Tea at Trianon: Horned Helmets

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Horned Helmets

They look like something from outer space. From Popular Science:

The Viksø helmets, as the pair is called, were discovered in 1942, buried in a peat bog near Copenhagen. They’re made entirely of bronze, including the twisted, bull-like horns. They’re probably not objects meant to be worn into battle, but are closer to religious gear, intricately decorated with a curling beak and two bulging eyes around the forehead. Recesses in the crown of the helmet likely held a horsehair crest, and a pair of long feathers.

These ornate helmets actually represent something more mysterious than Viking intimidation: the emergence of a new mythology, and possibly politics, in the time before written history.

In a new study, a team of Danish archaeologists scraped off a fingernail’s width of the organic glue used to hold the horns in place. Radiocarbon dating of that substance showed that the glue was last applied—and therefore helmets were likely last used—somewhere around 950 BCE. (Read more.)