The six queens of Henry VIII

Divorced, beheaded and died.
Divorced, beheaded survived.
I'm Henry VIII I had six sorry wives,
Some might say I ruined their lives. 

~ Horrible Histories

If you know me, you have probably realised that I have a big interest in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period in European history. My main interest is the Swedish royal dynasty Vasa, but I never say no to watching or reading about the English Tudors.

The Tudor dynasty is far more frequently portrayed in popular culture than the Vasas and I recently came across a documentary in four parts about the six wives of Henry VIII (1491-1547) that from what I have understand is made by BBC and where historians Suzannah Lipscomb and Dan Jones tell the stories of the six queens.

I really enjoy watching a documentary about the six queens and the focus is very much on them throughout the four episodes. I do feel sorry for all of them even though Anne Boleyn seems to have been quite cruel to be honest.

On the annual big Swedish book sale in 2005, I bought Antonia Fraser's book The six Wives of Henry VIII translated into Swedish by Margareta Eklöf. It was over ten years since I read it, so it was nice to have a reminder of them even though the documentary (for obvious reasons) was not as thorough as the book was.

The queens all deserve posts in my Historical Women series, but I will give you a short overview of each of them here.

Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) is the first of Henry's wife and they seem to have actually loved each other from the beginning. She originally came from Spain at the age of 15 to marry Henry's older brother Arthur in November 1501, but he died pretty soon after their wedding. Henry VIII's father, king Henry VII, then said that Catherine could marry prince Henry instead if Catherine's father (Ferdinand II of Aragon) could send her dowry in advance. For some reason Ferdinand did not do this and Catherine was left without money to even buy for food. Seven years later, in 1509 Henry VII died of tuberculosis and Henry VIII was now king and free to marry whoever he wanted and he chose Catherine who he actually seems to have loved.

Their struggle (and failing) to get a healthy child is well-known and the only one who lived through the first few weeks was their daughter who would later be known as king/queen Mary I. What is far lesser known I think is Catherine's  war victory over the Scots.

Henry named her regent while he was at war against France in 1513 and the Scottish king James IV saw a chance to invade England. Catherine however countered with sending two armies and leading a third one and at the battle of Flodden Field on 9 September king James was killed.

Catherine really seems to have been a pretty fierce fighter and she did not give up her husband without a fight. She was forced to do so in the end and live the rest of her life in poverty.

Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn (c 1501-1536) was made queen in 1533 when she married Henry with a promise that he would give him a son. What surprised me was how soon after Catherine's death Anne was beheaded. I thought there was at least a year apart and not only a couple of months. One can definitely say that she must have fallen from grace as fast as she rose to it.

She too failed to give Henry a living son. The only living child they got was king/queen Elizabeth I.

She was accused of having affairs with several of the male court members (among others her own brother!) and was beheaded in May 1536. The documentary does not seem to think she was guilty of the claims but rather that she was a flirty person in a very flirty court who did not really know how to tread on the fine line of flirting without upsetting her husband.

Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour (c 1508-1537) is often described as pretty meek. She became engaged to Henry the day after Anne's excecution in 1536.

Jane rewith his oldest daughter Mary whom she seems to have befriended and cared for.

She died only days after having given birth to hers and Henry's son king Edward VI in October 1537.

Anna von Kleve (1515-1557) (Or Anne of Cleves as she is usually called in English.) came from Germany to marry Henry in 1540.

When Jane died, Henry sent out his painter Hans Holbein the younger to look for a new wife. Among other ones, he painted the portrayed above to the right and the one of princess Christine af Denmark whose involvement with Henry I will get to later.

Anna von Kleve

Henry was suspicious, so he decided to disguise himself and seek her up. If she would recognise him, he decided she was the love of his life. She did not recognise him at all and of course being approached by a man in discguise scared her. (Based on the #metoo-movement I cannot say that I blame her either.) Henry also found her ugly saying she looked like a horse.

The marriage therefore was annuled after only a few months and this is one of the main problems I have with the documentary. They sort of leave her story unfinished showing no interest in her life after the divorce even though she got a really powerful position as The king's beloved sister. She also befriended Henry and cared for his children. She also outlived both Henry and his other wives and got to see Mary I being crowned.

Jane Seymour

The fact that this is left out is a bit confusing based on the title of the documentary. It seems that even though it was a documentary in four episodes about his wives, the leading character in it was still really Henry.

