I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

Leaving Britain is a particularly strange feeling.  In so many ways, it feels close to home — not just the (mostly) shared language and history, but just the feel of the place.  The green and the trees hearken back to my earlier life, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana or living in the Northeast.  The intermittent misty and sunny weather that remains temperate through the summer evokes echos of the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Rockies, where I came of age.

More than that, it has been a year of personal growth and change.  I have had some excellent research interactions, of course, and have learned a great deal scientifically.  I had some valuable time to think and experiment and hack a bit myself.  I have a stronger sense of some directions to explore.

But much more than that, it has been a year of learning about the greater world and our place in it.  History, art, culture, language, politics, religion.  Food, fashion, fun.  I feel that I have a fuller or richer sense of the tides of culture.  Countries all face the same problems, but different countries resolve them differently, and we both have some better senses of what the spectrum of choices is.

In flight, now, the great steel flying machine boring a hole through the sky above Ireland, heading for the North Atlantic.

Moments and memories flit through me…

Arriving in Spain eleven months ago, now.  Confusion and panic, plunged into a world we didn’t fit into, uncertain if we could even pay for our apartment.

Snow in London, paralyzing the city.  Two days later, a train through the fairy-gilded countryside.  Sunlight gleaming on snow in the trees and on the fields; a Dickensian scene.

Treading the streets of Hardy, Halley, and Hawking; Tolkien, Carroll, and Lewis.

A whirl of castles, fortresses, and palaces: El Escorial, El Palacio Real, El Alcazar de Segovia, Alhambra, Pembrokeshire, Warwick, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Versailles, Castle Howard, Schloss Marienburg, Earl’s Palace, Edinburgh.  Centuries of might, power, prestige, wealth, fear, and blood.  Some standing still proud and strong, some crumbling and struggling against tides of time and entropy.  All showpieces, now, for adventurers, curiosity seekers, history fanatics, and tourists.

Snippets of history assembling.  Fitting together growing fragments of the great mosaic.

The sense of wonder and excitement as cafés and headlines in Madrid were filled with Obama’s victory.

The awe of touching stones laid down a thousand years ago by the cathedral-builders…

… or laid down two millennia ago by the Romans, as they grasped the world in their palms.

… or five millennia ago by the now-nameless neolithic farmers, circumscribing the heavens with stone.

… or eight millennia ago by the mesolithic hunter-gatherers, laying their treasured dead into barrows for reasons now lost in entropy and age.

Plays in London’s West End and English-language movies at the foreign film theatre in Madrid.

The ocean surging against cliffs in Scotland and Wales; mist above the sea.  The sea, the sea, the sea, stretching out before us, a reminder of how small these islands really are, for all of their deep history and vast influence.

The whirl and bustle of the great mercados of Madrid, a foodie’s heaven, if only you can speak enough Spanish to order the jamon.

The decaying Victorian majesty and grunge of the London Tube, its subterranean labyrinth inviting visions of fairies, just beyond sight in the hidden recesses, driving the trains, or sometimes not, at their whim.

Jamon and pisto manchego.  Fish and chips at the pub.  Chocolate con churros, merluza, cochinillo, cocido, and the best calamari in Madrid.  Steak and kidney pie, cumberland sausages, scones and cream tea, Victoria sponge cake. Ordering Indian and Chinese for delivery.

The gleaming modern efficiency of the Madrid Metro, jewel of Madrid’s recent public works and their charming, self-aggrandizing pride in it. Posters of the Sphinx or the Statue of Liberty peering excitedly down the steps of a Metro station: “El Metro que todos quisieren tener.”

The green, green, green of Britain.  Trees and grass and flowers and rolling farmlands.  Even in the concrete jungle of London, the locals have striven to set aside greenspace.  And the greenery fights for itself: grass springing forth from every crack or crevice in the concrete, moss or ivy spreading over every wall, unless vigilantly fought back.

The grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Madrid, evoking Nineteenth Century splendor and imperial power.  The arid clime, so achingly reminiscent of Albuquerque and the desert Southwest of the US.

The digital map informs us that we are over the coast of Greenland now.  Halfway to Chicago, or thereabout.

But, really, what has mattered most are the people.

