Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan's Column to Icelandic Sagas by Speidel Michael P

Author:Speidel, Michael P. [Speidel, Michael P.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2004-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Leipzig of J.E.Schlegel's play Hermann failed to overwhelm Goethe, "notwithstanding the many animal skins."

In the mid-eighteenth century the Flemish artist Peter Anton Verschaffelt sculpted a hooded wolf-warrior as the centerpiece of his allegory The Art of War, still standing outside the palace at Schwetzingen. On a Dutch engraving of 1783 the national hero Civilis wears a (winged) wolf-hood.14 In Switzerland a painting of 1858 shows wolf-warriors growling among Helvetians as they send Roman prisoners under the yoke.15 Wolf-warriors also lurk on the walls of Denmark's Frederiksborg Castle painted after the fire of 1859. Stockholm and Göteborg have naked-warrior monuments. Never yet collected or studied systematically, such works of art can be delightfully odd: an iron sculpture made in 1842 by August Fischer casts its two fighters in patriotically reversed roles: a Roman on foot fights with a club against a Germanic bear-warrior on horseback.16

Perhaps out of embarrassment at animal-hooded and half-naked forebears, the twentieth century largely overlooked Germanic warrior styles on Trajan's Column. To us in the twenty-first century, the old warrior styles are both an anthropological phenomenon and a part of European antiquity alive until the High Middle Ages. They appeal, for the human motivations they embodied still live.17 This study may have shown that our shared humanity can give us an insider understanding of ancient warriors and empathy for a bygone style of life.

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