Catherine Howard (c 1523-1542) was the cousin of Anne Boleyn and she was married to Henry almost as soon as his marriage to Anna of Cleves was annuled.

As was the tradition of Henry's wives, she did not last long. In five years, he actually had four failed marriages.

Catherine was accused of treason for commiting adultery with the male courtier Thomas Culpeper and was beheaded in February 1542.

Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr (c 1512-1548) was to be Henry's last wife. They married in 1543. She had been married twice before and really knew how to take care of both him and his children. It seems like she had a keen eye to Thomas Seymour, the brother of Henry's third wife Jane. When the king proposed however, she must have thought she could not refuse him.

She was far more political than I would have thought to be honest. She too is also often portrayed as meek. She tried to urge Henry on to finish the reformation, but the bishop of Winchester put a stop to it.

Henry died in 1547 and Catherine left the court after Edward VI's coronation. She married Thomas Seymour, but died in childbirth only a year later.

Christine af Denmark

That was a very shortened version of the life of each of Henry's queens. Overall I liked the documentary, but there were a few things that they could have thought about. Like I said, the leaving out the rest of Anne of Cleves life in England did not fit into the focus of the documentary.

Another thing really bothered me even though I cannot say it surprised me either. They hosts said that Henry was not keen to leave the throne to one of his daughters because every time a woman had tried to rule England before it had ended in civil war. While this is true, they completely left out the fact that the civil war parts of the female rulers's reign was not really their fault, but caused by men not wanting a woman to rule at all...

I also find it rather ironic that the woman who played Anne Boleyn looked a bit like Catherine of Aragon. It was like the play I saw of Swedish king Erik XIV's life at the castle in Kalmar this summer where the court musician was more or less a clone of the 16th century king while the man playing Erik did not look at all like him.

And last of all I would also have liked them to include Henry's proposal to the Danish princess Christina (The portrait above to the right is the one Hans Holbein the younger made that I mentioned above.), daugther of king Christian II and his wife Isabella of Austria, who is said to have refused him saying that she only had one head and she would very much like to keep it!

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on this day (14 July) into a wealthy family in Washington New Hall in County Durham, England in 1868. Her mother died in childbirth three years later and Gertrude was very close to her mill-owning father Sir Hugh Bell who had held several government positions.

Her family's wealth gave her access to the universities and she studied at both Queen's College London and Oxford university. Her studied history which was one of the few subjects that was opened to women at the time. In two years she recieved a first class honours degree.

After graduating, she spent a lot of time travelling the world. During this time she developed a passion for archaeology and languages. Beside English, she spoke Arabic, Persian, French and German, Italian and Turkish.

Her heart lay in archaeology, but she was also a linguist, writer and the best woman mountaineer of her age. She gained interest in the Arabic world and its culture and made extensive journeys across the Middle East. Her knowledge about the Arabs also led to a position as a British secret agent during the First World War after first having volontered as a nurse in France.

After the war, she became focused all her research on Mespotamia and supported an independent Iraqi and became active in their politics. She supported Lawrence of Arabia's protege Faisal and used her connections to have him crowned king. After this, she acted as his advisor. In Iraq, she got the nickname Kathun which means fine lady or gentlewoman.

‘I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,’ 

 ~ Gertrud Bell in a letter to her father

In 1923, she opened Bagdad Archaeological Museum (later renamed the Iraqi museum). Unfortunately, the museum was plundered during the Iraqi war in 2003.

On 12 July 1926 Gertrud was found dead after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. It is unclear if it was deliberate or not.

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Caton-Thompson

Gertrude Caton-Thompson

While thinking of my Historical Women series, I also thought about how many amazing female archaeologists I know of and who also deserves a place in the spot light. Though technically, they can also be viewed as "Historical Women", I have decided to give them their own category. Not least, to present a more varied picture of my own profession.

Dwelling into the research history of archaeology, one actually find rather a lot of different women who worked on excavations with or without men (mainly their husbands). It seems to have been particularly easy for American, British and French women to do archaeological work in the colonies. They also seem to have had it easier if they had worked with something that their contemporary society (late 19th and early 20th century) thought of as fitting for a woman. There are quite a lot of nurses among them for example.

