by Arnold van de Laar

When Erik Weisz died on 31 October 1926, it was world news. Like Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Erik Weisz typified the spirit of that wonderful time in America. Almost no one knew his real name but his stage name is still—almost a century later—known around the world and has become synonymous with the art that he developed. Erik Weisz was the world-famous Harry Houdini, the escape artist who had himself buttoned up into a straitjacket and hoisted up in the air by his feet, wrapped in chains and sealed in a wooden chest and then thrown overboard in New York harbor, handcuffed and shut in a milk churn full of beer. And he always emerged unharmed, even after being buried alive in a bronze coffin. Many will think that his death was as spectacular as his life, that he drowned while performing his legendary Chinese Water Torture Cell act—handcuffed, upside down and underwater, on stage, in front of a packed theatre. But nothing is further from the truth.

Houdini ornamented his spectacular escape acts with Spiritism and classical circus tricks. He was a juggler, an acrobat and a strong-man. He claimed, for example, that his abdominal muscles could withstand any blow and challenged everyone to try it out. For a long time, it was assumed that his death had been caused by one of these hefty punches in his stomach, but we know now that it had nothing to do with his stunts and was largely down to his stubborn refusal to go to a doctor.

Gordon Whitehead, Jacques Price and Sam Smilovitz were three Canadian students. They visited Houdini in his dressing room in the theatre in Montreal on 22 October 1926, the morning after his performance. Houdini lay on a divan to pose for Smilovitz, who wanted to draw a portrait of him. Whitehead asked him if it was true that he could withstand any blow to his stomach and whether he could give it a try. Houdini agreed and the student immediately started to punch him. He hit Houdini several times extremely hard in his right lower abdomen. The two other young men later stated that the escape artist was clearly not ready for their friend’s rapid attack. They saw that he had only been able to tense his abdominal muscles sufficiently after the third blow and they noticed that, as the tough escape artist—who had been so magnificently indestructible on the stage the previous night—lay there on the divan, he seemed to be suffering unexpected terrible pain from the few well-aimed punches.

Harry Houdini, circa 1905. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

Houdini left the following day, after his evening show, taking the train to Detroit, the next stop on his tour. He was not feeling well and sent a telegram ahead asking to see a doctor when he arrived. But once he got to the city, he had no time to be examined and started the final performance of his life with a high fever. He may have performed his underwater escape act, which entailed him holding his breath for several minutes—a fantastic achievement considering that, after the show, a doctor had no hesitation in concluding that he needed to be operated on immediately. The audience thus had no idea just what an incredible stuntman they were watching up there on the stage.

The surgeon at the hospital in Detroit made his diagnosis with a simple physical examination. Laying his hand on Houdini’s abdomen, he declared that the escape artist was suffering from an everyday complaint—appendicitis—but which was only just then starting to be understood. It had only been correctly described for the first time forty years earlier (when Houdini was twelve years old) by Reginald Fitz in Boston. That is remarkable for a life-threatening illness that must have been affecting people for thousands of years. There is no mention of it in ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman medical texts, while it must have been prevalent in these old civilizations, where knowledge of medicine was already quite advanced. It was first described by Giovanni Battista Morgagni, an eighteenth-century anatomist, but he too was unable to put his finger on the correct cause of its lethal consequences. Only in 1887 did it become clear that this illness did not have to end in the death of the patient when Dr. Thomas Morton in Philadelphia conducted the first successful operation to treat it.

Houdini should, therefore, have simply gone to the hospital in Montreal, where he could have been saved by an operation. Was he too stubborn, too vain, too money-driven, or simply afraid of doctors? He probably thought ‘the show must go on’. Consequently, he was not operated on until three days later in Detroit. The surgeon discovered peritonitis, which develops from the bursting of the appendix. Houdini’s abdominal cavity was completely infected with pus. Four days later his abdomen had to be opened up again to be rinsed out. But the situation did not improve and there were at that time no antibiotics to fight the infection.

Harry Houdini died two days later, at the age of fifty-two. He was buried in Queens, New York, amid a whirl of public attention, in the same bronze coffin he had used for his escape acts. Erik Weisz, juggler, stuntman, Spiritist and, above all, escape artist—known around the world as The Great Houdini—died of a banal, everyday complaint: appendicitis.

Appendicitis is a very common disease. More than 8% of men and almost 7% of women contract appendicitis at some time in their lives. It can occur at any age and is the most common cause of acute abdominal pain. The appendix—more correctly the vermiform (‘worm-shaped’) appendix—is a blind-ended intestinal tube starting from the great bowel near the junction with the small bowel, located in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. It is less than a centimeter in diameter and some ten centimeters long.

Doctors knew about the small organ for a long time, but it had never occurred to anyone that such a small thing could have such disastrous consequences. It is because it is so small that, once it is inflamed, it can burst quite quickly. The contents of the intestines are then released into the abdomen, which causes peritonitis, inflammation of the entire peritoneum, the lining of the abdominal cavity. And that is why the link was never made between that small appendix and the fatal consequences of an abdominal inflammation. Before surgeons dared to open up a living patient’s abdomen with any degree of success in the nineteenth century, they only saw the final state of the appendix in the body of the deceased. During the autopsy, amid the debris of full-scale peritonitis, no one had ever noticed the rupture of that tiny, worm-shaped appendage.

Appendicitis generates a typical series of symptoms that reflect the successive stages of the disease, starting with the inflammation of the appendix itself. This causes a vague organic pain in the center of the upper abdomen. Within a day, the inflammation expands around the appendix and starts to irritate the peritoneum in the area where it is located, on the right side of the lower abdomen. This local pain is much more acute and pronounced than the vague organic pain. Typically, patients with appendicitis describe the pain as moving downwards from the center to the lower right of the abdomen, increasing in severity as it does so. The local irritation of the peritoneum also causes fever, loss of appetite (anorexia) and, above all, pain during movement. Patients can no longer tolerate being touched or making sudden movements, and prefer to lie still, flat on their backs with their legs pulled up. For a normal person in this stage of the disease, it would seem impossible to remain standing in front of a theatre full of people, not to mention allow themselves to be tied up, hung upside down and immersed in the Chinese Water Torture Cell as Houdini did.

Pus then forms around the appendix. At first, the pus can be contained by the surrounding intestines, but in the next stage the appendix dies off locally and bursts. Feces and intestinal gases are then released into the abdominal cavity. The patient experiences a sudden increase in the pain in the lower right of the abdomen, which then spreads throughout the whole abdomen and becomes so severe that it is no longer possible to say exactly where it is coming from. This is the stage of life-threatening peritonitis.

