One Norse tale tells how a Viking warlord would test the keenness of his sword by slicing through the neck of a nearby slave. If the slave’s head fell from his body, then the blade was not sharp enough. Only when the head remained in place, balanced upon the now severed neck, would he judge the sword properly sharp.
If this seems unlikely, one of the bodies excavated from the Bowl Hole cemetery at Bamburgh revealed a man who had been killed by a sword cut that had struck him on the shoulder, passed diagonally down through his body, severing his spine and several ribs, before reaching his waist. That’s how sharp some of these weapons were, and how lethally they could be wielded.
Ewart Oakeshott did more for the study of swords than anyone else in the 20th century. Oakeshott received no formal training in scholarship, nor did he have an academic position to lend weight to his opinions. His standing amongst his peers was entirely the product of decades of handling, owning, assessing and cataloguing swords.
Without any academic training, but with boundless interest and energy, Oakeshott set about revolutionising how old weapons would be regarded and classified. His great insight was to treat the swords as practical weapons, forged and used by men to kill other men.
It might seem obvious now, but before Oakeshott the people responsible for looking after and curating collections of arms had seen them in terms of the history of art rather than as weapons, assigning ages and provenances to weapons based upon the decorative features of hilt and guard, pommel and scabbard rather than using the business end of the sword for classificatory purposes.
Oakeshott, on the other hand, visited museums and old houses, trying out those weapons he was allowed to handle. As he did so, he began to develop a physical understanding of the nature of the weapons he was wielding, getting a feel for balance, weight – the indefinable ‘life’ that marks out an exceptional weapon as something that seems alive in the hand.
The earliest iron artefacts so far found, dated to circa 3200 BC, were made from meteoritic iron. The iron was found as nine small beads which were excavated in 1911 from two burials in Gerzeh, north Egypt, a prehistoric burial site that has produced a great deal of information about very early Egyptian civilisation.
Seven of the beads were found in one grave, four in a necklace that was also strung with lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold and agate, and three at the waist.
The other two beads, discovered in a nearby grave, were found in each hand of the dead body, the grave itself being almost a magpie assemblage of grave goods, including beads made from lapis lazuli, obsidian, gold, carnelian, calcite, chalcedony, steatite, faience, garnet and serpentine, as well as a porphyry bowl, a miniature pink limestone jar, a bird scutiform-shaped palette, an ivory spoon, a flint flake, shells, a jackal canine tooth, 16 stones of carnelian, green jasper, quartz, a lump of red resin and nine pottery vessels.
In both cases, the richness of the grave goods that were buried with the dead person to accompany them into the afterlife tells that they came from rich and powerful families.
The sword as a weapon exists on more levels than the purely practical. It is more than the sum of its parts.
A sword is a signifier, an indicator of rank, power, prestige and potential martial prowess. A man (or potentially a woman) with a sword has the wealth and status necessary to ensure access to a good diet, leisure time to train, a psychology that is suited to fighting, and the will to use it.
A person carrying a sword also carries the threat of a sword, which is usually far more important than the sword itself. A man carrying a sword seldom had to wield it in order to get his way.
In most cases, it was far better to convince via the threat of a sword than to actually use it.
Swordsmith Owen Bush holding one of the many swords he has forged.
Swords are individual. Each is unique, with its own set of characteristics. These characertistics impress a style upon the man wielding it who in turn exerts his own style upon the sword.
A sword is not a dumb brute of a weapon but rather one that works in partnership with its wielder. Depending on the sword and the swordsman, the partnership may be one of equals, the sword may be superior to its wielder, or the swordsman may have to impose his own style upon a crude and poorly made weapon.
This is a very fine addition to the canon of historical detective stories set in exotic locations – but, if you’re like me, you will have finished reading The Janissary Tree with one question uppermost in your mind: surely eunuchs can’t have sex?
Yes, the novel gives a wonderful sense of the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, when a gentle cloud of futility descended over the great city that was once Constantinople and the pashas settled into civilised and genteel inaction. Its hero and his friends and rivals are finely drawn, vivid creations, providing further insights into this strange world.