Many of these female archaeologists worked in their shadows of their husbands and have become marginalised in the research history because their texts were published in their husbands's names. There were also quite a few women working in archieves and museum storehouses who's work never really classified as archaeology wherefore they are never mentioned in research historical overviews. Quite a few of them, however, did have an obituary. Not least the archaeologist I intend to devote the rest of this post to. Her name was Gertrude Caton-Thompson and she was born in London in 1888. Her interest in archaeology was founded when she visited Egypt together with her mother in 1911 and afterwards also visited Sarah Paterson's on Ancient Greece at the British Museum. She inherited money in 1912 which made her financially independent and studied both a Cambride and University College London from 1921 onwards. Among her teachers were Margaret Murray, Dorothea Bate and William Matthew Flinders Petrie. She participated in quite a few excavations in Egypt during the 1920's. Not least in the Faiyum oasis with geologist Elinor Wight Gardner in 1925.

Part of Great Zimbabwe

Her most famous excavation is that of the remains of Great Zimbabwe close to Masvingo in what was then known as Rhodesia, but that we today call Zimbabwe. The remains had been known by Europeans since the 16th century when Portugese soldiers at the coastal fort in Sofala in Moçambique heard tales of great remains deep inside the heart of Africa. The first European to visit the remains was the German geologist Carl Mauch in 1871 and Gertrude's countryman J. Theodore Bent was the first to do any archaeological work of the remains at the end of the 19th century. Bent interpreted the remains as too sophisticated to have been built by any known "African race". Instead he sought parallels with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, not least with the Phoenicians.

Aerial view of Great Zimbabwe

In 1905, the British Association for the Advancement of Science sent another student of Flinders Petrie to Great Zimbabwe, David Randall-MacIver. He debunked Bent's migration theory of Great Zimbabwe being of African origin. The was not really what the British Association for the Advancement of Science or the white population of Rhodesia wanted to hear. Not least since they used the remains to legitimize their imperialism in the area.

Therefore the association sent Gertrude in 1929. She did, however, confirm Randall-MacIver's theory of an African origin. Not least since she could find similar objects being made among contemporary native craftsmen. For this she became very impopular among the same crowd as Randall-MacIver's but she stood her ground, publishing her results in 1931. She was not totally unbiased though. After having established that Great Zimbabwe had African origin, she talks about the remains in a rather degrading way, but there is no way to deny that her research was important. She used stratigraphical methods and artefact chronology to date the site to the Middle Ages. Dates that have actually been confirmed by carbon dating today.

Gertrude died in 1985.



References:

• Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth 2003. Genusforskning inom arkeologin, Högskoleverket, Stockholm
• Palmer, Douglas & Bahn Paul G. & Tyldesley, Joyce 2006. Arkeologins största upptäckter, Swedish translation by Kjell Waltman, Historiska media, Kina
• Renfrew, Colin & Bahn, Paul 2012. Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice, Thames and Hudson, London
• Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Picture from here, here and here.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"We cannot find our future if we forget our past."

~ Alaa Awad, modern Egyptian artist

I have been watching this three part documentary called Treasures of Ancient Egypt where art lover Alastair Sooke discover ancient Egypt through 30 art pieces and what he finds is very intriguing.

At a first glance, ancient Egyptian art seems schematic and static and everything is supposed to be the same over thousands and thousands of years. Sooke, however, finds that there are a lot of things that interupts the static and schematic pictures, making them full of life. Some art pieces also goes more or less against the schematic style. I loved the so called ostraka Sooke finds in the worker's village Deir-el-Medina. They are much more free-styled and a lot of them are also parodies on the official style.

As someone who has studied colonialism/imperialism/cultural meating for awhile I do not really see it as strange that the invaders in Egypt after the New Kingdom tried portraying themselves as Egyptian, but also incorporating their own style, creating a hybrid. This is something I have tackled before, here and here but it might be time for a recap. To me, we are thinking too biologically about the concept of culture, one of the many things we have not been able to shake from modern imperialism of the last two centuries. It is extremely seldom that invaders go in and force their own culture on the colonized groups. This is an idea sprung from imperialism during the last two centuries and only one form out of many types of colonialism. Everyone of them were about power, but not everyone of them has been as devestating as imperialism during the last 200 years. Sooke says that maybe the Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies were not so powerful so they could introduce Greek culture into Egypt. I, however, would rather say that they were smart. They seem to have a much better understanding of cultures and how they interact than we do today. By using history and the old expressions of power in Egypt, they legitimized their right to rule over the Egyptians. They sought to build on the sense of eternity and stability presented in ancient Egyptian art, but like all cultures do as they adopt new traits, they interpreted it through their own cultural logic. This is why we actually can see some Greek influences in Egyptian art from this time. It really is like Egyptian artist Alaa Awad said to Sooke and which I qouted in the beginning. We all must look to the history to find our future.