The kind and enthusiastic woman across the courtyard from us in Madrid.  Discussions in our halting Spanish about sharing the clothes line and the state of the weather, and her pledge of friendship on the day we left Spain.

The supervisor at the Manor House Tube station in London, who cheerfully sorted us out, from helping us get to our house in the first place, to helping us find our way to the New Year’s celebrations in the city.

The Nicaraguan expat we met in Spain who hated the US for its role in the Contra-Sandanista civil war that destroyed his country and his family.

The Kosovan taxi-driver in London who loved the US for its role in the Kosovo war and stopping the horrors of ethnic cleansing.

Elaborate Christmas lunch at the warm and welcoming house of my postdoc’s family.

The brusque but secretly friendly proprietor of the corner store near our place in London, who just smiled when we returned for the fourth time in a day for something forgotten, saying “It’s ok — this is your store.”

The delightful B&B hosts in Pembrokeshire, who welcomed us into their house and shared their joy in Wales with us.

Gaming with friends back in the US — a touch of familiarity and comfort for expats far from home.

The shopkeeper in Spain who sold us pillow cases when we had no Spanish whatsoever, who cheerfully passed the dictionary back and forth with us to help us through the transaction and who, at the end, complimented our Spanish, “¡Su español es muy bueno!”.

A group of hostellers in Orkney, with whom we stayed up too late dissecting the state of the world and the best travel destinations on five continents.

And all of the beautiful, wonderful, warm friends we found in London: Writers and musicians and gamers and engineers and hackers and teachers.  Who, most of all, made London feel like home, at least for a time.

Over the North Atlantic again, closing in on the coast of Canada.  The flight attendant brings us a snack of fruit and crackers and lovely stinky cheese.  We marvel a bit at the luxury of flying business class.

I titled this post “Leaving the Shire, Mr. Frodo” because I can empathize with some of Sam’s feelings.  For one thing, the echos of Middle Earth are all over Britain — you can see Tolkien’s roots in the thatched roofs and hedge-rows, the towers and spires, the barrows and standing stones.

But it’s a deeper feeling than that.  Sam was leaving home for the first time — first setting foot beyond his native lands, starting out on a grand adventure that would change him deeply.  We are returning from a grand adventure — admittedly not as grand, nor as hazardous, as Sam’s — but I can feel some of the wistfulness and conflicts that he did.  Transitions are potent.  We return to familiar places and people that we love, but we leave behind fascinating places and discoveries and new people to love.

But more opportunities to return, to visit new friends, and to explore further.

The road goes ever on…

Passing over the Great Lakes now.  We are close.  They feed us again.

It has been such a strange year.  There were plenty of stresses, from discovering the failure modes of the international finance system, to wandering lost at Barajas airport in search of our cats, to staying in touch with friends and colleagues five thousand miles away, to planning the next bit of local travel and tourism, to trying to pound a new language into our aged cortices by exposure and sheer force of will.  At times, we were exhausted by the overwhelming intricacy of life maintenance when your home isn’t really your home and every transaction has to be coordinated across two continents and up to five countries.

Landing gear down.  Seats and tray tables up.  Machines off.

But it has also been an incredibly… Fulfilling/enriching/educational/exciting/exploratory/wonderful/creative/social year.  All wrapped up in complex feelings — joy, loss, excitement, fatigue.  The sense of our perspectives stretching, like muscles, sometimes a little bit too far.  Homesickness for two homes.

Landing in Chicago; back in the US.

We are home.

As archaeology and ancient culture junkies, Susan and I have really been wanting to see Stonehenge and other of the great standing stone monuments of the British Isles.  (Yes, I know that other countries have them too, but we’re here now, so…)  Unfortunately, they’re a bit challenging to get to for the car-free.  Fortunately, our local friends Gwen, Joe, and Gavin have a car and volunteered to take us on the sightseeing tour.

One of the secrets that we learned from the locals is that, while the English Heritage group keeps most tourists at a distance from the stones themselves (for the stones’ preservation), it is actually possible to get to go inside the circle and to touch the stones.  You have to make a reservation well in advance, because only a limited number of people are allowed in each day, in fixed, early morning time slots.  So, entirely too early on Saturday morning late in April, we hit the road, headed for the Salisbury plain.  This is a couple hours away from our end of London, so it was a bit of a trek to get there early enough.  But it was a glorious morning and an incredible experience.