The total picture that fits in with peritonitis is typically that of an ‘irritated abdomen’. The abdominal muscles are tense, the abdomen is hard and every movement is painful. It is not only painful when the abdomen is touched, but even more so when it is released—this is known as ‘rebound tenderness’. The patient’s face is pale, anxious and tense, with sunken eyes and cheeks. The intestines in the abdomen respond to the inflammation by stopping their normal movements. Through a stethoscope, the abdomen is unnaturally quiet. All of these symptoms are so typical of peritonitis that it can be diagnosed in a couple of seconds, with a quick look at the patient (face and position), a few questions (where does it hurt and where and when did it start?), pressing the abdomen once (hard and painful when pressure is applied and released) and listening with the stethoscope (no audible intestinal movements). In the final stage, the patient experiences septic shock caused by blood poisoning; the peritoneum has a large surface area, allowing a mass release of bacteria into the bloodstream. That leads to general poisoning of the body, causing high fever and affecting all organs, with death as the result.

Peritonitis is an acute surgical emergency. The surgeon has to repair or remove the cause as soon as possible and rinse the abdominal cavity. This should be done at the earliest stage possible, preferably before the onset of septic shock or, even better, before the stage of general peritonitis, but the best time is while the problem is still restricted to the affected organ, the tiny appendix. Acute appendicitis is therefore already a surgical emergency.

In 1889, American surgeon Charles McBurney described these principles for operating on appendicitis, namely the sooner the operation is performed, the greater the chances of a full recovery, and that it is sufficient to remove the inflamed organ as long as peritonitis has not yet developed. This linked McBurney irrevocably to appendicitis. The spot on the abdomen where the most pain usually occurs is known as McBurney’s point and the incision in the abdominal wall to perform the appendectomy is also named after him. Every surgeon knows immediately what the problem is if a colleague says that a patient has ‘tenderness at McBurney’s point’.

A classical operation for appendicitis proceeds as follows. The patient lies on his back, the surgeon standing to his right and the assistant to the left. The surgeon makes a small, diagonal incision in the lower right of the abdomen, at McBurney’s point, which is exactly two-thirds of the way down an imaginary line between the navel and the bony projection of the iliac crest, the outer edge of the pelvis. There, beneath the skin and the subcutaneous tissue, are three abdominal muscles on top of each other. At exactly this point in the abdominal wall, these muscles can be passed without cutting them, by maneuvering between the muscle fibers, as though you are opening three pairs of curtains. Below the third muscle is the peritoneum. You have to take hold of this carefully and open it up, making sure you do not damage the intestines. If you are lucky, you can now see the appendix but, usually, it is hidden away somewhere in the depths of the abdomen. You can feel around for it with your finger, free it carefully and pull it outwards. Using a small clamp and an absorbable thread, you first divide and tie off the blood vessel feeding the appendix. You then do the same with the appendix itself. You can now close the peritoneum, move the muscles back in place, and close the aponeurosis, the flat tendon of the outermost of the three abdominal muscles. Lastly, you close the subcutaneous tissue and the skin. The whole business takes about twenty minutes. Today, however, the appendix is no longer removed using the classical procedure. Now, a laparoscopic appendectomy is preferred, using keyhole surgery via the navel and two very small incisions.

Houdini’s symptoms were typical of appendicitis—fever and pain in the lower right of the abdomen. The doctor who was only permitted to examine him in his dressing room in Detroit after the show encountered a seriously sick man with an irritated lower right abdomen. The symptoms were so obvious that the doctors did not even consider the punch in the stomach that Gordon Whitehead had given Houdini three days previously. The diagnosis was confirmed during the operation – they found a perforated appendix and the consequential peritonitis. And yet, it was the punches to the stomach that were the focus of attention later. Other cases of alleged ‘traumatic appendicitis’ – that is, caused by a direct blow, fall or other trauma to the abdomen—were cited. No causal link has, however, ever been found between trauma and appendicitis, and the fact that these two events occurred within days of each other must be seen as coincidence. Nevertheless, the cause of appendicitis is by no means always clear. We do not know why some people contract appendicitis at a certain moment, while others never do.

Harry Houdini and his wife Beatrice. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

In the case of Houdini, it was apparently important to find a cause. The three students were extensively interrogated by the police and the punch delivered by poor Gordon Whitehead was established as the clear cause of death. It may have also been significant that Houdini, given his not entirely danger-free profession, had taken out life insurance that included an accident clause. The clause stated that his wife and lifelong assistant Bess Weisz would receive a double pay-out—500,000 dollars—if Houdini died as the result of an accident while performing a stunt.

While a punch in the stomach to demonstrate his strength could be considered as such, an everyday disease like appendicitis of course could not. Fortunately, Whitehead was not prosecuted for grievous bodily harm or manslaughter, as Price and Smilovitz were able to testify that Houdini had given him permission to punch him.

Among the audience at Houdini’s last performance in the Garrick Theater in Detroit on 24 October 1926 was a man called Harry Rickles. He later recalled that the show had been a disappointment. It had started more than half an hour late and Houdini did not look well. He made mistakes, so that the audience could see through his tricks, and he had to be supported by his assistant several times. But when Rickles read that the escape artist had performed with a burst appendix, from which he died several days later, he realized that Houdini had given his life to perform for his admirers right up to the last minute.

ARNOLD VAN DE LAAR is a surgeon in the Slotervaart Hospital in Amsterdam, specializing in laparoscopic surgery. Born in the Dutch town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, van de Laar studied medicine at the Belgian University of Leuven before taking his first job as general surgeon on the Caribbean Island of Sint Maarten. He now lives in Amsterdam with his wife and two children where, a true Dutchman, he cycles to work every day. Under the Knife is his first book.

The post The Death of an Escape Artist: Harry Houdini appeared first on The History Reader.

The continued demographic crisis of 14th and 15th century plague-ridden Europe did not calm the political waters. Arguably, the majority of people got wealthier when they began to pluck off the clothes of the backs of their dead neighbours while stuffing themselves with the fat gees running wild on the abandoned fields. One should have thought that just to have survived might have calmed the waters. Instead, the wars ravaged the continent.

