New Discoveries, Or At Least New Questions, and Women Warriors
Last week a news report from Livescience.com popped up in my Google alerts. (1) Archaeologist Leszek Gardeła has concluded that the remains of a woman buried with an axe on the Danish island of Langeland was not “a Viking”. (2) Both the form of the burial and the style of the axe suggest that she may have been ethnically Slavic.
The news is not the burial itself, which was discovered some time ago, but Gardela’s interpretation. Gardela came across it as part of his efforts to catalog and study female graves throughout Scandinavia from the 8th through the tenth centuries. His willingness to look at these graves from new angles raises all kinds of interesting questions, not only about women warriors in medieval Northern Europe, Viking and otherwise,(3) but about women and long distance travel in the medieval world. (Not only is a seemingly Slavic woman buried with a Slavic axe in Denmark, but she had an Arabic coin.(5) )
All I can say is, “Don’t touch that dial!”
(1) Here’s the link for anyone who is interested: https://www.livescience.com/66023-slavic-warrior-woman.html Here is a another report of the same story: http://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news,77881,polish-researcher-identified-possible-grave-slavic-warrior-woman-denmark.html Personally, I’m eager to see Gardela’s paper on his study of Scandinavian and Slavic women, part of a project titled “Amazons of the North”, which is due out in 2020. I read several of his papers when I was researching the Birka woman for Women Warriors —fascinating stuff.
(2) “Viking” has become shorthand in media speak for a medieval era person with a what forensic anthropologists describe as a “genetic affinity” to modern Europeans from what is now Sweden. In fact, the term is more complicated.
(3)Medieval traditions of Slavic women warriors—most notably the race of horse-riding, sword-wielding female warriors from the steppes known as polianitsy (4)—have not caught the western imagination the same way Viking sword maidens have. I have some reading to do.
(4) Amazons, anyone?
(5)There’s a story there for a historical novelist.
In Which I Finally Read a Book by Erik Larson
A few weeks ago I picked up Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Germany. Prior to that I suspect I was one of the few history buggs,(1) at least in the United States, who had never read a book by Larson. This was not a case of misplaced boycotting.(2) It was simply a case of not being the right book at the right time. There is a certain irony in this since Larson is one of my benchmarks of success in writing historical nonfiction for a non-academic audience. More than once I’ve started a sentence with “I’m no Erik Larson, but…”
In case any of you haven’t read In the Garden of the Beasts, here’s a quick review:
Larson looks at Germany’s descent into Nazi control through the eyes of America Ambassador William E. Dodd and his daughter Martha.(3)
Dodd was not an obvious choice for the position from the perspective of the career diplomats who surrounded him. A history professor from the University of Chicago (!!) nearing the end of his career, he was desperate to finish his major scholarly work and thought a nice little diplomatic sinecure would give him time to write. (Any writer with a day job could tell you how hard that balancing act is.) The embassy at Berlin was no sinecure, but having put his name in for diplomatic consideration he reluctantly accepted the position. In part from a sense of duty. In part because of his fond memories of the time he spent as a graduate student in Leipzig. His role as ambassador was difficult beyond all expectation. He found himself at odds regarding his role as ambassador with his superiors in Washington and his staff in Berlin. He was increasingly disturbed by German politics as Hitler rose to power, and by his inability to get Washington to take action.
Martha was a more problematic character from my perspective: it is hard to sympathize with someone who is impressed first by the Nazis and later by Communism under Stalin. As Larson presents her, Martha was politically naive and self-indulgent to the edge of scandal—a difficult quality in a diplomat’s daughter. Basically, I wanted to smack her. But there is no doubt that her accounts provide a useful counterpoint to those of her father.
Larson uses their combined experiences of life and politics in Germany in 1933 and 1934 to demonstrate that the United States government had plenty of warnings of the consequences of Hitler’s rise to power and chose to ignore them in favor of more pleasant reports. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Fabulous book. Chilling story. There is clearly more Larson in my future. Though maybe not immediately. The To-Be-Read piles are large.
(1) For those of you who are new here in the Margins: I mis-type history buff as history bugg so often that I have chosen to embrace it. I’m a proud history bugg. How about you?
(2) Something I’m occasionally guilt of. Josephine Tey’s mystery novels for instance. Or more recently, Stephen King’s On Writing. Both are excellent. And I should be ashamed of myself for not reading them for due to misconceptions created entirely in my own brain.
(3) His wife and son were with them in Germany, but they are basically wallpaper in the book.
Escalante’s Dream, or The Spanish Lewis and Clark
In 2011, I became a reviewer for Shelf Awareness for Readers: an on-line bookish newsletter that comes out on Tuesdays and Fridays.(1) It was a wonderful experience. I reviewed Big Fat History Books, quirky little reference books, and an occasional cookbook. (2) In April, 2017, I resigned. It just about broke my heart, but I was deep into writing Women Warriors and I just couldn’t keep up.
I recently put my reviewing hat back on, which means I’m reading books I otherwise might not read and have goodies to share here on the Margins.
First up: Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest by adventure writer David Roberts.(3)
It will not surprise any of you to learn that the the phrase “the Spanish Lewis and Clark” caught my imagination.
In 1776, two Franciscan friars, Francisco Atansio Domíngues and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante,(4) led an expedition across the southwest in search of a land route from Santa Fe to the new Franciscan mission at Monterey. (Note the date: Lewis and Clark began their expedition in 1804.) I had never heard of them. As Roberts discovered, most of the people who live along their route haven’t heard of them either.
In 2017, Roberts and his wife Sharon recreated D & E’s journey, guided by Escalante’s first hand account and the report of “exploratory rediscovery” created for the expedition’s bicentenary in 1976. Roberts’ account of their travels is part road trip, part historical exploration, and part love story. It’s a combination I find appealing. (This will come as no to surprise to anyone who’s been hanging out here in the Margins for a while.)
Frustration is the dominant emotion for much of Escalante’s Dream. Roberts wrestles with the inadequacies of Escalante’s account as a travel guide, the bicentennial report’s lack of academic rigor, and the absence of historical markers commemorating the expedition’s travels through the southwest. He worries over his inability to like, or even understand, the men whose footsteps he follows.
Roberts also struggles with new physical limitations, the result of a two-year battle with throat cancer. He opens the book with the admission that this six-week journey is both tame compared to the adventures that defined much of his adult life and the most extreme challenge he is now able to face.
By the book’s close, Robert’s frustration is replaced by appreciation both for the friars themselves and for the value of this “tame” adventure in the company of his wife, “the best thing we had ever done together.”
(1) Just like History in the Margins, but without the occasional stutters in the schedule.
(2) To quote the late great Leonard Bernstein: “And what’s more, baby, I can cook!”
(3) I was weirded out to learn that David Roberts is a well-known modern travel writer. In my world David Roberts is a nineteenth century Scottish artist and travel writer best known for large-scale lithographs of his travels in Egypt and Palestine.
(4) Hereafter to be referred to as D & E
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.