The circle of Stonehenge, seen from the approach across the Salisbury Plain.

For those who aren’t familiar, Stonehenge is one of the great mysteries of Brittanic culture.  It’s a neolithic monument, dating from roughly the period of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and far before the written word had entered the isles.  It was constructed in phases, over as much as 3,000 years (depending on which parts of it you’re talking about and whom you ask).  And, unlike the Pyramids, we really have no idea what it’s about.

It’s clear that the circle has astronomical functions — the alignment captures midsummer and midwinter sunrise and sunset (respectively) precisely.  But beyond that, we know little about why or even who built it.  Given that it was built in phases over a span of time greater than that from Christ’s birth to today, it seems virtually certain that it was used by different cultural groups for different things over different eras.  What is amazing is the amount of effort that went into its construction and the fact that it remained of importance for so many millennia.  And that all of that importance is now lost in time, like tears in the rain.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of standing among the stones on a quiet, bright, sunny morning.  The sense of age and mystery is amazing and humbling.  The stones are immense — the small bluestones in the inner circle are nearly my height and weigh something like 4 tons apiece, while the great sarsens in the outer ring stand over twice my height and weigh as much as 25 tons each.  Their weight and silent mystery resonate in all the places of my soul that long to touch other times and places.  I can’t really put words to it properly, so I’ll let the stones speak for themselves.

Sun flares at Stonehenge.

A different view of the circle, showing how they've fallen over the ages.

The stones are home now to lichen and a variety of other life: birds, spiders, mice.  The lichens are fascinating — it turns out that they can do genetic studies on the lichens to determine their age and origin.  There are some lichen colonies that are, apparently, thousands of years old and live only here, on these stones.

Lichens growing on a trilithon.

New life nestles among the ancient stones.

A view of the outer ring of sarsen stones, showing the longest remaining segment of capstones.

The lintel stones in the outer ring of sarsen stones are works of high stone-shaping skill.  They’re actually assembled with tongue-and-groove construction aligning the lintels and mortise-and-tenon joints holding the lintels in place.  You can still see the tenons at the top of some of the uprights that have lost their horizontal stones:

Stone tenon, once used to align and support a lintel capstone.

Beneath the lintel stone.

Shadows of present and past: Susan framed by a trilithon.

After Stonehenge, we headed for Avebury.  The awe of the stones hung with us as we drove.

Before arriving at Avebury, we stopped briefly at Silbury mound:

Silbury mound.

Just as mysterious, and at least as ancient as Stonehenge, Silbury mound is an artificial hill, constructed by an astounding mounding clay and chalk.  While you could build it with only “modest” effort using modern earth-moving equipment, in its day, archaeologists estimate that it required 18 million man hours to move the nearly quarter-million cubic meters of earth.  And we have no idea why.  It doesn’t seem to be a barrow or burial mound, and no significant implements or artifacts have been found in the excavations of the site.

Today, it stands starkly out of the plain.  The photo doesn’t really capture just how obviously man-made it is.  It is dramatically different than all of the land features around it, and you have no doubt in your mind, as you face it, that it was built by human hands.  It’s quite a bit larger than the photo makes it look as well — it really does tower over you as you stand there.  Unfortunately, it is currently closed because some of the old excavations have collapsed, so we couldn’t get any closer than this.

Then it was on to Avebury.

Avebury is a small village in Wiltshire, not too far from Stonehenge.  It is notable now because it sits in the midst of an enormous neolithic structure — immense earthwork ditches and banks, a huge stone circle (much wider than Stonehenge’s), and a prehistoric roadway or avenue lined with standing stones.  Many of the stones were partially or entirely buried until unearthed in the Nineteenth Century, which preserved them against the depradations of those seeking building materials or fearing what they represented.  Today, they have been mostly unearthed and concrete pylons laid in to mark the positions of some of the missing stones.  The remaining stones stand an imposing sentinel around the village.

Part of the great Avebury Stone Ring. The village of Avebury can just be seen in the background.

