Medieval Mondays: What we stand to lose in Timbuktu

If you follow the international news, you've probably heard there's a civil war in Mali. The northern half of the country has broken away and formed the nation of Azawad.

This new nation is itself having a civil war, with part of the territory run by Tuareg tribesmen seeking a homeland, and part run by militant Islamists who want to create a hardline religious state. Many of them are mercenaries who fought for Gaddafi in the Libyan civil war and fled to Mali loaded with weapons and equipment.

Unfortunately, the Islamists' area of control includes Timbuktu, the fabled trading center near the River Niger and the edge of the Sahara. From the 12th century AD it was a center of learning with a large university, a flourishing book trade, and many resident scientists. It was the center of a tolerant brand of Sufi Islam that sought to learn from the world, not change it.

The fundamentalists, who called themselves Ansar Dine, have decided the many medieval shrines of Muslim saints are against Islam and are systematically destroying them. If that's not bad enough, the city is home to hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts, many of which have not been copied. If Ansar Dine decides these need to be burned, priceless documents of the past like this early astronomical treatise will disappear forever.

As usual with militant religious groups, Ansar Dine isn't exactly holy. UNICEF says they are forcing children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. Why is it that religious control always ends up being about hurting kids? So far, world leaders have done nothing but wring their hands and say tsk tsk. Timbuktu doesn't have any oil, so like Syria, the people and their past will be decimated before anything is done.

BBC has a good slideshow of Timbuktu's endangered treasures here.


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Medieval Mondays: Vampire skeleton reburied with honors in Bulgaria

The discovery of a vampire skeleton in Bulgaria made big news last month, followed closely by the sale of a Victorian-era vampire hunting kit.

Now there's more vampire news out of Bulgaria. A 13th century skeleton found with his hands and feed tied and with pieces of ember in his grave, signs of a medieval ritual designed to prevent vampirism, has been reburied.

Keeping with tradition, the archaeologists who discovered it washed the bones with water and wine and reburied it. With this ritual it will finally rest in piece and not suck the blood out of any lovely Bulgarian ladies at night.

This illustration is from Varney the Vampire, a bestseller in 1847. Click on the link to get a Project Gutenberg copy for your ereader, but don't forget to order one of my fantasy novels first!

Medieval Mondays: Did Saint Brendan sail to America?

Fellow author and blogger buddy Sean McLachlan recently wrote a couple of interesting posts about the Vikings in North America for the travel blog Gadling. One was on L'Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in the New World. The other is on the controversial Kensington Runestone and other purported Vikings traces in the U.S. These runestones are problematic to say the least and may be modern forgeries.

There is a whole subculture in the United States of trying to prove that various ancient cultures arrived in the New World before Columbus. One of the more popular theories is that Saint Brendan voyaged to the New World.

Saint Brendan lived from about 484-577. Not much is known about his life for certain. One later account written in the ninth century, Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator, tells a fantastic tale of his seven-year journey to the Isle of the Blessed and back. This isle was supposedly far to the west out in the Atlantic. During their voyage, the saint and his companions meets devils, Judas, and sea monsters, and have many adventures. Time and against the saint protects his followers by calling on God.

While it seems like a Christian fable or morality tale, some people, especially Irish-Americans, think it proves that the early Irish visited the New World. There's no archaeological evidence for this, however and there is no mention of it in any of the Irish records besides the fantastical tale of Saint Brendan. One would think that Irish monks risking life and limb to preach to the native Americans would write an account of their exploits.

Back in 1976, adventurer Tim Severin decided to prove that Saint Brendan could have made the voyage. He constructed a currach, the traditional Irish boat of the times. These boats come in all sizes and are made of leather lashed onto a wooden frame. Severin's boat was 36 feet long and had two masts. A model is below. he and his crew sailed this unlikely craft all the way from Ireland to Newfoundland.

This was certainly an impressive feat. Showing that Brendan could have made it, however, doesn't prove that he did. Severin had the advantage of knowing where he was going!

While Severin was a serious investigator, the same can't be said for some of those searching for the early Irish in the New World. Barry Fell and other authors caused a craze in the 1970s when they claimed to have found numerous inscriptions of Ogam, an ancient Irish script, all over the United States. There's a good page on this controversy at the Council for West Virginia Archaeology website. Well worth a look.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Magic shoes and Christian princesses

There have been two interesting articles on BBC this past week. the first was a feature on the folk custom of concealing shoes and other pieces of clothing in hidden places in bridges and homes in Australia. I talked about the English version of this magical folk practice here. I'm not surprised it got transplanted to Australia. It's interesting that it was going on at least as late as the 1920s!