Picture was borrowed here.

Andrew Lloyd Webber - Phantom of the Opera

Yesterday, I went to see the Swedish production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous musical Phantom of the Opera at the teather  The musical is based on the book Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux which was first published in 1910.

It tells the story of the opera in Paris in the 19th century where the young preformer Christine has been given song lessons by a mysterious figure for quite some time before the show starts.  As it turns out, the mysterious figure is the opera's notorious phantom who wants to replace the opera's star Carlotta with Christine.

The opera gets new owners and one of them turns out to be Christine's childhood friend Raoul, vicomte de Chagny. They fall in love and a love triangle occurs which more or less turns into a destruction for the opera and more or less everyone working there.

I find both the love story and the character of the phantom wonderfully complex.

He is an abused child and it is said not even his mother wanted anything to do with him. She only gave him a mask to cover up his deformed face. He was then trapped in a cage and was forced to travel around being shown of to people just because he was defigured. This aspect of him is what I find to be the main theme of the show. What happens to someone who has been abused his whole life?

I know there has been an increasing number of pop-cultural expressions in recent years that says that we always have a choice how to act and this is true to a certain extent. You can always choose to treat people badly. However, as for someone who has been abused his whole life, I do think it is important to actually think of it from another perspective. The phantom has always been mistreated. No one has ever been close to him and no one has probably ever loved him. The society at the time was extremely nasty to people who did not fit into the norms. His only lasting relationships seem to be the one he has with the ballet teacher Madame Giry and Christine. What is also important to know about the Phantom is that he does seem happy to keep a distance towards Christine. Loving her from afar so to speak. Christine also seems to trust him completely, believing he is the angel of music her dead father has promised would come to her. This, I would say, indicates that they have had at least a fairly good relationship up until the point where Raoul shows up.

Raoul at first seems to be a better choise than Phantom. He is confident and handsome. He is rich and has a title. He and Christine also has a history, but one that is further back in history when they were children. This is actually part of the problem I see with their relationship. It is actually explained by Raouls part in the song Think of me and the Swedish translation I would say captures it much better. The original is: "Long ago. It seems so long ago. How young and innocent we were. She may not remember me, but I remember her." The Swedish translation however is: "Vad hon ändrats. Hon är inte mer, den barndoms vän som lekt' med mig. Vi har inte setts på länge. Men nog minns jag dig." ("How she has changed. She is no longer the childhood friend who played with me. We have not seen each other for long, but I do remember you.") This I think is the main problem! They did know each other as children (and probably also had some feelings for each other back then). However, they have grown up now and as our identities change with experience and time, we are never the same people as adults as we were as children. Since there is literally no time for them to form trust and get to know each other (like Christine has with the Phantom), I do think they are more in love with the memory of the child version of each other than of each other.

The second problem I have with Raoul and Christine's relationship is the fact that he neither listens to her and feels himself entitled to decide everything for her. This shows an extreme amount of disrespect and is not a quality that establishes trust in a relationship. This too is very well exemplified by their first meeting in the show. She has just preformed and also seems to have made herself ready for bed when Raoul shows up. She tells her of her mysterious song teacher, but he is not at all interested in what she says. Instead he tells her that she has two minutes to get ready because they will go out. The same goes for when Raoul tells of his plan to capture (and kill) the Phantom during the performance of his Don Juan. She says she will not preform it, probably both because she knows it will not work and because it is obvious she cares for the Phantom. However, Raoul more or less forces her to do so.

The Phantom, on the other hand, does show a great matter more respect for her. As I said above, he is really content watching and loving her from afar. However, as he realises that Raoul is a big threat for Christine's attention, he is triggered to show himself to her. The main problem is that he does not know how to handle other people. This is why it all goes downhill. But the only time he hurts her physically, he also shows remorse afterwards. This is important and why I do feel like the Phantom is a far better partner for Christine than Raoul.

The photo of the programme was taken by myself before the show. The other was borrowed from here.