But could a eunuch really have sex? Because that’s exactly what Yashim the Eunuch, the detective hero of the story, does, and with a particularly beautiful Russian noblewoman at that. Which, so far as I had thought (although admittedly I hadn’t thought much on it), rather ruined the point of creating a eunuch in the first place. Surely, I thought, the point of castrating men was to ensure that they could not interfere with the women of the Sultan’s harem, or any other women for that matter. But here was Yashim doing exactly what I had always supposed was impossible for a eunuch to do.
So, having finished the book, I looked further into the matter (well, did some Google searches, to be honest) and the answer appears to be: maybe. Could be possible, or then again it might be impossible. Pretty well par for the course for internet research. So, dear reader, I leave the question in your hands: do you think it is possible for a eunuch to have sexual intercourse? (Although I do encourage you to read this excellent detective story as a means towards starting your research.)
As a child, Rob Henderson was in the running for the I’ve-had-it-worse-than-you cup. His mum was a drug addict. Father unknown. Shuttled through various foster homes. Adoptive parents split up, using him as their battleground. Small town America, little to no money, and zero prospects.
The children Henderson grew up with didn’t have much in the way of choices; for most, it resolved to drugs or crime. Henderson, however, took the only other real option: enlistment. He joined the US military.
As with many others, the military began to give Henderson some of the structure his chaotic home life had always lacked. Couple that with a formidable natural intelligence, and Henderson began to make his way out of the milieu into which he had been born. On leaving the military, he was able to enrol in college where his intelligence finally had an outlet. Henderson excelled. After completing his degree, he went on to do a Masters at that most Ivy League of American universities, Yale.
Henderson had arrived among the intellectual elite. The people whose parents and professors made the policies that affected the people he had grown up among. And, basically, he discovered that they were completely clueless. They had not the slightest idea of the effect of the ideas they espoused. Almost all his peers came from intact, two-parent families but all of them argued that there was no reason to say that was better than single-parent families. Their other ideas similarly championed personal and sexual freedom and licence, while they themselves generally belonged to conventionally moral families.
In short, they lived morally conservative lives while espousing complete libertinism.
And they thought this was the right thing to do, not because of its effects on the poor but because it brought them status among their peers. Henderson slowly realised that, as markers of their own status, his peers at Yale were propounding luxury beliefs, a set of ideas that marked them out as different from other, lower-status Americans.
Social status is something that goes deep into our evolutionary past. It was literally a matter of life or death. Now, though, to signal status, when everybody can own a Rolex or an indistinguishable replica, something else is needed because luxury goods don’t do it. The marker for superior social status today is not what you have but what you believe. And who cares what effect that has on people who can’t buy their way out of a husband leaving home or an addiction leading to the loss of a job?
Well, Rob Henderson does and his evisceration of our current ‘elite’ is as measured and savagely polite as any I have read. Read this book. It might be the most important of the last ten years.
As for the Christian church in Britain, shortly after the Synod of Whitby it took an unexpected but extremely important international turn. The Archbishop of Canterbury designate went to Rome to be confirmed – and died, before either confirmation or return.
With the See of Canterbury empty the pope decided to dispatch a truly wild card to Britain to take over as Archbishop of Canterbury. The man he chose was already in his 60s: Theodore of Tarsus was Greek and steeped in classical and patristic learning. Accompanying him was a North African, Hadrian, who was equally learned.
This pair of international scholars established a school in Canterbury that inaugurated a new age of learning among the Anglo-Saxons.
The insular world of the Anglo-Saxons was bursting open. A young boy by the name of Bede, growing up in Northumbria, took that knowledge and made it his own and that of his countrymen.
The Franks Casket in the British Museum portrays both the legend of Wayland the Smith and the Adoration of the Magi, suggesting that old and new religions coexisted for a while.
With the destruction of the kingdom of the Isle of Wight, the old religion was officially dead.
Of course, belief in the old gods and some of the old practices lingered on in places. But the chroniclers of this new age in Britain, the monks of the new god, had little interest in recording either the beliefs or the practices of the old religion.
What we know for sure of Anglo-Saxon paganism is minimal. Most of our purported knowledge either predates the Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain, coming from Roman reports on the religion of Germania, or postdates it, derived from the work of Scandinavian and Icelandic scholars from the 12th century onwards recording the myths and legends of their forefathers. How closely either of these related to the lived pagan religion of early medieval Britain we simply don’t know.
