sunday, 23 March 2014
Vikings at the British Museum
We weren't sure when we would be able to get to the British Museum to see the exhibition, so we hadn't bought tickets in advance. They'd actually organised it quite well - we had to queue for tickets at a main desk in the central courtyard, but there we were given a time slot to turn up at the exhibition - and it was so popular the slot we were given was in two hours' time.
This gave us time to slip away and browse the Atlantis Bookshop, where I bought a book of essays, Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon, about Ronald Hutton's work on the history of Pagan Britain on the tenth anniversary of its first publication.
Then we shot off down the road to Forbidden Planet for some rather more frivolous spending - Daredevil, and Captain Marvel (and she seems to be living in the top of the Statue of Liberty now, and dating Rhodey/Iron Patriot). I also found a copy of Neil Perryman's book Adventures with the Wife in Space, which is a companion to his brilliant blog. Basically, he got his wife Sue (who is not a Who fan) to agree to watch every single Doctor Who episode in order from the very beginning, and recorded her comments. The book is the background to the experiment - which went so well that they are now going through Blake's Seven in the same way!
Then it was back to the British Museum to enter the waiting area, where there was a member of staff with items from the stores that you could actually touch, including the hilt of a Viking sword (we asked if it was pattern-welded, and had to explain to her what pattern-welded meant, while she looked it up in her notes to find that, yes, it was).
Then we joined the slow-moving queue of people who were winding their way round the display cases in the exhibition itself. We didn't mind that it was slow-moving at all, because we wanted to examine every exhibit in detail, and talk about them in excited loud voices, which started a few interesting conversations with other people around us.
There were items there that I've seen in book after book about Vikings - and there they were, only a few inches away under glass, like the piece of wood with the graffiti of the Viking fleet (which is tiny!)! There were pictures of places around the Viking world, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (where there's a bit of runic graffiti which says something like "Olaf was here" on a balcony). There were quotations on the walls from Viking texts, like the admonitions that a man should sip at his mead quietly and not gulp it down, and it was no bad thing to go early to bed.
There were hoards with coins from around the known world, and hack silver, and ornate brooches - and this was before we even got to the main hall.
That's where the ship is - Roskilde 6, 37 meters of Viking warship. Only 20% of the planking remains, but it has been displayed in a metal framework in the shape of the ship, so it's easy to imagine what it would have looked like originally.
It filled the hall, and there were display cases all around it as well, including a rowing boat burial of a warrior, and a sorceress's metal staffs, which resemble distaffs and may have had something to do with winding the thread of a person's life on them.
And in the corner - my jaw dropped. "That can't be the original!" I muttered. "It's got to be a replica!"
It was the Jelling Stone - and yes, it was a replica, brightly painted as it would have originally appeared, with Christ on one side and a monster on the other, with a lot of curly decoration and the inscription that Harald Bluetooth had raised the stone to honour his parents and to declare that he had made the Danes Christian. The original is outside a church he built, between two older pagan burial mounds.
Most of the stuff there was the real thing, though, and I don't think I've ever seen such a large collection in one place before. It was well worth the £16.50 to get in, and it took us two hours to get round, by which time our brains were starting to feel a little bit overloaded!
And then the shop (of course) followed by some much needed cake and coffee!
This gave us time to slip away and browse the Atlantis Bookshop, where I bought a book of essays, Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon, about Ronald Hutton's work on the history of Pagan Britain on the tenth anniversary of its first publication.
Then we shot off down the road to Forbidden Planet for some rather more frivolous spending - Daredevil, and Captain Marvel (and she seems to be living in the top of the Statue of Liberty now, and dating Rhodey/Iron Patriot). I also found a copy of Neil Perryman's book Adventures with the Wife in Space, which is a companion to his brilliant blog. Basically, he got his wife Sue (who is not a Who fan) to agree to watch every single Doctor Who episode in order from the very beginning, and recorded her comments. The book is the background to the experiment - which went so well that they are now going through Blake's Seven in the same way!
Then it was back to the British Museum to enter the waiting area, where there was a member of staff with items from the stores that you could actually touch, including the hilt of a Viking sword (we asked if it was pattern-welded, and had to explain to her what pattern-welded meant, while she looked it up in her notes to find that, yes, it was).