• 

  In Scandinavia, the continued Swedish rebellion against the Kalmar-union spread havoc in the Swedish countryside as well as towns throughout the century

• Until 1453, most of Northern and Western France was laid waste by the English until the French finally got the upper hand
• Later, in the second half of the century, the war of Roses culminated in several large, decisive battles ending with Bosworth in 1485
• In Central Europe, the century opened with the Hussite wars, which were more or less a series of civil war played out between two imperial factions – the Luxemburgs and the Hapsburgs.
• In Poland, the Jagiellonian Dynasty establish a mighty power at some point ruling Lithuania, Poland. Bohemia, and Hungary
• In Spain, the final years of the Reconquista were spurred on by the outcome of the Castillian Wars of succession leading to the final capture of Granada and the near annihilation of Portugal.
• In the east, two new imperial powers – Muscovy and the Ottomans build their new powerbases through aggressive behaviour culminating with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the final defeat of the Tatar Golden Horde in 1480

The costs of these wars were immense and led towards more creative forms of suppression of peasants as well as new forms of taxation. Also, the warring was spurred on by technological as well as administrative innovations, the invention of the harquebus as well as the introduction of standing armies (France 1449).

These wars were a reflection of the concentration of powerful nodes inside the network of rival states, as Philippe de Commines so vividly sketched in his memoirs finished in 1498. Finally, the political events in France and Burgundy lead to the consolidation of the four great European powers – France, Spain, England and the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs.

To some extent, the same concentration of powers took place on a minor scale with numerous minor and major feuds leading to consolidation and petrification of the nobility. At the end of the 15th century, to enter the ranks of the exalted became nearly impossible, as even rich parvenus discovered when trying to hobnob with the mighty of any realm. This concentration of power meant peripheralisation of the less privileged. The formation of the “modern states” of Western Christendom did not just take place in the upper echelons of society. It reverberated in the insignificant corners of small towns, among the gentry and occasionally led to uprisings such as those in Paris in 1413 and Ghent in 1477 culminating at the beginning of the 16th century.

At the centre of these events were the “princes” – kings, dukes, condottieri, princely bishops or knights – whose orbits followed the paths of “fortune”, the beloved metaphor of which was the wheel.

Political Propaganda

The Gutenberg Press, fully developed in 1439 was the most significant invention of the century. Although the consequences in the form of mass production and spread of printed books did not set its mark before the Reformation, the new technology was widely adopted in the second half of the 15th century; and led to the dissemination of manuals and pamphlets of all sorts on how to conduct the good life. Yet, coins, flags, emblems, signs and colours continued to hold sway as means of public messages. Whether reserved for select groups or broader companies, the core ritual was the procession whether along lanes, towards towns, in marketplaces or inside or between churches. Choreographies of such events as well as festivals became continuously more detailed and led to a “liturgisation” of daily life later preserved as popular culture.

No doubt, these forms of cultural communication had a more profound impact than did the steadily growing numbers of political, philosophical, juridical and not least historical tracts, as well as the constant circulation of political propaganda through letters, speeches, and sermons.

Power of consolidation in theology

In 1417, the Council of Constance effectively found a solution to the Western Schism and appointed Martin V as Pope. As part of these deliberations, Jan Hus was burned on the stake in 1415, John Oldcastle in 1417, while Wycliffe was exhumed and burned in 1428. To this panoply of pre-reformation “saints” might be added Jeanne D’Arc in Rouen in 1431 as well as Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. As secular powers were consolidated and centralised, so did those of the church. Allowing for pietism in the form of Devotio Moderna, the princes of the church sought to channel any subversive and explosive spiritual fervour into a practical and less controversial way of apostolic renewal. As we know, these forms of late medieval piety did not, however, stop the revolts and reforms of the 16th century. Not only the Reformation followed, but wars came to ravage the continent until the middle of the 17th century.

Keywords:

• Wars
• Consolidation of major powers
• Entrenchment of the higher nobility
• Early Reformational battles for the Soul(s) of Europe
• Renaissance in Italy

FEATURED PHOTO:

Battle of Agincourt (1415). Miniature from: l’Abrégé de la Chronique d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet, XVe siècle, Paris, BnF, département des Manuscrits, manuscrit Français 2680, folio 208.

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by Michael R. McGowan and Ralph Pezzullo

People usually become informants for three reasons:

1. They face criminal charges (or are “jammed up,” in FBI parlance) and are seeking favorable treatment in court.
2. They’re interested in eliminating their competition in the criminal world.
3. They’re mercenaries who do it for the money.

Types two and three are dangerous, because they can turn on you at any time. The best informers are people like Nestor, who are motivated to work with law enforcement in order to get their criminal charges reduced.

FBI badge and service pistol. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

For someone to become an FBI informant they have to meet a strict set of legal criteria and be approved by the FBI brass. They generally rule out anyone who has ever been convicted of a violent crime. Since Nestor was a drug dealer with no violent offenses on his record, he was accepted. His wife turned out to be a classy, educated woman with a good job at a utility company.

She started cooperating with us from Day One. Nestor, meanwhile, cooled his heels in jail, but was entitled to a bail hearing every thirty days. Because the courts were filled with spies working for the various drug-trafficking organizations, we didn’t want to risk going to court and asking for his release. Instead, every thirty days at Nestor’s bail hearing his lawyer would argue to lower his bail. After three months, it dropped to a reasonable amount, which Nestor’s wife promptly paid. Once released, Nestor immediately reported for FBI informant duty, and I knew exactly what I wanted to use him for.

In the late ’80s/early ’90s, hides were new to both dope dealers and law enforcement. In fact, before we had stopped Nestor’s car, I’d never seen one before. It got me thinking: Maybe we set up an Undercover Operation (UCO) where we offer cars with hides, and use them to catch bad guys.

UCOs and Title III electronic surveillance were the two most complex, demanding, difficult, and effective investigative techniques in the FBI’s arsenal. I’d been part of a Title III investigation in the Bacalao case, but had never done a UCO. This seemed like the perfect time to try.

Back in those days, the FBI was just starting to use computers. So I spent several days after Nestor’s arrest calling FBI offices all over the country. I asked each one: “Do you know anyone in the FBI or law enforcement who has run an undercover operation like this?”

The Los Angeles Division happened to be my sixth call. Agents there described an FBI resident agency office in Santa Ana, California, that had initiated a similar and very successful undercover operation a year earlier. They called their’s “Loadtrak.” Like a good FBI Agent, I immediately “borrowed” their concept for the East Coast and dubbed ours “Eastload.”

Then, I traveled out to Santa Ana to see how they had set theirs up. Agents in the Orange County municipality generously shared all the nuts and bolts of their UCO. They showed me the various hide cars and trucks, and introduced me to the mechanics who had built the sophisticated hides.

Now that I could show the existence of a very successful precedent in another FBI Division, it turned out to be relatively easy to get my plan approved. Again, like a good FBI Agent, I “borrowed” all of LA’s paperwork, or “ponies” in FBI speak, and started to draft my first FBI UCO.