These stones are older than Stonehenge by a good five centuries, at least, and they are just as mysterious.  They are in a very different style, being undressed stone, but they represent at least as much effort.  Some of the large stones clock in at 40 tons.

Susan and Gwen hold up one of the Avebury Stones.

Gavin, Gwen, and Joe (Joe's back, anyway) at Avebury. Yes, the grass really is that vividly green.

One theory (or at least story) told about the stones is that they are gendered — the tall, narrow stones being male, and the shorter, broader stones being female.  I don’t know that there’s any evidence supporting this, aside from the raw fact of the dimensions of the stones.  But it’s a nice story.

A "male" stone.

Part of the avenue leading into (or away from?) Avebury.

The earthworks surrounding Avebury are also monumental, even if they’re a bit less striking than the stones themselves.  I can’t find figures, offhand, about how much effort it took to construct them, but my guess is that it was well more than Silbury Mound, when you consider that they ring the entire village.  And when you consider that all that digging was done by neolithic humans, with no domesticated animals, using deer antlers for digging tools, it becomes awesome and terrifying.  What inspired them to so much effort?

After the stone tour, it was lunch at a local pub in Avebury, then back to London, tired but filled with wonder and fascination.

(Warning: long and lots of pics behind the cut.)

Susan relaxing with our friend, Paddington Bear, as we head out for Wales from -- where else? -- Paddington Station.

After months of living in the Big City and doing lots of the city-side tourist bits, we felt a strong need to get out into the country side and see a bit of trees and grass.  Susan, our travel researcher, had found a compelling entry on the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail in Wales, so with our trusty packs and hiking boots, we set off for the west.

Sadly, we’re here without all our camping gear, so we weren’t really set up to overnight on the trail.  (And I’m not sure if there’s place for it out there anyway…)  Fortunately, a bit of web research turned up a B&B that turned out to be a startlingly good find.

I could narrate it all blow-by-blow, but I figure the pictures speak more than a thousand words.  [Roughly, they each speak about 22k words on a 32-bit architecture, using jpeg encoding at a quality level of about 5.]

Day 0: Transit

Lovely bedroom in the comfy B&B in Pembroke Dock

The train from London to Pembroke Dock is quite a trek — about 5 hours, with a brief change in Swansea — so we were glad to get into the B&B, where our hosts fed us a fabulous dinner, gave us some orientation on the local land, and sent us off to a plush bed.

Day 1: Manorbier to Bosherston

We set off in the mid-morning.  One logistical problem we hadn’t accounted for is that we had (deliberately) arrived slightly before “summer” and the real tourist season kicked off.  While that meant that we didn’t have much competition for the trail, it also meant that most of the busses weren’t running, so it was hard to get places (like trailheads).  Fortunately, our B&B hosts were super-helpful and got us on the trail.

The PCT is really long — we were only walking a tiny fraction of it (about 10 miles this day).  Our segment of the trail started at Manorbier and Manorbier Castle:

Gate tower of Manorbier Castle

We actually beat the staff to the castle in the morning, so we had to wait a bit for them to open.  But only a few minutes, and we did get in to tour the ramparts and some of the old rooms:

Manorbier Castle, overlooking the courtyard; St George's Channel in the background.

Great hall, now somewhat the worse for time and weather.

Susan and the Sea, seen from the ramparts of the castle

We knew that we had a bit of trek, though, so we didn’t linger long at the castle (much as we dearly love old piles of rock and history).  Soon enough, we were on the trail!

The trail begins for real. Be sure not to fall off the cliffs and die. And be sure not to do something incomprehensible in Welsh, either.

The US doesn’t have gorse, but it’s all through British literature, so we were excited to find some (and in bloom, no less).  We discovered that, while it is beautiful, it is also wiry, coarse, and stabby.  Better looked at than trekked through.  Fortunately, the trail is well worn and easy to follow (aside from a couple of sheep trails that distracted us off the main trail and almost over a cliff).

Gorse!

Bucolic farmland.

About 1 mile in to the trail:

Looking back the way we'd come. Manorbier is back there, I swear.

Beautiful beaches.

Paths through pastoral farmland and sheepfolds.