Then we joined the slow-moving queue of people who were winding their way round the display cases in the exhibition itself. We didn't mind that it was slow-moving at all, because we wanted to examine every exhibit in detail, and talk about them in excited loud voices, which started a few interesting conversations with other people around us.
There were items there that I've seen in book after book about Vikings - and there they were, only a few inches away under glass, like the piece of wood with the graffiti of the Viking fleet (which is tiny!)! There were pictures of places around the Viking world, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (where there's a bit of runic graffiti which says something like "Olaf was here" on a balcony). There were quotations on the walls from Viking texts, like the admonitions that a man should sip at his mead quietly and not gulp it down, and it was no bad thing to go early to bed.
There were hoards with coins from around the known world, and hack silver, and ornate brooches - and this was before we even got to the main hall.
That's where the ship is - Roskilde 6, 37 meters of Viking warship. Only 20% of the planking remains, but it has been displayed in a metal framework in the shape of the ship, so it's easy to imagine what it would have looked like originally.
It filled the hall, and there were display cases all around it as well, including a rowing boat burial of a warrior, and a sorceress's metal staffs, which resemble distaffs and may have had something to do with winding the thread of a person's life on them.
And in the corner - my jaw dropped. "That can't be the original!" I muttered. "It's got to be a replica!"
It was the Jelling Stone - and yes, it was a replica, brightly painted as it would have originally appeared, with Christ on one side and a monster on the other, with a lot of curly decoration and the inscription that Harald Bluetooth had raised the stone to honour his parents and to declare that he had made the Danes Christian. The original is outside a church he built, between two older pagan burial mounds.
Most of the stuff there was the real thing, though, and I don't think I've ever seen such a large collection in one place before. It was well worth the £16.50 to get in, and it took us two hours to get round, by which time our brains were starting to feel a little bit overloaded!
And then the shop (of course) followed by some much needed cake and coffee!
Tuesday, 18 February 2014
Women Warriors - Gudrid the Far Travelled
Anyone who knows about Norse exploration to Vinland will know the name of Lief Eirikson, or Lief the Lucky - but fewer will know of his sister in law, Gudrid the Far Travelled, or Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, to give her her full name.
She married Lief's younger brother Thorstein, and travelled to Vinland (the coast of North America, probably to the settlement at l'Anse aux Meadows) with him. This was impressive enough on its own - sailing to Vinland was sailing off the end of all known territory, but she did more than that.
Thorstein died, and Gudrid returned to Greenland, where she married Thorfinn Karlsefni, and then returned to Vinland with settlers including five other women.
One of my favourite stories about her is of a time when the Norse were attacked by Skraelings (which was what they called the local Native Americans). The men were beginning to flee when Gudrid, who was pregnant at the time, ran forward to snatch up an axe that one of the men had dropped in his flight, while calling the men a bunch of cowards. They could hardly turn tail when their leader's wife was running in the other direction, towards the attacking Skraelings, and they managed to beat off the attack.
Later, she gave birth to Snorri Thorfinnson, the first European to be born on the American continent. Many Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to Snorri.
The attempt at settlement did not succeed, so they returned to Greenland, where Gudrid converted to Christianity - and from there, she made a pilgrimage to Rome. Some say she met the Pope there, and told him what Iceland and Greenland were like.
Nancy Marie Brown has written a book about Gudrid, called The Far Traveler - she also has an interesting blog, mainly about Iceland, called God of Wednesday, which can be found at http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.co.uk/
There is also a novel called The Sea Road about Gudrid, by Margaret Elphinstone, and both these modern re-tellings depend on the two Sagas that mention Gudrid, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red.
So apart from the skirmish with the axe, she wasn't, strictly speaking, a warrior, but I don't think anyone would have wanted to mess with her!
She married Lief's younger brother Thorstein, and travelled to Vinland (the coast of North America, probably to the settlement at l'Anse aux Meadows) with him. This was impressive enough on its own - sailing to Vinland was sailing off the end of all known territory, but she did more than that.