The process to get an undercover operation approved required extensive preparation, research, logic, hard work, and long hours. There were multiple layers of approvals to secure from our own Division, FBIHQ, and the Department of Justice. The FBI wasn’t about to invest significant time, effort, manpower, and money on some goofy idea. It took a couple of months and gave me writer’s cramps, before we got the green light from Washington with a budget of more than $500,000 for hide buildouts and dope buys.

Next came something we called “backstopping”—or fabricating a story with false documents to support an undercover operation. In this case, we wanted to set up a business that rented out cars with hides to drug dealers and thereby catch a lot of bad guys. We scoured the local area for an appropriate facility and found a huge warehouse in an industrial complex across the Delaware River in New Jersey big enough to accommodate twenty cars with private offices in front. Video monitors, listening devices, and one-way glass had to be installed.

The post Ghost: My Thirty Years as an FBI Undercover Agent appeared first on The History Reader.

Europe in the 10th Century is commonly allowed to stretch from 890 to 1030. Named since the 15th century as the “Century of Lead and Iron”, it was characterised by a significant shift from centre to the periphery, from France to Germany.

During the 9th and 10th centuries, the Carolingian dynasty slowly petered out. Especially noteworthy was the extinction of the German branch in 911, which led the way for the Ottonians and later the Salians to build their impressive powerbase in Saxony. From here the defeat of the Magyars and the Slavic neighbours was orchestrated, while the Vikings were held (somewhat) at bay. Meanwhile, Vikings settled permanently in the Danelaw and in Dublin, wherefrom they conquered Normandy. In this geopolitical shift, France was reduced to a tiny remnant of its former self.

The fortunate discovery of the silver-mines near Goslar in Harzen in Germany probably contributed to this shift.  In short, this mining enterprise contributed to a change away from the dominance of hack-silver and Arab coins, towards monetisation on the northern fringes of Europe. Part of this move was caused by the success of the Vikings in getting footholds in the west, while they were held at bay by the Germans at the southern border.  Backed by these events, Otto the Great was able to launch the successful conquest of Italy and harvest the economic advantage, which derived from these events. While the Holy Roman Empire as a Germanic construct expanded, the Western parts of Europe imploded.

How did this play out? First of all, the period saw the first “private” small-scale and residential fortifications. In Germany, former Carolingian palaces were turned into fortified Ottonian centres like Quedlinburg, Memleben, and later Goslar. In France and further south, local lords became gradually more powerful. Part of this was helped along by the slow, yet steady shift away from land worked by slaves and towards serfs or minor dependents. This led to changes in family consciousness and the construction of minor dynasties or families, no longer solely constructed through agnatic ties. Cognatic ties became increasingly important. Often, these new lineages took their names from their fortified strong-holds, thus creating a new world consisting of numerous small, independent power-centres. No longer needing legitimation through public or administrative service, this caused a marked loss of authority – first among royals, but later also of the intermediate powers: archbishops, abbots, dukes, counts, and earls. Instead of public ties, the social fabric came to be built through personal relationships – man to man.

Known as the “feudal revolution” or feudal mutation” it caused a decline in the rule of law. Albeit often considered the primary type of societal organisation in the 10th century, it took different forms in different regions and realms.

The result was a peripheralised world, primarily in France, Northern Italy and parts of Northern Spain, which came to be peopled by continually feuding local lords, controlled only by needs demanded by the upkeep of the network of friends and relations. Germany, on the other hand, did not implode quite in the same manner. Historians have assiduously explored these considerable variations, demonstrating that no such “model” covered all the instances. Nevertheless, it functions as an “ideal” model, when we seek to grasp the implosion of some states and the creation of others. This was a period of flux. Exactly how the transition played out in different regions and localities remains to be even more explored in a finicky way,  before a general overview of these processes of fragmentation and impermanence, indeed “encellulement” may be considered.

In this connection, it is essential to consider the deterioration of the uses of literacy and the corresponding implementation of symbolic and non-verbal forms of communication. On these parameters, especially German historians have led the way, thus demonstrating that the political fragmentation was not just part of what happened in its neighbouring countries. Part of this challenge is posited by the fact that lack of written sources does not necessarily mean they never existed. Also, rituals and corresponding liturgies (whether secular or sacral) did not fossilise in the long tenth century.

KEYWORDS:

Mining and monetisation

Magyars and Vikings

Fortifications

Feudalism

Social networks

Literacy

Rituals

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Expansion and exploration was the order of the day in 13th century Europe. Led by powerful popes, anointed kings, sworn knights and crafty merchants, demographic and economic expansion resulted in a vibrant Christendom reaching further and further out.

In the 13thcentury crusades were undertaken to export Latin Christendom into the Baltic, the Pyrenees, Andalusia, the Balkans, Greece, and – of course – the Middle East. Parallel to this, the outer limits were stretched to incorporate lesser states on the fringes like Wales, Scotland, Iceland and Finland into the dominant spheres of England, Norway, and Denmark. Sometimes these ventures were clothed as crusades. At other times, they were just obvious examples of predatory warfare.

At the same time, merchants and tradesmen from Italy and Spain worked to grow their activities in the wider Mediterranean, while the Hanseatic League pushed forward along the Russian rivers and up to the north, establishing outposts in Turku, Novgorod, Bergen, and elsewhere. Elsewhere, Germans moved to settle in Transylvania pushing the frontier into the mountains of Eastern Europe creating critical new centres for silver-mining.

The expansion was thus also the predominant characteristic of the growing cities and the fiduciary institutions of the budding transnational banks, trading networks, and trading posts, for instance, the so-called “Kontore” of the Hanseatic League. While double book-keeping was yet to come, the gradual introduction of paper at the end of the century led to an explosion in literacy. No longer were charters thought of as written historical records or testimonies of transactions. Instead, a charter gradually – as pars pro toto – came to represent the property itself. Who had the written record of a deed in their power, per definition also owned the property.

As part of this expansion, Universities were founded in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Montpellier to further the establishment of schools of law. Added to this list In the 13th century were Cambridge, Orleans, Toulouse, Padua, Naples, and Salamanca. In a broader European context, local laws were written down, commented upon and codified, while lawyers at the great Universities explored the ramifications of the Digest of Justinian and other Roman law-codes.

On the evangelical level, expansion was encouraged by the missionary activities of Franciscans and Dominicans. Both worked ardently to combat heresy as well as encourage lay religiosity and spiritual yearnings among lay people. Officially sanctioned by the Popes, they spear-headed the efforts to control the more wild-growing popular movements or sects like the Waldensians and Cathars.

These expansionary movements led to a renewed contact with diverse people; not just Jews, and Muslims, but also the terrifying Mongol Hordes came to play a role in the imagination of leaders as well as ordinary people.