Sheep! And lambs. Spring is in the air!

More beautiful beaches.

Somewhere around here we stopped for lunch at a local pub.  The nice thing about hiking out here is that the small villages are close enough together that you can almost always find a place to eat about the time you’re ready to eat.

A tulgey wood.

I’ve skipped some time here, but a couple hours after lunch, we were able to get a very nice tea at a small tea house overlooking a beach.

Rugged cliffs and sea caves.

Spurs of land. (Yes, I walked out to the end of that.)

And horses with colts. (Did I mention spring?)

At the end of the day, we wearily and somewhat awkwardly made our way back to the B&B for another fabulous dinner and rest.

Day 2: Saundersfoot to Tenby

Because the first day had a moderately long hike, we took this day easier, aiming for a 4 mile hike, ending in the town of Tenby, a medieval town that the Victorians refashioned into a seaside resort town.  While the hiking on the first day was almost entirely in the open, this segment of the coast trail was much more heavily wooded:

Susan in the dappled sunlight of the trees shading the coastal trail.

Lovely forest land.

Looking back the way we'd come. We started on the other side of the spur of land in the distance.

A striking grotto. (More of the omnipresent gorse in the foreground.)

Arriving at the town of Tenby.

We had a very nice late lunch/early supper in Tenby and took a few minutes to tour a Tudor-era merchant’s house.  Then caught a train back to the B&B for an early and relaxing evening.

Day 3: Pembroke and Return

We had a late return train on our last day in Wales, so we had some time in the morning.  After another luxurious breakfast and bidding farewell to our hosts, we caught a morning train up to Pembroke, where we got to tour the Pembroke castle.  This is a larger castle than the one at Manorbier, but dates to the same era.  They’re both late Norman, during the conquest of Wales.  The Normans swept through, smashing resistance and building a ring of 29 (IIRC) castles to hold the territory.  The Pembroke castle was one of the more significant ones out on the Welsh peninsula, apparently, and was in the keeping of an Earl, I think.  Reading a lot of the history text gave a picture of just how rough an era it was, back in the day.  For example, when this Earl had a tiff with one of his peers about a piece of property, what was the recourse?  Courts?  Parliment?  The King?  No, the Earl just grabbed his opponent and tossed him in the Pembroke Castle dungeon for seven years, until the chap was broken in body and spirit.  Yeah.  Nice guys, those.  And a nice era, when the royalty were warlords, answerable only to those with more might.  It’s nice to live in an age that’s a bit more civilized.

In any case, the castle was fascinating:

Panorama inside one of the watch towers of the gatehouse. (Apologies for the crappy compositing.)

One thing that I found particularly thought-provoking was the historically-plausible mock-up feast that they had laid in one of the tower rooms:

Dining hall, with mocked-up Thirteenth Century feast.

This is c. 1250 AD or so.  Note the decorated pottery flagon in the foreground.  This was the valuable, show-off piece of tableware.  Check it out: these are among the richest and most powerful people in the British Isles at this time, and one of the prized possessions is this flagon, imported all the way from France.  A far cry from the gold plates that we think of the royalty dining on, isn’t it?  That had to wait about three hundred years, until after the discovery of the New World and the plundering of its gold reserves.  In the meantime, pottery like this had become widespread, its manufacture and trade driving economic and cultural development across Europe.  It really struck me with a sense of the tides of history: this object that was the prized possession of nobility in the Thirteenth Century, two hundred years later would sit on the tables of middle-class, and two hundred years after that would be commonplace in lower-class taverns.

A garderobe (i.e., medieval toilet) behind the dining hall.

A maze of twisty passages, all alike.

I was also struck by the sense of age and the ravages of entropy on the place.  To date, we had largely toured either well-preserved castles, palaces, and fortresses (such as the Tower of London, Versailles, the Palacio Real in Madrid, and so on) or else castles that had gone almost entirely to ruin.  This castle was somewhere in the middle — it was clearly being cared for, and had been preserved somewhat, but it was also clear that the tourist pounds out here in the far corner of Wales were just not enough to maintain it at the glory that places like the Tower of London can afford.  Oddly, the contrast of the well-maintained and the aging highlighted the sense of age and history even more forcefully to me than I have felt in completely abandoned fortresses.  Something about the sense of fighting the tides of time and the encroachment of the environment highlighted the futility of our battles for eternity much more than do the graceful decay of ruins abandoned altogether to time’s millstone.  I was particularly struck by the keep — once the defensible heart of the fortress and storehouse of most precious goods:

The keep -- once the best-defended part of the castle. Now hollow and aging.