Thorstein died, and Gudrid returned to Greenland, where she married Thorfinn Karlsefni, and then returned to Vinland with settlers including five other women.
One of my favourite stories about her is of a time when the Norse were attacked by Skraelings (which was what they called the local Native Americans). The men were beginning to flee when Gudrid, who was pregnant at the time, ran forward to snatch up an axe that one of the men had dropped in his flight, while calling the men a bunch of cowards. They could hardly turn tail when their leader's wife was running in the other direction, towards the attacking Skraelings, and they managed to beat off the attack.
Later, she gave birth to Snorri Thorfinnson, the first European to be born on the American continent. Many Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to Snorri.
The attempt at settlement did not succeed, so they returned to Greenland, where Gudrid converted to Christianity - and from there, she made a pilgrimage to Rome. Some say she met the Pope there, and told him what Iceland and Greenland were like.
Nancy Marie Brown has written a book about Gudrid, called The Far Traveler - she also has an interesting blog, mainly about Iceland, called God of Wednesday, which can be found at http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.co.uk/
There is also a novel called The Sea Road about Gudrid, by Margaret Elphinstone, and both these modern re-tellings depend on the two Sagas that mention Gudrid, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red.
So apart from the skirmish with the axe, she wasn't, strictly speaking, a warrior, but I don't think anyone would have wanted to mess with her!
Saturday, 15 February 2014
Women Warriors - Viking burials
Here's an image that turned up on Facebook, which claims to be of the weapons discovered in a 10th century grave in Finland, with the body of a woman. I haven't been able to find out where the image came from, and I haven't been able to find any reports of such a burial either, so I can't be sure if the claim is true or not.
However, archaeologists over the years have found quite a few burials with a variety of grave goods from the Viking era. In the early days of archaeology, it was assumed that, if a body was buried with a sword, axe or spear, they must have been male, and burials with jewellery must have been female.
The truth, as is often the case, is much more interesting and complex than that.
Modern archaeologists have access to a lot more scientific tests on their finds than was the case fifty years and more ago, and several "male" burials have been found to be female. The reverse is also true - several "female" burials have been found to be male.
So, were these women warriors? It's the obvious assumption when a man is buried with weapons, but is it true of the women? Was a sword a symbol of high status in society, without any correlation with the ability to use it in battle?
The truth is, from the remains alone, even backed up by reading the sagas, we just don't know.
There is an interesting line in the Hervarar Saga, though this contains a lot of legendary and folk-tale material: "As soon as [Hervor] could do anything for herself she trained herself more with bow and shield and sword than with needlework and embroidery." If women were portrayed in folk-tales in this way, there was at least a possibility that women in real life could act in the same way.
I tend to the belief that people who were buried with weapons knew how to use them. In 1981 a burial site was excavated in Gerdrup near Roskilde in Denmark.* It was dated to the 9th century and the grave contained a woman's skeleton. She was buried with a spear, an iron knife and a needlecase. Nearby was the skeleton of a man with his feet tied together - his neck had been broken. In male burials, a slave was often killed and buried with the man, and it would seem reasonable to see the same thing happening here.
The reason I tend to the belief that she could use the spear she was buried with, though, is that a spear is not a high status weapon. Just about anybody who turned up to join a warband could afford a spear, whereas a sword took a lot more metal to make, and needed far more skill to make. Any blacksmith could turn out a few spear heads.
This was one of the first burials to be discovered where the burial was obviously female, with weapons. Others have been found since, and older material has been looked at again - the idea that only male Vikings invaded Britain, for instance, and married Anglo-Saxon women when they got here and settled, is rather contradicted now that we know that about half of the burials that are known are of women - and it is now possible to find out where a person grew up if you have one of their teeth.
*information taken from Women in Anglo-Saxon England by Christine Fell
Saturday, 29 December 2012
"Captain's Share! I Bespeak Her!"
I've been watching The Crimson Pirate over the holidays, and remembering why it is one of my favourite pirate films of all time. Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat swinging on ropes and bouncing around all over the Italian fishing village that was standing in for the Caribbean, daring escapes and double crosses, and even a hot air balloon! It's all great good fun.
But.