These outward movements of growth and expansion were mirrored in the continued demographic as well as economic growth until the crisis struck at the end of the 13thand the beginning of the 14thcentury.

In this world, anointed kings, crowned emperors, and sworn knights played a significant role while embodying (more or less successfully) the chivalric code of honour.

The cost, however, obliged these powerful men to ground their authority in popular assemblies – such as the Corts or Cortes in Aragon-Catalonia, the Parliament in England, and the Danehof in Denmark. As part of this process, kings came increasingly to rule over territories less than people. In this context, the formation grew of dynasties as international networks. To some extent, this fostered the production of the huge codified “national” histories in Spain, England, France, Scandinavia and elsewhere; as well as the lesser chronicles of events written by crusaders, travellers, and merchants.

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by Karen Bartlett

Since the summer of 1941, the Nazis had been mulling over how to implement Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ and in August of that year, they discovered a horrible possibility. When testing a delousing agent, Zyklon B gas, on Soviet prisoners of war at a prison camp in Silesia known as Auschwitz, they discovered that the noxious substance had the ability to kill all those who breathed in its fumes. In the winter of 1941, the chief of the German police and SS, Heinrich Himmler, summoned Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss to Berlin to answer what the Nazis considered to be the vital question of how best to achieve annihilation. On 20 January 1942, while newspapers focused on collecting woolen fabrics for the war effort and celebrating the successes of German engineering and the Autobahn, Himmler hosted the infamous Wannsee Conference. ‘Whatever Jews we can reach are to be eliminated,’ Himmler tells Höss, ‘without exception.’

The resolution the Nazis reach will require a cold-blooded alchemy of technical ingenuity and moral bankruptcy, and will be brought into being not in the cold swampy flatlands of Poland, but, in part, in a comfortable office in one of Germany’s most pleasant cities. An office with drawing boards and a view of the Ettersberg mountain—where middle-aged men wearing stiff white collars dream up horrors, each more demented than the last.

The crematorium at Buchenwald, showing the two, triple-muffle ovens, 1959. Image via Wikipedia, attr.: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-68687-0004 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

These are the offices of Topf and Sons, a proud local company noted for expertise in producing agricultural equipment for brewing and malting. Topf and Sons has been working with the Nazis since 17 May 1939, when engineer Kurt Prüfer produces a drawing for a mobile, oil-heated Topf cremation oven, securing the company’s first commission with the SS. The mobile ovens will be used to incinerate the growing number of bodies at concentration camps, including the nearby camp at Buchenwald. Although the initial order is for only three mobile ovens, the company has crossed its first and most important moral line in producing them. For the ovens are based on Kurt Prüfer’s design for a mobile waste incinerator intended only for animal use and which does not meet the strict technical requirements necessary for human cremation chambers. According to German regulations, when incinerating a human body it should never come into direct contact with flames, it must instead be cremated in super-heated air. By late 1941, Topf and Sons have produced mobile and static single and double-muffle ovens for four Nazi concentration camps, and have designed a new series of triple-muffle ovens to meet the demands of the SS at Auschwitz, where Nazi administrators calculate that Soviet prisoners will die at a rate of 1,000 per day.

(The  muffle  is the incineration  chamber, a double-muffle oven would have a source of fire for each chamber, but Prüfer’s design for a triple-muffle oven broke convention by using only two sources of fire for the external chambers, and allowing the flames to burn the body in the central chamber by passing through gaps in the walls.)

It is work that the company appears to be proud of: instead of recoiling from the immediately apparent nature of these horrors, company director Ernst Wolfgang Topf writes to the SS at Auschwitz on 4 November 1941 to explain that the new design will ‘improve efficiency’, even taking into account the higher fuel consumption of ‘frozen’ corpses. ‘Rest assured,’ Ernst Wolfgang writes, ‘we shall supply an appropriate and well-functioning system, and we commend ourselves to you with a Heil Hitler.’ So proud are they of their work that Kurt Prüfer takes the opportunity a month later, on 6 December, to write to Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf demanding more money for his design: ‘It was I who worked out how to create the three- and eight-muffle cremation ovens, mostly in my free time,’ he boasts, ‘These ovens are truly ground-breaking, and may I assume that you will grant me a bonus for the work I have done.’

This staggeringly inhumane debate seems a far cry from the origins of J. A. Topf and Sons, founded in Erfurt sixty years earlier, in 1878, by master brewer Johann Andreas Topf. Yet the company was marked from the beginning with some of the same characteristics of technical innovation, unsteady business fortunes, and a strain of mental instability in its founders.

KAREN BARTLETT is a writer and journalist based in London. She has written extensively for the Sunday Times, The Times, The Guardian, and WIRED from Africa, India, and the US, and has presented and produced for BBC Radio. Most recently, she worked with Eva Schloss, writing her Sunday Times bestselling autobiography After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.

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First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.

Birds in Medieval English Poetry. Metaphors, Realities, Transformations
By Michael J. Warren
Boydell & Brewer 2018

First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.

Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people’s lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems: The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems.

Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction
• Native Foreigners: Migrating Seabirds and the Pelagic Soul in The Seafarer
• Avian Pedagogies: Wondering with Birds in the Exeter Book Riddles
• A Bird’s Worth: Mis-Representing Owls in The Owl and the Nightingale
• ‘Kek Kek’: Translating Birds in The Parliament of Fowls
• Birds’ Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in Confessio Amantis
• Epilogue
• Glossary: Old and Middle English bird names
• Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael Warren has studied Medieval English at Royal Holloway as well as Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2017 he obtained his Phd with the thesis, Bird Kind: Avian Transformations, Species and Identities in Medieval English Poetry, was submitted in December 2016 and succesfully passed in April 2017. He is now a visiting lecturer at Holloway, teaching on the first year an undergraduate course on medieval poetry whilst continuing to work as an English teacher at Cranbrook School in Kent. His research focuses on birds, environments and the natural world generally, as depicted in medieval poetry (Anglo-Saxon to 15th century).

FEATURED PHOTO:

From The Lovell Lectionary. Between c. 1400 and c. 1410. Harley 7026, f. 5  © The British Library, London

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In 1993, the contents of the reliquary of the Holy Sepulchre in Pamplona were carefully explored. The following documentation shows that the reliquary is not only unique as a piece of art. It had been fitted with precious and “authentic” relics related to the “empty” tomb.

The reliquary of the Holy Sepulchre in Pamplona belongs together with the Lignum Crucis, to the former royal collection of the crown of Navarre. The reliquary from c. 1255 (1300) takes the form of an open aedicule raised on an oblong platform. It belongs to the arthistorical cathegory: Gothic micro-architecture. Buttresses, topped by pinnacles and cusped arches, flank the four open sides, while the windows are decorated with champlevé enamel. This decorative element may also be found on the sarcophagus in the middle of the tableau, which shows the dramatic scene with the sleeping soldiers, the angel claiming, “he is not here”, and the holy women staring down in horror into the empty grave filled with the sudario, the holy shroud, which John writes, was carefully folded and laid to the side.