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

There is a lot to say about the christmas traditions and their history and I could spend this Christmas Eve post on talking about how the Scandinavian languages have word for Christmas that derive from one of Odin's many names Jólnir. How the earliest known celebration of the birth of Jesus in the Coptic church in Egypt in the 3rd century AD was in the beginning of May and how the celebration was moved to it's current place in December due to Pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, when Christianity gained power in the Roman Empire.

I could also talk about weird Swedish traditions like eating the pagan pig Särimner every christmas. Or that we are all watching the Disney christmas special originally called From all of us, but which we call Kalle Anka (Donald Duck) at three o'clock every Christmas Eve. Or what a total uproar it becomes if Disney or SVT tries changing even one second of that show...

But I am not going to do so. This because I find it better and more important nowadays to talk about Charles Dickens's classical book A Christmas Carol. The book was published in 1843 but its message is still important to reflect upon.

A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy and selfish buisness man.

Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips bue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry ching. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

Scrooge's selfishness is clear in the description of him in the first stave (as the chapters are called in the book. An influence from the music world like the title of the novella itself also is.). He does not care for anyone or anything and is too trapped in himself that not even the weather can affect him. His cold inner nature is also clearly demonstrated by his outer one. He is mean and uncaring to everyone.

One Christmas night, he is visited by the ghost of his 7-years-dead buisness partner Jacob Marley. Marley tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts that will try to make him change his ways so he will not be doomed to haunt around the world regretting his choice not to care about others after death like himself.

'Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask', said Scrooge looking intently at the Spirit's robe, 'but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?'
'It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it', was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. 'Look here!'
From the foldings of its robe it brought two children, wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
'O man! look here! Look, look down here!' exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish, but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched thm with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared outo menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half as horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
'Spirit! are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.
'They are Man's' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. (---)' 

The three ghosts turns out to be: The ghost of Christmas past, The ghost of Christmas present and The ghost of Christmas yet to come. They have a different lesson to teach Scrooge about the importance of self-reflection, of empathy and compassion and of long-term thinking. In a world where people strives to live in the present, not reflecting on memories of the past nor of what consequences their action will have on the future, A Christmas Carol is just as an important lesson today, when the boy and girl accompanying The ghost of Christmas present grows ever stronger and when the sake of goodness, empathy and compassion are seen as something naive and bad. But there is hope. Like Scrooge, one always deserves a second chance to correct ones way of living.


God Jul! Merry Christmas!

About chess - or the other inspiration for my view on culture

Not much is known
Of early days of chess
Beyond a fairly vague report
That fifteen hundred years ago
Two princes fought, though brothers
For a Hindu throne

~ Chess, Story of Chess

The Eddan Queen
Photo: Historiska museet i Lund

I read a blog post from 2014 on the blog of the contract archaeological company then called Riksantikvarieämbetets uppdragsverksamhet (Now Arkeologerna.). It was about a chess piece from the 13th century turning up at the excavation of the Eddan block in Linköping in Östergötland, Sweden. Therefore I think it would be perfect opportunity to tell you about the history of chess and why I think it is perfect for understanding both how cultures interact and what the game can tell us about early Medieval Europe. In many ways it is a continuation of the entry I made a while ago about the Sami hat.

My grandfather taught me to play chess when I was five. Even though the blog post about the Eddan Queen is very imformative, there are some problems with it. For example it uses a direct translation to Swedish of the English names of the pieces and I will tell you why I find this problematic later on in this post, but first som back story.

Chess originated in India and is said to have been spread to Europe via the Arabs in the early Middle Ages. The oldest known written sources of the game and its rules is Versus de scachis dating to c. AD 1000. The blog post about the Eddan Queen says that it probably came to Scandinavia during the 12th century. However, as always with written sources, I think there are reasons to be cautious saying this dates the first use of the game in either Europe or Scandinavia. It might have been used for quite some time before that, just that no one had thought about writing it all down.

Part of the Lewis chess set.
Photo: National Museums Scotland

The Silk Road was, after all, very important to the Vikings and they tended to pick up whatever they liked and brought back home to use it as their own. An indication of when the game was first introduced in Sweden, might the name of the pieces actually provide wherefore I found it sad to see that a direct translation of the English names was used in the blog post about the Eddan Queen.

Like so often when different cultures interact and pick something up from one another, changes need to be made to accommodate the new social context. This also happened to the chess set. In the blog post about the Eddan Queen, it was explained that the army of the Indian and Arabic game turned into representations of the social classes in the European feudalistic society. I, myself, would actually not say that that was really the case.