In other news, an Anglo-Saxon grave from the mid-seventh century has been discovered that includes a beautiful garnet cross. The deceased was a sixteen-year-old woman who may have been local royalty. The seventh century was a time of transition from paganism to Christianity and so this find is extremely important.

I love the BBC. Always some food for thought on there!

Upcoming releases

I've been a bit too quiet on this blog lately. I've been very busy at work and finalizing two upcoming releases. One is Down in the Dungeon, a collection of my short stories inspired by classic RPG gaming. So many fantasy authors are inspired by roleplaying games and try to hide it. Well, I don't. I revel in it! This ebook has a wonderful cover designed by Laura Shinn. It will be coming out within a month from Writers Exchange E-Publishing.

I also have a short story titled "The Witch Bottle" in the upcoming anthology Love and Darker Passions. This will be published early next year by Blood Moon, the horror imprint of Double Dragon. It's based on some research into a real item of folkloric magic called, you guessed it, the witch bottle.

If you haven't sampled my fiction yet, I already have two books available. My fantasy novel Roots Run Deep follows the adventures of a female goblin struggling her way out of a slum in a human-dominated world and becoming a leader for her oppressed people. My mystery/thriller Murder at McMurdo tells the tale of flawed man trying to make things right for his wife and himself while trying to solve a murder.

So while I've been a bit quiet of late, I haven't been sleeping! And you're getting a medieval post later this week, so stayed tuned!

Charm to ward off evils spirits found in castle ruins

Archaeologists digging in the ruins of Nevern Castle in Wales have found a dozen pieces of slate with scratched markings of stars and other designs.

The slates were found at a 12th century doorway, hinting that they were put there to ward off evil spirits trying to get into the entrance. I wrote about this practice on a previous Medieval Mondays, in which hidden clothing is used to ward off witches. Dead cats work too!

The archaeologists say they were installed around 1170-1190 when the castle was rebuilt in stone. The castle was originally built by the Normans as a motte-and-bailey castle in 1108. The BBC has a nice photo of one of the Nevern slates. Recent excavations have unearthed a lot of interesting finds from this site, including a game of Nine Men's Morris shown below. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for this photo.

The Green Man: Pagan or Christian?

 We’ve all seen them—those strange faces peering out through foliage in odd corners of churches. They look out of place in such a setting—apparently pagan iconography in a Christian building. Who was The Green Man, and why does he decorate churches?

While the Green Man was commonly seen carved into buildings in ancient Rome, the term was actually coined by a folklorist in 1939. The figure died out with the end of the Classical era and didn’t reappear until the eleventh century.

We have no direct evidence for what these figures mean; the stonemasons who carved them and the church leaders who commissioned the carvings haven’t left us records of why they chose this motif. Some people, especially modern neopagans, like to see the Green Man as a pagan survival sneaking into Christian territory. While the Christian church did co-opt many elements of paganism, such as turning ancient gods into saints, the long gap between their use in the Roman Empire and their reappearance in the Middle Ages argues against this. One suggestion is that it’s a foreign motif brought in by international trade. Although there are Green Man figures in places like India, there’s no direct evidence for the import idea.

 For clues to its meaning we need to look at Medieval and Renaissance society. The vast majority of people were farmers, and there were large tracts of wilderness that the people looked on with a mixture of interest and fear. A man draped in foliage brings to mind the springtime, a time of joy and optimism for the farmer, a time when hormones run wild. The church’s wealth depended on land and it was often the largest landowner in the area. Celebrating the spring as a time of blessings and abundance from God makes sense in a Christian context.

On the other hand, the Church always warned against the licentiousness of the season, and the pagan dances and rituals that sprang up in the villages at this time of year. The 8th century theologian Rabanus Maurus said they symbolized the sins of the flesh and that the Green Man was a doomed soul. Perhaps, but this was only one interpretation. Contrary to popular belief, the medieval Church was a testing ground for a number of ideas and a variety of local practices.

Thus the Green Man was a tricky symbol, one of both hope and danger, a bit like another favorite motif, the Wild Man. This probably explains why he's generally not put in prominent places, but rather high up on arch supports or on roof bosses. He acts as secondary decoration rather than the first thing that catches the eye like a large stained glass window or gold altar.

Many of the Green Men we see in England today actually date from the Victorian era, a time of elaborate decoration and celebration of nature. The Green Man fit in perfectly to Victorian sensibilities. It was only then that the Green Man started appearing in large numbers outside of churches. Thus the Green Man, contrary to his appearance, was actually a Christian symbol.

Medieval Mondays: how a corpse can convict its murderer

In the days before fingerprints and CCTV, people had all sorts of strange ways of finding a criminal. One of the strangest was called the "bahr recht" (bier right). If someone has been murdered, you bring the suspect to the body and force him or her to touch the wounds. If they start to bleed, the suspect is guilty. This practice was common in England, Scotland, Wales, and perhaps other places during the 17th and 18th centuries.