Now, inside, you find just the hollow shell, with post-holes for beams showing where once floors were.  Now, birds roost in the windows of nobility and their calls echo through this lonely space.

Interior of the keep.

An interesting find that the staff pointed us to was the cave below the castle:

Cave in the cliff beneath the castle. Home of swallows, swallow dung, cold stores, and smugglers. For scale reference, that's Susan at the back there.

A decaying Norman window.

The gatehouse, seen from the battlements opposite.

The town of Pembroke, seen across the inlet that defends the Castle.

As we trekked across the sun-washed stone battlements, my eye was caught by a flowering moss growing from the limestone.  I was entranced by the juxtaposition of the ancient and the ephemeral, and the knowledge that ultimately time and the inexorable tide of life, would win against even the hardness of the stone.  This thing, all things devours…

Flowers growing from the rock of the battlements.

There is little to say after Pembroke Castle.  We had a delicious light lunch at a small church-run café in Pembroke, enjoying our home-made, locally-sourced, eco-friendly soup and sandwhiches while we read the posters calling us to submit prayer requests (“We guarantee that at least three people will invoke your prayer every day for two weeks.”)  The irreverent part of me wondered what they would do if I submitted a request for a prayer for the end of prayer requests…

We caught an earlier train than we had planned and made it back to London in the early evening, with time to relax after travel and savor our experiences before work the next day.

I was leaving home in the morning, heading for the bus stop to go in to the university. As I approached the end of our street, and the turn onto the more major cross-street, I was surprised to see a Victorian hearse pass.

Two beautiful grey horses in fancy tack and bridle (complete with the feather head dress) drawing an elaborate, gilded and ornamented, glass sided wagon containing what appeared to be a coffin. The whole affair was driven by two men in formal dress — coat and long tails, top hat, the whole bit. It was a vision out of a Dickens novel, for sure.

This surprising conveyance was followed by just two dark, limousine-style cars. (And then a red London city bus.)

I assume that it was really a funeral arrangement of some sort.  I was just surprised to see it trotting down a city street in what is not precisely an upper-class or elaborate area.  I think of horse and carriage as being something that people hire for weddings and other romantic occasions, not for funerals.  And there wasn’t a long line of mourners following.  (Though the tradition of a huge number of cars following a slow hearse and paralyzing traffic for miles around may be more of a US thing.  I don’t know.)  It just felt…  Out of place, I guess, in the middle of a neighborhood of early 20th century row houses filled with immagrents and making its way through dense traffic.

“And then, when Henry took the throne, he…”

I had to interrupt (being a loud and obnoxious American), “Which Henry?”

He stopped his flow of lecture and blinked.  “The Eighth, of course.  We’ve only had two monarchs, you know: Henry and Elizabeth.  All the rest were just placeholders…”

Henry VIII, as rendered by Ewerth. National Portrait Gallery, London

The funny thing is that he’s not completely kidding.  While all the monarchs of Britain have left their marks, some have done so more than others.  Being ignorant Americans, who barely remember most of our own presidents, much less the leaders of that-other-country-over-there, we didn’t really realize the extent to which Henry VIII left much more of a mark than most others.  When you start looking around the UK, he stands out in the parade of royalty.  My history books in high school sort-of mentioned him, and we all know his famous portrait, but we (Americans) tend to think of him as an overweight, turkey-leg bearing chap, whose major accomplishments were writing Greensleeves, fathering Elizabeth I, and running through wives like Imelda Marcos ran through shoes.

No.