The Medieval army of the European countries actually did consist of both kings, pawns, knights and bishops and sometimes even women (like queens). However, there were ceveral changes in the pieces collection anyway. The king kept his title, but his advisor, the vizier of the Indian/Arabic version turned into a queen. In Swedish she is normally known as Dam (direct translation: Lady). The battle elephant turned into a bishop in the English version of the game. In Sweden those same pieces are known as Löpare (direct translation: Runner) and the horses where never turned into knights as in the English version. The name normally used in the Swedish version is an older term for horse: Springare. In the Indian/Arabic chess, there were also two wagons that became castles in English and Torn (towers) in Swedish and also the foot soldiers turned into pawns (This is actually the only piece that can be directly translated in Swedish: Bönder.).

Why is this so important to me? Because chess is actually an excellent way to see how far Christianity had spread throughout Europe and which of the "classical social classes" of the Medieval period that had been established at the time the game was introduced.

More stilistic chess pieces

England seems to have already had an established medieval society with knights, kings and queens and the Church seems to have had much more influence there as evident by the bishop's name, than it had in Swede, when the game was introduced there. The names of the pieces reflect this.

The rules of the games also changed when it came to Europe, giving the new queen a much more active role in the games. Today she is the most valuable and piece.

But how about the Arabs? Did they find a need to change the game from its Indian roots? Yes, they did. The older, more naturalistic pieces contradicted the Quran's prohibition of portraying humans and animals. Because of this, the game pieces were transformed to more abstract versions. Today you can find them both while looking for chess sets.

King in a set of game pieces for Hnefatafl
from burial BJ750, Hemlanden Birka, Björkö, Mälaren, Sweden
Photo by SHM 2001-09-26

Another board game that seems to have been popular among the Vikings is Hnefatafl and I just have to show you the one to the left from Birka since I think the pieces are so beautiful. Game pieces turn up in elite Viking burials from time to time. There are some similarities to Chess with both being played on a checkered board and both have the purpose of defending a special piece called "king" which, just like in chess is actually pretty weak. An interesting aspect considering both games illustrates Medieval power structures...


Pictures were borrowed from here, here and here and here.

Conn Iggulden - Wars of the Roses. Stormbird

The Wars of the Roses is a difficult period in the history of England. Conn Iggulden starts his series about the period with the death of Edward III in 1377. After that event, there was a messy fight for power among his sons that split the family into many different branches. York and Lancaster are the most important ones to understand the Wars of the Roses.

The power struggle after Edward's death led to Henry IV (part of the Lancaster branch) took the throne from his cousin Richard II. Henry was the father of Philippa who married the Nordic union king Erik of Pomerania in 1406 (I will return to her in later blog posts.). His oldest son Henry V inherited the English throne after him.

Henry V is seen as a hero by the English for beating the French in the battle of Agincourt in 1415. He, however, died young in 1422 leaving the throne to his very young son Henry VI. The latter is the king of England when Stormbird starts off in 1443.

Henry VI is nothing like his father. He is  young and sickly and wants peace. His spymaster Derry Brewer therefore gets the idea to marry him off to the French princess Margaret of Anjou in exchange for a truce and parts of France that had been counquered by the English during the 100 years war that Edward III started. This because he understands that Henry never will be able to keep them. Derry is one of a few fictional characters in Stormbird and Iggulden explains why he chose to follow this part at the end of the book in an appendix called  Historical notes (The main reason he gives is that Henry would have needed a person who knew the ways of the French court.)

Henry and Margaret marries and a fragile truce is initiated. The Frenchmen are, however pretty violent in their ways to take back controll over the parts Henry has returned to them and they meets some serious resistance in the English settlers (eg Thomas Woodchurch and his son Rowan). Henry's father's second cousin (if I have correctly understood the family tree), Richard, Duke of York gets upset over the whole affair and starts gathering support for claiming his right to the throne.

Henry is depicted as a credulous and mild man who does not quite grasp the life outside of the castle walls. This leads to courtiers surrounding him, taking liberties and titles and his subjects suffer. This is where the character Jack Cade walks into the story. He is the leader of a revolt in Kent and manages to get to London. Iggulden depicts him as if he could be a very good leader, but his abuse of alcohol makes him volatile. If he had managed in making the Londoners part of his revolt, he might have succeded better, but instead, he loots the city, turning them against him.

