The Eleven Lights artwork

[Yelm's Light]

I was thinking more along the lines of the Seven Mothers plus Sedenya which equals eight, hence octa-, not hepta-.  And a symbol of chaos, eight arrows equidistant from each other at any radius and radiating from a common center.

[jeffjerwin]

25 minutes ago, Yelm's Light said:

I was thinking more along the lines of the Seven Mothers plus Sedenya which equals eight, hence octa-, not hepta-.  And a symbol of chaos, eight arrows equidistant from each other at any radius and radiating from a common center.

Ah, Ok.

[JanPospisil]

On 1/1/2018 at 11:14 AM, Joerg said:

Do you know that the second person from the left may be pretty much how Viking girls (!) dressed in summer? There is a very nice "skirt" which consists of lots of tassles which used to be on display at Hedeby museum (their undergoing a rebuild right now).

 

Not sure I've seen that one, I thought the Hedeby garments were mostly dresses. (made from fabric)

Can't speak for any other parts of Glorantha, but there are definitely a few skirts like this in Six Ages. A book I've read by Elizabeth Wayland-Barber ("Women's Work") has an entire chapter on them, they are apparently still part of the traditional costume in (iirc) Macedonia.

Here's a rope skirt from the Egtved girl burial (14th century BCE):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl

[jeffjerwin]

2 hours ago, JanPospisil said:

Not sure I've seen that one, I thought the Hedeby garments were mostly dresses. (made from fabric)

Can't speak for any other parts of Glorantha, but there are definitely a few skirts like this in Six Ages. A book I've read by Elizabeth Wayland-Barber ("Women's Work") has an entire chapter on them, they are apparently still part of the traditional costume in (iirc) Macedonia.

Here's a rope skirt from the Egtved girl burial (14th century BCE):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl

 

Very much yes.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber suggests (in books I'm seemingly always also recommending, The Dancing Goddesses and Women's Work, as Jan mentions above) suggests that string and rope skirts were a pre-historic fertility dress developed as ritual wear for dancing, and that weaving developed as a technology as women developed more elaborate variations on the skirt, which seems to be a universal among Indo-Europeans (and people of North Africa and the Fertile Crescent as well).

She writes (in the latter book), p.59: "In no case do the string skirts — whether Palaeolithic, Neolithic, or Bronze Age — provide for either warmth or modesty. In all cases they are worn by women. To solve the mystery of why they were maintained for so long, I think we must follow our eyes. Not only do the skirts hide nothing of importance, but if anything, they attract the eye to the precisely female sexual areas by framing them, presenting them, playing peekaboo with them..." The dancing exaggerates and confirms this pattern, of course.

The Dancing Goddesses also discusses the excessively long sleeves of Balkan and Slavic ritual women's wear as an approximation of geese or swan wings; compare the Swan maidens and similar figures in folklore, as well as the Vely among the South Slavs... 

I'd suggest that this reflects a primeval knowledge, in a Gloranthan context, of the Green Age, before most humans lost their feathers and beaks.

[Joerg]

9 hours ago, JanPospisil said:

Not sure I've seen that one, I thought the Hedeby garments were mostly dresses. (made from fabric)

Most are, but I will have to wait for the museum to re-open again after re-organization to be able to tell what's on display now. (I work a few km from it...)

9 hours ago, JanPospisil said:

Can't speak for any other parts of Glorantha, but there are definitely a few skirts like this in Six Ages.

Looking forward to seeing those.

9 hours ago, JanPospisil said:

Here's a rope skirt from the Egtved girl burial (14th century BCE):

Great... that's the kind of continuity between Viking dress and elsewhere I was talking about. Dress, housing, tools - the main advancements were introduction of iron as the other available metal, and shipbuilding. And I am not exactly sure whether the jump from Hjortspring's carvel-built sewn canoe to clinker-built Nydam boat was a direct advancement from that shipbuilding tradition or a new player studying the models of others and applying his own technique to it. (That's how the first Hanseatic cogs were built, and with "upside down" clinker.)

 

When I look at a contemporary statue like the "Thusnelda" (captive female barbarian), I wonder how much of that is depicting the strangers in Lederhosen and Dirndle when portraying Germany as a whole. Take one minor region's idiosyncrasies and project them on a great and mostly innocent population.

It's a bit like seeing basically nude Impala riders and telling everybody that the entire Paps is a great nudists' paradise.