One case in the English Coroner's Court from 1623 provides some interesting details. A woman had been found dead in her Hertfordshire home with her throat cut and a bloody knife stuck into the floor of her room. At first the court ruled it a suicide, but then changed its mind, exhumed the body, and made the dead woman's husband, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and another relation touch it. The court records that,

. . .the brow of the dead which before was of a livid and carrion colour, begun to have a dew or gentle sweat arise upon it, which increased by degrees till the sweat ran down in drops on the face. The brow turned to a lively and fresh colour, and the deceased opened one of her eyes and shut it again; and this opening the eye was done three several times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropped blood from it. . .

Three of the suspects, including the husband, were eventually found guilty.

This little gem came from The Flying Sorcerer by Francis X King, published by Mandrake.

Medieval Mondays: Wild men in Medieval folklore

Medieval folklore is filled with monsters, from dragons to unicorns to goblins. One enduring creature is the wild man. This fellow is generally depicted as unclothed, covered in hair, of immense strength, and living on the edge of human habitation. He (and sometimes she) appears frequently in illuminated manuscripts, heraldry, and even coins. Some wild men are shown as giants, another favorite creature of the medieval bestiary.

Medieval Europeans were fascinated by what anthropologists call "liminal zones", areas crossing from one state of existence to another, in this case from civilization to wilderness. There was a lot of wilderness in medieval Europe, and since most people didn't travel, this wilderness was looked upon with wonder and fear. Who knew what might be living in that primeval forest? At the edge of human habitation there certainly were some strange people: bandits, hermits, madmen, so perhaps there were monsters too.

Medieval society was a strict and hierarchical one. Everyone had their place and they better stick to it. In the more rural areas, though, the church and state had less of an iron grip, and people could get away with more. Time and again in the historical record there are reports of rural people engaging in rituals that look like pagan survivals or revivals. These were dangerous but exciting, and medieval people looked upon these remote regions with a guilty thrill. The wild man is a projection of this.

Images of wild men are so frequent that some have argued that they may have been real. Some say there may have been primitive tribes living in the more remote regions, or even surviving Neanderthals. There's no evidence for this. I think there probably were a few wild men, people who left society either by choice or by force, who lived a semi-wild life in the woods, wearing uncured pelts as clothing. They may have been a danger to farmers living on the edge of civilization, stealing livestock or women and children as is often depicted in wild men imagery. In the weird, wonderful world of the Middle Ages, it's not unlikely.
  


[All images courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Medieval Mondays: A shoe hidden away keeps the witches at bay

A witch bottle wasn't the only way people in the British Isles protected their homes from evildoers. Traditional folklore gave the nervous homeowner plenty of ways to secure their home, family, and livestock.

The most common method was to conceal one or more shoes in the chimney or other hidey-hole. The origin of this peculiar custom is unclear. One theory says it started with John Schorn of Buckinghamshire, an unofficial "folk" saint from England who in the 14th century caught the Devil in a boot. There was a common belief that witches and spirits came in through the chimney and couldn't turn around, so if you caught them in a shoe you'd keep them out of the house.

More than a thousand shoes have been discovered hidden in old homes in the UK. About 40 percent are from children (considered likely targets for evil spells) and they're rarely found in pairs.

An even weirder remedy was to wall up a cat. (A moment of silence for all those cats). Many cats have been found sealed up in walls or roofs in places where they clearly didn't get to on their own. They've become naturally mummified and are commonly called "dried cats". Since cats were considered semi-magical creatures, perhaps it was thought a dead cat could hunt in the spirit world, or go toe-to-toe with the witch's familiar.

The local cunning man or woman could provide protection without killing Furball or stealing your kid's shoe. A written charm with a mixture of astrological symbols, an abracadabra triangle, and barely literate Latin could do the trick, as could magical marks such as a "daisy wheel" that's commonly found on roof beams, plaster, and furniture in early modern England. This was a good luck symbol.

Another method was hiding a horse skull. At the Portway pub at Staunton-on-Wye there was discovered more than forty horse skulls screwed beneath the floor! Some people claimed it was to help the fiddler sound better, but some sort of magical ritual seems the more likely explanation.

For more on these and other amazing practices, check out the Apotropaios website and the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project. An excellent book is Ralph Merrifield's The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic.

The Red and White Springs of Glastonbury

Today we have an interesting guest post by Theresa Crater, who writes urban fantasy and mysteries, and teaches writing, British literature, and meditation.