Light-hearted or not, from the first moment Eva Bartok as the beautiful Consuela sets foot on the deck of Captain Vallo's ship, she is at risk of rape.
"Why did you bolt your cabin door last night?" Vallo (Burt Lancaster) asks her.
"If you know it was bolted, you must have tried it, and if you tried it, you know why it was bolted," she says, having already pulled a knife on two pirates who were leering at her.
And later, after a couple more twists of the plot, she and her father are the pirates' prisoners - so they put her in a swing, up in the rigging, and set up a greasy pole to it. Whoever climbs the greasy pole, gets the girl - whether she wants it or not.
Captain Vallo stops that, but it's all presented as "a bit of fun".
The Crimson Pirate isn't the only film with this attitude. Okay, it was made in 1951, and The Black Swan (one of my other most favourite pirate films of all time) was made in 1943. That's where the title for this blog post comes from. In the first scene where Tyrone Power meets Maureen O'Hara, he sees her only as part of the plunder from the castle his men have stormed to rescue him. He claims her for himself, knocks her out cold, and then dumps her on the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Later in the film, he attempts to woo her in a more gentlemanly way - but that doesn't stop him from kidnapping her when it appears she's about to marry the wrong man! The boyfriend turns out to be one of the villains of the piece, though, so that's all right!
Kirk Douglas was doing the same sort of thing in 1959, when he made The Vikings. Again, it's one of my favourite films of all time - Vikings storming a medieval castle by throwing axes at the gates and climbing up them! Wonderful stuff! Tony Curtis almost getting eaten by crabs while tied to a stake in a rock pool! And Einar (Kirk) capturing Janet Leigh, who he keeps aboard his ship while the Vikings party - and gets drunk, and rows over to the ship to have his evil way with her. It's fortunate that Tony Curtis is a gentleman, and manages to rescue her.
So, three films that I grew up with, and love dearly, despite their flaws when it comes to women. It would be nice to think that film makers have become more enlightened since the 1950s - but I'm not sure there's been all that much improvement, or we wouldn't have something like the Beschdel Test to see how fairly women are portrayed now.
But.
Light-hearted or not, from the first moment Eva Bartok as the beautiful Consuela sets foot on the deck of Captain Vallo's ship, she is at risk of rape.
"Why did you bolt your cabin door last night?" Vallo (Burt Lancaster) asks her.
"If you know it was bolted, you must have tried it, and if you tried it, you know why it was bolted," she says, having already pulled a knife on two pirates who were leering at her.
And later, after a couple more twists of the plot, she and her father are the pirates' prisoners - so they put her in a swing, up in the rigging, and set up a greasy pole to it. Whoever climbs the greasy pole, gets the girl - whether she wants it or not.
Captain Vallo stops that, but it's all presented as "a bit of fun".
The Crimson Pirate isn't the only film with this attitude. Okay, it was made in 1951, and The Black Swan (one of my other most favourite pirate films of all time) was made in 1943. That's where the title for this blog post comes from. In the first scene where Tyrone Power meets Maureen O'Hara, he sees her only as part of the plunder from the castle his men have stormed to rescue him. He claims her for himself, knocks her out cold, and then dumps her on the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Later in the film, he attempts to woo her in a more gentlemanly way - but that doesn't stop him from kidnapping her when it appears she's about to marry the wrong man! The boyfriend turns out to be one of the villains of the piece, though, so that's all right!
Kirk Douglas was doing the same sort of thing in 1959, when he made The Vikings. Again, it's one of my favourite films of all time - Vikings storming a medieval castle by throwing axes at the gates and climbing up them! Wonderful stuff! Tony Curtis almost getting eaten by crabs while tied to a stake in a rock pool! And Einar (Kirk) capturing Janet Leigh, who he keeps aboard his ship while the Vikings party - and gets drunk, and rows over to the ship to have his evil way with her. It's fortunate that Tony Curtis is a gentleman, and manages to rescue her.
So, three films that I grew up with, and love dearly, despite their flaws when it comes to women. It would be nice to think that film makers have become more enlightened since the 1950s - but I'm not sure there's been all that much improvement, or we wouldn't have something like the Beschdel Test to see how fairly women are portrayed now.
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