And he saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. (John 20: 6 – 7).

Apart from the fact that the tableau represents an amalgamation of the “Empty Grave Scenes” from Mark and John, it ads an extra layer. The sarcophagus is fitted with a lid made of rock crystal, through which we together with the holy women may glimpse a gold capsule with what we are told is a fragment of the original sudario – DE SUDARIO DOMINI, we read. We don’t just see the scene, we are carefully invited into the grave participating in the horror and the adoration.

The Pamplona reliquary thus represents a new type of reliquaries, which do not enshrine the holy relics, but rather open them up to let us participate. We become more than just spectators. We get enrolled in the scene with the gesturing figurines replaying inside a temporal sequence the emotional eruption, which the biblical verses only hint at … for terror and amazement had seized them, writes Mark (Mark 16:8).

The Contents of the Reliquary

In 1993 the reliquary was opened in order to register and study the contents. Inside the tiny sarcophagus, three small capsules were found.

The first, a small flat capsule decorated with Gothic openwork, was inscribed with + De Sudario Domino. The second was inscribed with + de Sepulcro Domino, while the last was inscribed with + DE MENSA CENE DOMINI. While the first contained a piece of red linen, the second a small piece of a rock wrapped in linen, while the third contained small pieces of stones. Further the sarcophagus contained a piece of white silk, a piece of linen, fragments of wood, a pebble, a lock of blond hair, small pieces of stained glass, and some red linen wrapping pieces of wood. Also included was a written list explaining the importance of the stones and fragments, all derived from the life and passion of the Lord. These lists are written in a hand form the 16^thcentury.

Unfortunately, the exploration of the contents of the sarcophagus did not lead to a camparison of the textile fragments with the alleged Sudario kept in the Cathedral in Orviedo. It would have been nice to know if the tiny fragment had been cut off from that and afterwards placed in its capsule in Pamploma.

The reliquary has traditionally been considered a wedding gift from St. Louis, King of France, to his daughter Isabel in 1255, when she married Theobald II of Navarrea Recently, though, it has been proposed that the reliquary dates from 1284, when Phillipe (a grandson of St. Louis) married Juana de Navarra. The reliquary may have been created as a reflection of the architecture of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1248); as perhaps is also the case with the reliquary of St. Louis, which was donated to St. Domenico in Bologna c. 1300. To a large extent, the two reliquaries may be seen to mirror the same artistic ambition and taste.

SOURCE:

Inventario de las reliquias contenidas en el relicario del Santo Sepulcro de la catedral de Pamplona
By Jesús M^aOmeñaca Sanz
In: Príncipe de Viana, (2002) Vol 63, No 226, 2002, pp. 287-294

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When was Beowulf composed? In the 10th and 11th centuries as the Toronto School decided in a postmodern whiff? Around AD 700 as linguistic studies have proven? Or as an oral epos, around AD 550, and in Gotland as suggested in a new book?

Review:

Beowulfkvädet. Den nordiska bakgrunden.
By Bo Gräslund
Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi 149
ISBN: 9789187403279

In the 1980s a scandal broke out in Toronto. No longer a venerated poem of the Dark Ages, Beowulf was dated to the turn of the millennium and characterised as a very late Anglo-Saxon pastiche. Although metrical, linguistic, and palaeographic evidence was brought forward to staunch the postmodern erudition flowing from the medievalists – who had drunk from the poisoned chalice of Derrida, Baudelaire, and Kristeva – the standard bearers from Toronto nevertheless succeeded in banning the use of the text by historians and archaeologists. Under pain of shunning, students might no longer “use” the beautiful verses to illuminate the murky mead-hall.

Later, hard-core linguists were luckily able to turn the tide and reclaim the poem from this literary evisceration. Nevertheless, challenges have continued to mar the understanding of the epos and the cultural crucible, in which it was forged.

Finally, this summer, a magisterial and erudite analysis by the archaeologist, Bo Gräslund, was published in Sweden outlining the material world and a probable background for the text.

Let it be said initially. Bo Gräslund is the grand old man of Swedish Archaeology. He has worked at the National Museum in Stockholm as well as taught as a professor at the University in Uppsala. Apart from this, he has served as head of the Royal Academy of History and Antiquity, the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Uppsala and several other august academies. To this should be added a very long list of publications. In his later years he has been occupied with outlining the events in the 6th century leading up to and following the climatic crisis AD 536 – 550. It is as part of this project, the study of Beowulf has been undertaken. Thus, Gräslund is not a perky young fellow with a fixed idea running wild on the fringes of the academic scene. He arrives at the scene with a solid ballast.

Further, the book is softly written, courteously and mildly. Yet, it delivers a decisive blow to the last 200 years debate and adds some well-argued propositions and hypotheses as to the what, where, when, and how of the Beowulf.

Then, what are his arguments?

First of all, we are met with a catalogue of the material culture of the late migration to early Vendel period. With its gold, rings, ring-swords, swine-helmets, and chain-mails, we are obviously transported way back in time, either prior to or around the period 536 to 50. Secondly, it is demonstrated that several of these particular artefacts are virtually unknown in an early Anglo-Saxon context. Not until the Viking Age, do we meet “rings” in the archaeological assemblies in Britain. Nevertheless, they are mentioned 44 times in the poem, and whenever they are further characterised, they are made of gold. How should an English poet c. 700 be acquainted with this particular cultural item – golden rings – which is never found in a British context, and which disappeared in Scandinavia in the late 6th century, Gräslund asks? As for ring-swords, it is important to note, that while three ring-swords have been found in England, most (77) have been found in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. And one of those – the one from Sutton Hoo – is probably Swedish, he writes. At the same time, he notes that the only chain mail ever found in an Anglo-Saxon archaeological context is from the same grave, making it a unique item in an English context from c. 400 – 1000. Finally, Gräslund draws attention to the fact that the descriptions of the cremations of Hnæfs and Beowulf have a sensual character, which makes it mind-boggling to imagine that a Christian poet c. 700 was able to describe these events in such details. Thus, the material culture of the poem does not fit at all with an Anglo-Saxon origin, Gräslund concludes.