Iggulden tells the story from many different characters. This gets confusing from time to time and I think it would have been better if he used one character's perspective for an entire chapter (kind of like in the A Song of Ice and Fire books). At the same time the story also benefits from this changing perspective, giving the reader a chance to see the different types of power that comes into conflict.

The character I personally likes most to follow is queen Margaret. She has got a bad reputation in history because of Yorkish propaganda and I like that Iggulden has chosen to get away from the picture of her as "The she-wolf of France". Instead he portrays her as a product of the power vaccum in England at the time. She develops from a 14 year old princess to a strong queen prepared to fight for her position, her marriage and her son. Unfortunately, she is the only female among the main characters in a very male oriented plot (Richard of York's wife Cecily do appear from time to time, but seems less important to the plot.). This might have historical reasons, but I still think there most have been some other women present at the time.

The portrayal of violence is pretty good, but I mostly enjoyed how Iggulden takes a more humanistic approach to the events of the time. The scenes between Margaret and Henry and between Thomas Woodchurch and Rowan is depicted with tenderness and love and is a nice interruption to the otherwise pretty raw power struggles the book depicts.

Savage Stone Age

Even if it cannot be seen on this blog (yet), I do have more nerdy favourites than Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. My second largest is the British sketch show Horrible Histories. It is mainly aimed towards children, but it has a huge adult fan base as well, which is not really surprising. It is based on books by Terry Deary and to a Swedish audience it is probably best described as similar in its setup to the Swedish children's show Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter. Both consist of educational sketches and songs and both also use humour to teach children about certain themes. Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter teaches them to read and count and therefore has a somewhat younger audience than Horrible Histories, whichs main theme is history. And not just history taught in school which mainly involves years, wars and rulers. The show uses fun, weird and sometimes quite gruesome facts about time period, people or weird thing that happened.

The humour of the show is what I like the most. It is not like in so many other shows aimed both towards children and adults today, it usually trusts its audience to be smart enough to get the jokes and messages that it want to get across. For short: it treats even children like they have a brain and they can think for themselves. The jokes are seldom straight forward and often want to evoke a reflection process in the audience, which it also seem to manage. It encourages children to do their own research and also be quite source critical. I can go on and on in my praises of the show, but I also have some minor criticism about it. Mainly when it comes to how the Stone Age and the Neanderthals are portrayed. These themes are often quite stereotypically depicted and the extremely problematic term "cavemen" is used often during the shows Stone Age sketches. It also portrays people who barely can speak, especially when it comes to Neanderthals. The subject of Neanderthals speech abilities has been discussed among scholars a lot in recent years and we have not heard the last about it. However, there are great sketches about the Stone Age as well in the show. Sketches that really problematize the concept and the general picture of the Stone Age human. The best I think is the one illustrated by the pictures below.

Normally I prefer later time periods like the Iron Age and Middle Ages, but after participating in a huge archaeological excavation in Motala in Sweden a couple of years ago, I see myself as tiptoeing around in the Stone Age as well.
First of all, the Stone Age is, like every other historical time period, is a construction of later times mainly made by academics to sort through the mess that historical facts can be. Just the Stone Age is part of the so called Three-age System that the Danish antiquarian  Christian Jürgensen Thomsen put together for the archaeological collection at the National Museum of Copenhagen in the 1820's. Therefore it fits best for the Scandinavian prehistory and might be less convenient for other geographical areas. It is not all the time good and handy and can be very unwieldy. However, I still is the most practical way to handle it.

The Stone Age can be divided into three smaller chunks: The Paleolithic, (the older Stone Age), The Mesolithic, (the Middle Stone Age) and the Neolithic (the New Stone Age). These divisions is based mainly on livelihood, but also somewhat on climate changes. I think the Paleolithic in some cases can be stretched as far back as we can get, even long before our own speices, Homo Sapiens, did evolve. The Mesolithic is mainly used for Northern Europe which was covered by the ice during the Ice Age. During both of these periodes, humans were nomadic hunter gatherers. During the Neolithic on the other hand, people started settling down with agriculture and pets. Even though, dogs seems to have been domesticated already during the Mesolithic.

But enough about the period itself! What I want to talk about in this entry is the depiction of the time period in popular culture. What does the Stone Age generally mean to someone who is not an archaeologist and why is it depicted as it is?

