I have wanted to share this superb animation for a while. Released in Denmark in 2012, Væsen is a wonderful homage to the Golden Age of illustration and animation, including the early work of the Disney studio – Snow White and Pinnochio in particular. Those films pulled in influences from a number of late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrators. One artist who worked for the studio in those days, the talented and versatile artist Gustaf Tenggren (1896 – 1970), developed a style that drew heavily on the work of artists like John Bauer and Arthur Rackham (he in fact succeeded John Bauer as the illustrator of Bland tomtar och troll, the Swedish fairy-tale annual). It is a tragedy that he would later destroy many of his fabulous early paintings and go on to pioneer a flat and sterile approach that would dominate in children’s illustration for several decades.
Continue reading “Væsen and the Golden Age of Illustration”The Battle of Ashdown in Medieval Warfare
A few weeks ago, I had an article titled The Battle of Ashdown: Victory, battlefield, and the language of war published in Medieval Warfare magazine. The theme of the issue is Alfred the Great and the Great Heathen Army and thus coincides neatly with my own area of academic interest. The publication is not scholarly, but contains a good deal of interesting material and is nicely produced with some superb commissioned illustrations.
Continue reading “The Battle of Ashdown in Medieval Warfare”Autumn
On one of the first days of October I went walking with my wife. I found my first conker of the year, with the beautiful patina and texture of newborn wood. It’s already wrinkled, like a hard shiny prune. After the walk I went shopping and bought a small collection of objects. I hadn’t intended them to be a collection, but when I looked at them together I was struck how my emotional response to the season was reflected in the things I had chosen. The warm, rich, smoked flavours of Beavertown’s Smog Rocket is full of the scent of bonfires and leaf litter.
Book Reviews: Alfred’s Wars and Viking Warfare
Two reviews (by me) of titles published in the last couple of years on the subject of early medieval warfare can now be read online.
The first is a review of Ryan Lavelle’s Verbruggen-prize-winning Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age (Boydell 2010) which, apart from its slightly misleading title (it happily ranges far more widely than the mention of Alfred implies), thoroughly deserves all the praise it has received. It is also, as of last year, out now in paperback for a very reasonable price.
The second is my review of I. P. Stephenson’s Viking Warfare. This has the distinction of being my most read article on academia.edu, although I suspect that this is testament to the popularity of ‘Viking Warfare’ as a search term, rather than any great desire on the public at large to discover my opinions of Mr Stephenson’s book. In hindsight, I would soften my criticism of Stephenson’s approach, and in particular his comments regarding the shift in military fashions over the tenth and into the eleventh centuries. However, I still take issue with some of the assumptions made by the author given the paucity of the material evidence. Nevertheless, this is still one of the better efforts addressing this subject currently in print.
Ringmere
Yesterday I visited the site that has long been associated with the Battle of Ringmere (as named by John of Worcester and called Hringmaraheiðr in various Norse saga accounts which include some fascinating contemporary skaldic verse relating to the battle). The connection of the battle to a remarkable geological feature – Ringmere – on Wretham Heath is a long-standing one, which has only recently been seriously challenged in a well reasoned article by Keith Briggs that appeared in ‘Notes and Queries’ [read it here]. Nevertheless, the site at Wretham remains a compelling one, not least due to the preservation of an open and atmospheric landscape thanks to the designation of Wretham Heath as a nature reserve (run by the Norfolk Naturalists Trust).
THOMAS J. T. WILLIAMS 