In the second part of the book, Gräslund discusses the ethnonyms in the poem and argues that the main group, to which Beowulf belongs – the Geats – in all likelihood came from Gotland. Seafaring islanders, known also as wederas, the latter epithet has been consistently translated as wind, weather, or storm. However, much more likely, writes Gräslund convincingly, the prefix in weder-geatas refers to Proto-Germanic wedrą, meaning ram – Old English weder, Old High German wetar, Old Norse veðr etc. It so happens, that rams were significant symbols of the people from Gotland, as witnessed in documents, sagas, and in the official seal.

Gräslund also touches upon the Christian varnish and concludes (as have others before him) that it seems to have been added as a gloss. In its core, the poem is heathen. This conclusion leads to Gräslund’s next hypothesis that the poem was composed as an oral epic in the mid-sixth century and probably in Gotland; but also that it would have circulated widely, for instance in a Swedish context at Uppsala.

We know Rædwald of East Anglia was married to a pagan princess who worked assiduously to make her husband relapse. We also know, that his presumed grave at Sutton Hoo held an assemblage of artefacts with a clear Swedish origin. Were these objects – the helmet, the chain-mail and the sword – bridal gifts of a Swedish princess? Did she bring a bard along in her entourage? After which the oral poem circulated untilit was written down by an Anglicising and Christianising scribe c. 700? We shall never know, but the hypothesis fits the facts as well as Ockham’s razor.

The third part of the book finally offers a close reading of the events in the text to see if they fit the historical facts of the events in 6th century Scandinavia, such as they may be gleaned from archaeological excavations and historical sources. Much here is believable, less, slightly hypothetical. The conclusion, however, is that the poem was composed in a volatile and dangerous situation in the mid-sixth century. In 536 – 41 a series of volcanic eruptions of frightening proportions caused a dust veil to wrap itself around huge parts of the world, forcing a dramatic climatic downturn. Average temperatures in northern and middle Scandinavia fell by 3 – 4 C˚ and the decade between 536 – 45 has been characterised as the coldest inside 2500 years. Other studies have shown that Norse poems like Hyndluljóð and Vafþrúðnismál in all likelihood were composed as comments to these events. Here and elsewhere (in Gylfaginning) we hear about the Fimbulwinter, a dark and frozen prelude to the events of Ragnarök causing hunger and untold suffering. Enter Grendel, a name, whose meaning hitherto has eluded scholars. Perhaps Grendel is derived from Old West Norse grenna (-grenda, grendr) meaning make thin, reduce, make gray. The name Grendel should accordingly mean the one who famish people. Grendel is the symbol of the great hunger. He is also a “guest” who under cover of the ethos of caring for strangers, eats out the people of Heorot, which by the way gets located on Stevns and not Lejre. Also, Gräslund notes, Grendel and his mother live in a black and swampy mist while the heavens cry (v.1374 – 1376). Possibly, this dismal place echoes the sodden and dark landscape, from which water is held back from evaporating by the cold weather and the lack of sunlight. In Gräslunds understanding, Grendel is a metaphor for the devastation caused by the sudden disruption of the weather in the mid 6th century.

It is a complicated argument, and readers deserve to be guided by Gräslund and not a foreshortened version in a review. Also, some of the points have been argued by other archaeologists and anthropologists over the years. So, please read the book for this vivid and enticing tour-de-force.

Accordingly, let the following suffice: Through the years, I have followed the painstaking effort of numerous scholars and linguists trying to come to grips with Beowulf and its cultural context. It is only fair to say that the last ten to twenty years have brought us much closer to a formal understanding of the text in its written Anglo-Saxon version. Gräslund’s tour de force, though, lifts us to another level. His study of “Beowulfkvädet” deserves to be translated into English as soon as possible. No time to waste. Perhaps the good people in Toronto may finally succumb and dress up in sacks and ashes. They ought to…

Karen Schousboe

READ ALSO:

Beowulf – soon to be – Unlocked

Dating of Beowulf

Beowulf at Kalamazoo

FURTHER READING:

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Stevns is a peninsula in South Eastern Zeeland in Denmark. Flat, although it raises towards the east, where it breaks into the sea in the form of high cliffs, it has recently been suggested as the location for Heorot, the hall of Hrodgar, and the home of Grendel. What did it look like from the 6th to 10th centuries?

Stevns is a fertile peninsula located south of Copenhagen. Famously, it ends in a 15 km-long fossil-rich coastal cliff, which was listed in 2014 as UNESCO World Heritage. Also, it was recently claimed as the “brimclifu blican” and “beorgas steape” (v. 222)  of Beowulf, the sunlit cliffs and sheer crags, in the hinterland of which, Beowulf came to visit Hrodgar.

The area is primarily known for its extraordinary Roman finds in graves dating from the Early Iron Age. However, from 1995 – 2013, a magnate’s farm from c. 600 – c. 1000 was excavated at Strøby Toftegård. Although only parts of the excavation reports have been published, an overview may be gained from a preliminary report by Anna S. Beck[1]as well as the work of Sofie Laurine Albris. (See also the presentation at the website “Førkristen Kultpladser” at the National Museum in Copenhagen).

While partly protected from the sea by the forests and cliffs to the east and southeast, the locality was nevertheless accessible for small boats and barges sailing down Tryggevælde Å. The settlement consisted of a large hall rebuilt on a plateau between three to five times. All these halls measured between 37 – 40 meters and consisted of a large hall with additional rooms at the ends. No byres were found in these buildings, indicating their function as ceremonial gathering places.

The plateau had been artificially erected as part of the construction of the buildings. Surrounding the halls, the archaeologists found a ring of cooking-pits – so-called “hørgs” – which yielded an abundance of left-overs from what was obviously ritual feasts. The cooking pits had functioned as a kind of fence or marker in the landscape, segregating the hall(s) from the more ordinary part of the settlement.

Here, some smaller houses, typically with byres and outhouses, and probably organised as separate farms, were located.

In and around the plateau with the halls, finds were made of fibulas, pearls, carnelian gemstones, tools, fragments of Frankish glass from the 5th to the 7th century, weapons (arrows, parts of swords, spurs), amulets (“guldgubber”), weights, and silver-coins (African, Arabian, Central Asia). Of particular interest are some fragments of silver closely related to the so-called Witham Bowl from the Anglo-Irish context. As such, they belong to the same category of hanging bowls as the famous one from Sutton Hoo.

In the more “ordinary” part of the settlement, finds consisted of pottery and remains of animals as well as tools for spinning and weaving.