Stone Age is probably the one period that brings out the contemporary evolutionistic biases of the Western world the most. The period was mainly created through Western colonial contact with other types of societies and analogies were used to make parallels between the distant past and the distant present.

Archaeology as a science has its roots in the antiquarian tradition of the 17th and 18th century, but was not really founded as a dicipline until the second half of the 19th century. Charles Darwin's theories of (biological) evolution played a huge part in the development of the dicipline and cultural evolution was seen as an extention of it. The process was unilinear and everything was seen as striving to evolve. This lead (Western) scholars to place different cultures into hiearchies based on the level of evolution. Of course the Western one was the ultimate goal as to which every other society would become. Hunter-gatherer groups of (especially America, and Australia) were placed at the bottom of the hiearchies. They were seen as the last remains of Paleolthic hunter gatherer groups and had not the means to evolve by themselves. Neither the Stone Age nor the contemporary hunter-gatherer groups were viewed as societies and cultures that were supposed to be studied in their own rights and contexts, but as a mean to exaggerate how evolved the Western world had become and also to legitimize Western imperialism since contemporary hunter-gatherer groups were not able to evolve without the influence of the Western society.

Unfortunately this colonially biased view of the Stone Age has remained in Western popular culture and can be seen in many of the Savage Stone Age sketches of Horrible Histories, but I really enjoyed the one shown by the pictures above. This because it problematized our view of the Stone Age and also showed that white men still carry prejudice towards other culture. The joke works because, on the contrary to much humour of today, it is not bullying on the people already lying on the ground. It is the white man, considering higher up in the hiearchy that is suffering for his prejudices instead. That is humour at its best!

Hermione Granger and the power of knowledge

You probably have seen a lot of memes on the Internet in the last couple of years. Often these are made to joke about or ridicule something. Some of them are really fun and clever and some of them just do not seem to understand the thing they are trying to ridicule. Like this Harry Potter one I came across awhile ago:

If you do not know who she is. The girl sitting on the books is Emma Watson who plays the part of Hermione Granger, one of the main characters in the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.

In the third book: Prisoner of Azkaban, she has chosen so many subjects that she needs to time-travel to be able to get to all of her classes. Time-traveling always brings an ambivalence to stories because it gives the characters a tool to go back and remake everything. This fact has also become memes which say that someone could have gone back to save Harry's parents since Harry and Hermione could go back to save the hippogriff Buckbeak.

I will not go further into this here, but I have always tought about it like they created a parallel timeline in which they do things they had already done once. Why? Because they actually interact with themselves. Harry thinks he sees his father casting a patronus to save himself, Hermione and Sirius Black, but he really sees his future self casting it.

Now back to the meme above posted on Mugglenet's facebook page. I usually like the Mugglenet's indept analysis of the books and the films. Therefore I was a little surprised to see both the meme together with the comment "She still needs to sort out her priorities"a hint to a conversation between Ron and Hermione in the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

The standpoint does not surprise me. Our society today seems to have a huge disregard for knowledge and this is dangerous! Knowledge is actually a very powerful weapon against hate and ignorance. This is also one of the greater themes in the Harry Potter books, which is very clear if you bothered to read and reflect on them. Harry defeats the evil Lord Voldemort not because he is stronger or more powerful. He defeats him because he has taken the time to do research beforehand, This is what the 6th book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is all about! Him and Albus Dumbledore exploring where Voldemort comes from. This means he has gained knowledge that Voldemort is to insensitive (and egocentric) to care about. Harry has also reflected on this knowledge, which means he understands the situation (and who is the owner of the Elder Wand).

Unfortunatelly this theme has been reduced to barely nothing in the films and the 6th film is more devoted to the "love square" Harry-Hermione-Ron-Lavender which I have long wonder if it is an influence from the Twilight films that were released at the same time.

Harry Potter are really smart books and they have a lot to teach us if we really reflect on what they want to get across to us. Hermione is also one of the best role models for young people of both genders. She is often seen as nerdy and a little weird because she wants to spend so much time studying, but I think it is so great to see a female character interested in gaining knowledge more or less just because she thinks it is fun to learn! She is not portrayed as a geek everyone wants to bully either but a multifaceted character who sometimes is downright cool! She also uses her knowledge and understanding to her great advantage. I think it is great that Albus Dumbledore and McGonagall goes to such length to encourage her throughout the books.