My Power Places series starts in Egypt with Under the Stone Paw. Egypt is filled with mythological sites—as is Glastonbury, the location of the second book in the series, Beneath the Hallowed Hill. The Tor and the twin springs form the center of much of the mythology of ancient Avalon.

Red Spring, or Blood Spring as it is sometimes called, is now the centerpiece of Chalice Well Gardens, a beautiful, peaceful site well worth several visits. No one is certain where the water rises from—perhaps from the Mendip Hills or beyond, or it could be from deep within the earth.

Whatever its source, Red Spring carries a lot of iron, creating the red color. Most followers of the Old Tradition see Red Spring as the blood of the Mother Earth, giving to us healing and vision. Indeed, next to the well shaft is a polygonal chamber which many think was used by the Druids for initiation rituals.

Christians have claimed the well began to run when Joseph of Arimathea buried the Holy Grail below Chalice Hill. The spring to them is the blood of Christ. Today people come to this well to meditate, pray, and ask for guidance and healing. Many hang prayer ties in the trees surrounding the well, so many that the Chalice Well keepers are hard pressed to keep up with them. They also have in their possession a blue cup that many claim is the grail itself.

White Spring is the sister of Red Spring, just across a stone wall and Well House Lane. Now housed in a stone building that I’ve been told used to be a restaurant, the building was built by the Victorians to provide clean water during a cholera outbreak. The public protested the destruction of the natural wells and lime encrusted areas the natural flow of White Spring had created. For a time, White Spring was almost unnoticed compared to her more famous sister, but now thanks to Glastonbury residents, it has been refurbished and made into a temple. White Spring belongs to Brigid, the Celtic fire goddess who is guardian of sacred springs. Later, she became a Christian saint.

The water of White Spring is filled with calcium from the abundant limestone in the area. It flows from what were caves and tunnels deep in the Tor. The water is clear and tastes wonderful. It is said to bring healing and all the powers of Brigid—poetic eloquence, wisdom, smithery skills, and healing abilities. In Beneath the Hallowed Hill, several characters follow the tunnels into deep, magical caverns beneath the Tor—and even into the land of the Fae where they encounter Gwyn ap Nudd, King of the Faeries.

Week three of my virtual book tour

The book tour for Roots Run Deep is still steaming along. This week we have a nice variety of guest posts and interviews.

Monday, May 16: Medieval Mondays will be over at the Double Dragon blog, where I'm guest blogging about holy wells. Don't worry, though, I'll be doing Medieval Mondays here too!

Tuesday, May 17: I'll be over at Marian Allen's blog writing about landscape and how it influences your story. Marian will be doing the same thing right here about her novel Eel's Reverence.

Wednesday, May 18: In what promises to be both the high and low point of my virtual book tour, I'll be over at Alex Cavanaugh's blog writing about what we can learn from Viking coprolites. If you don't know what a coprolite is, it's simply the scientific term for preserved poop!

Thursday, May 19: Deirdra Eden Coppel is interviewing me about Roots Run Deep over at A Storybook World.

Friday, May 20: Nothing scheduled. I need a break! But if anyone needs a break more than I do and wants me to do a medieval or fantasy themed blog post while they go to the bar, drop me a line and I'd be happy to oblige.

Medieval Mondays: Witch bottles

The folklore of England is filled with odd spells and strange objects. My personal favorite are the so-called witch bottles.

Witch bottles date to at least the 17th century and were used until the early 20th. Folklore recipes and stories tell us the bottles were filled with various "magical" substances and buried under thresholds to keep witches away from the house.

They could also lift curses. If someone was sick and you suspected a curse, you'd make a witch bottle and hold it over the fire. The witch would feel the flames until he or she ended the curse. If the witch was able to tough it out long enough, the bottle would burst and the witch won.

Another variant on the witch bottle theme was to use them to capture witches. The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford has a witch bottle with the witch supposedly still inside! Reminds me a bit of the Cajun tradition of hanging bottles from trees near the house to catch wandering spirits.

I know of only one that's been found with the contents intact. It was reported in the July/August 2009 issue of British Archaeology. A 17th century bellarmine jar like the one pictured here in this Wikimedia Commons photo was found upside down in a pit by workmen in Greenwich. It was still corked and a chemist investigated the contents. These included: human urine, 12 iron nails, a bent nail through a bit of leather, 8 brass pins, hair, a bit of fluff the investigator thinks came from a belly button (!), and ten fingernail shavings from a man who had recently had a manicure.

The fingernail shavings, hair, and naval fluff probably came from the person the bottle was supposed to protect, since folklore spells usually required a personal possession or a bit of the body to work.

I have an idea for a witch bottle story fluttering around in the back of my head. I'll have to write it someday!