The hall of the magnate was located in a landscape of other important settlements – a harbour[2]by the mouth of the river Tryggevælde, a probable shipyard by “Snekkemosen”, another at Vallø Toftegård, a possible market-place at Kastanjehøj, a village near Varpelev and a large mound, Hothershøj from the 5th to 6th century, in the present churchyard of Hårlev Church. It is claimed that the large Viking Runic Stone, had originally been raised on this mound. The stone is dated to c. 900 – 950 and tells of Ragnhild, who was a sister to Ulf, and who raised “this stone, made this mound and built this stone-ship” in memory of her husband Gunulfr, son of Nefir, and a clamorous man”. The same Ragnhild is believed to have been responsible for another stone at Glavendrup in the island of Funen.

All-in-all, the complex at Strøby Toftegård may be categorised as a sacral centre of power akin to those at Tissø, Lejre and Uppåkra. Marked by continuity from c. 600 – 1000 it holds all the essential elements, including the remains of ritualised festivities (cooking and brewing) as well as an elite lifestyle.

Place Names

This conclusion is furthered by the studies of the place-names carried out by Sofie Laurine Albris in her Phd-thesis[3].

According to her, the place names at Stevns witness to the settled landscape going way back. Approximately half of the place-names can be dated to the oldest category with 50% dated to the Viking Age or later.

A significant early type of names characterised with the Southern Scandinavian suffix, -lev/-löv and often paired with a personal name are prominent in the landscape. The suffix means “that, which is left” and often believed to denote an inheritance. Hence “Gjordslev” means the “inheritance of Gyrth.” Sofie Laurine Albris, though, argues in her thesis that such names, in fact, means not so much the inheritance or property of Gyrth, but rather the land” which he was given or acquired control of as part of his official role, which he was appointed to as part of his alliance with an overlord (king or petty-king). A significant indicator is that these toponyms with the suffix -lev can be found near rich burials or graves. Such is the case for Hårlev just north of Hellested – a sacred place (from hēlaghær = holy, sacred). The presumed farm connected to this grave, though, has not as yet been located.

Interestingly enough, the area in a radius of 3.5 km around Strøby Toftegård is devoid of these older types of names (characterised by the suffixes -lev, -inge, -sted, or –høj). Instead, these names – and especially the names ending on –lev – abound in a radius of 10 – 19 km from the magnate’s centre. We may speculate whether the traditional Roman Iron Age centre further south lost its centrality due to the crisis in the 6th century, leading to the new settlement at Strøby with its corresponding “new” satellites, the –lev villages.

She reveals the way in which this new Germanic Iron Age magnate-centre was surrounded by seven –lev settlements in a radius of 10 km and 4 more at 20 km – to name them: Varpelev, Gjorslev, Hårlev, Vellev (Vallø), Endeslev, Sigerslev, Frøslev, Lyderslev, Alslev, Havnelev and Jørslev.

The same pattern can be found at the magnates’ residences at Lejre, Tissø, and Uppåkra from the same period c. 550 to 1000; yet, specifically not at Gudme, which went out of circulation around the time of the mid-sixth century crisis. Here, it is believed the centre moved further north to “Odins Vi” – present-day Odense.

Sofie Laurine Albris also lists the prefixes of these –lev-names, where they cannot be considered a personal name. The prefixes  are *harjar, *saiwa, * Þunrawīhar, Iarl, *frø, wæ/wihar, and goði; or translated – warrior, sea-warrior, priest of Thor, earl, lord, sacred place, or god-man/priest.

If it is correct, as suggested in Albris’ thesis, that these types of place-names, which surrounded the magnate’s residences, indicated places or land, which were “given” to people in the lord’s retinue as part of their entrusted status, we get a fine sense of what “jobs” were available. According to this list, you might be a warrior, a sea-warrior, a priest of Thor or just a priest, set in charge of a sacred place, or “just” an earl or a lord. To fulfil the roles, your over-lord would fit you out with a piece of land or a village. At least, this is a reasonable hypothesis.

Strøby Toftegård may thus have been forged in the crucible of the mid 6th century-crisis leading to the establishment of a new elite centre at a time when the slightly older centre at the Himlingøje complex had utterly lost its significance. This conclusion, though, is as yet hypothetical due to the lack of archaeological evidence, writes Sofie Laurine Albris.

Heorot and Stevns

In a recent, ground-breaking treatment of the poem of Beowulf by one of the most prominent archaeologists in Sweden, Bo Gräslund, he suggests – based on the material culture and other linguistic and semantic evidence – that the poem was composed orally between c. 550 and 600 at the island of Gotland[4]; and that we may trace the sea-faring Beowulf to the peninsular Stevns on his quest for the trophy of Grendel .

Whether or not, the Hall of Heorot was “really” located at Strøby Toftegaard is at best highly speculative. At least, however, the physical attributes of the landscape fits the description with the high cliffs, the rugged shore, the sheer crags, the looming highlands, and later, the beautiful roads, the high-timbered hall “standing on its high ground” – as such halls were prone to do! And with its gold-adorned pillars in the centre (so-called “suler”). Since the golden foil amulets are mainly found in postholes, it is believed they were pinned to such posts, rendering the “timbered hall, splendid and ornamented with gold.“

A titillating thought…

NOTES:

[1]Toftegård – store og små forhold på Stevns.
By Anna S. Beck
In: H. Lyngstrøm & L. Sonne (red.): Vikingetidens aristokratiske miljøer. Tekster fra et seminar i seed-money netværket “Vikingetid i Danmark”. Saxo-instituttet – Københavns Universitet den 29. november 2013. Københavns Universitet. 7-10.

[2]Anløbspladser ved Køge Bugt – fra Vikingetid og Middelalder. By Ulla Fraes Rasmussen. In: Historisk Samfund for Roskilde Amt (2008), pp.  93- 110

[3]Stednavne og Storgårde i Sydskandinavien i 1. årtusind. By Sofie Laurine Albris
University of Copenhagen 2017, p. 205ff.

[4]And probably brought to Britain as part of the ”treasure” accompanying the heathen princess, who married Readwald and whose ”Swedish” gifts were laid to rest at Sutton Hoo. Highly speculative, there is no doubt the poem was orally composed in the 6th century Scandinavia and only later (c. 700) ”translated” into Old English. See: Beowulfkvädet. Den nordiska Bakgrunden. By Bo Gräslund. Acta Academia Regiae Gustavi Adolphi. Vol 149. Opia 64. Uppsala 2018.

SOURCES:

Toftegård, Sjælland (Nationalmuseet i København)

Stevnsk stormandsgård fra sen jernalder og vikingetid.
By Svend Åge Tornbjerg
In: Årbog for Historisk Samfund for Præstø Amt, 2000, 63-76.

Beowulf. A New Verse Translation
By Seamus Heaney. Bilingual Edition.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000

FEATURED PHOTO:

Bridge over Tryggevælde river. By I. C. Dahl 18th century. © Statens Museum for Kunst. Source: Wikipedia

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