Henry VIII was a ruthless, bloodthirsty bastard, who ruled with might and terror.  He revolutionized the British military and was an advocate of advanced military technology.  He bucked almost a thousand years of tradition and accumulated power to break with the Catholic church in Rome.  Contrary to popular representations, that move was only partially about his desire for a divorce — it was probably much more about power and economics.  In one fell swoop, he broke the power of the monasteries and grabbed their money and lands which, by that point, included over a third of the property in England and Wales.  It was the largest land grab in British history (short of the Norman Conquest itself).  It represented a huge infusion of capital into England’s coffers and funded Henry’s continued warfare.

But just having grabbed their power, lands, and monies wasn’t enough.  It was necessary to break their spirits as well, in some sense.  Or, more properly, to wipe out any popular support for the clergy by utterly humiliating them.  Henry had horses stabled in churches, pulled down monasteries, and issued writs allowing townsfolk to carry of the stones and roof lead of abbeys at will, for whatever purpose they liked.  We visited one small church that had a waist-high gated fence around the altar because Henry had issued a permit allowing cockfighting in the sanctuary.  His soldiers used some churches as outhouses.

Henry didn’t hesitate to use force against those who opposed him, and the Tower of London saw a steady stream of political opponents on their way to the headsman’s block under Henry’s reign.  He once executed a priest’s mother because of the former’s political crusades against Henry on the continent.  By the time of his death, our tour guide estimated, over 50,000 families had lost someone to Henry’s reign.  It makes his daughter’s moniker, “Bloody Mary,” for a measly 300 Protestants burned at the stake, seem like blatant historical hypocrisy.  Another tour guide cited 153,000 writs of execution ordered under Henry.  This man had the “do not fuck with me” meter cranked to 11.

But this is just one example of the fuller portraits of European monarchs that we’re getting here.  (Living in Europe for a while has done way more for my sense of history than all my HS classes did.)  Take Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for instance.  What do most of us get out of American history lessons about this sweet couple?  What’s that I hear?  Funded Columbus to sail to the Americas?  True enough, but Spain paints a much different picture.

Don Fernando y Doña Ysabel, Reyes de Castille y Aragon

Like Henry VIII, Ferdinand (II, of Aragon) and Isabella (I, of Castille) were way up there on the “scary and powerful” scale.  They united two kingdoms to create the first major modern nation-state in Europe (what we now think of as Spain).  In the process, they annihilated the last of the Islamic state on the peninsula and slaughtered the Moors.  They were also bent on establishing a fully Catholic state, so they didn’t stop with Muslims — they expelled or killed every Jew they could lay their hands on and purged any other non-Catholics they could identify.  To aid in this process, they created that fine institution that we know today as the Spanish Inquisition, which proceeded to repress, terrify, torture, kill, and purge Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and even other Catholics for over 350 years.  Their reign towers over Spanish history — certainly in the South of Spain, you can’t go anywhere without tripping over their actions.

Nice people.

Oh, and did I mention that their youngest daughter was Catalina, better known to history as Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife?  That explains a lot…

Louis XIV

France had Louis XIV.  Best known today by American school children for Versailles, elaborate hairdos, and having dukes vie for the honor of being his personal royal poop-carriers.  All that is true enough, but again, that portrait evolves out of a much more complex, powerful, and dangerous man.  He reigned in France for over 72 years — still the longest run for any European monarch.  (Victoria, the longest-reigning British monarch, only made it a skosh over 63 years.)  During that time, he raised France to being the most powerful nation in Europe, and possibly in the world at that era.  Through his brilliant military leadership, France overturned the balance of military power in Western Europe of the time, emerging on the top of the heap after a series of wars.  He played his enemies as skillfully as he played his friends, keeping both at odds with each other and weak against him.  He defended the borders of France with a scorched-earth policy in Germany and he broke putatively impregnable fortresses.

Louis manipulated his nobles into an elaborate game of courtliness that kept them close at hand, where he could keep his eye on them.  Like F&A before him, he felt that the best way to a solid and united kingdom was religious unity, so he purged Protestants and Jews from France.  (Technically, his revocation of the Edict of Nantes allowed Protestants to remain in France, so long as they did not preach, advocate, or practice Protestantism.  Oh, and their children were to be forcibly baptized Catholic.)

His royal palace at Versailles is now known as one of the most extreme displays of power, decadence, and luxury that has ever been known in the Western world.  (Notwithstanding Bill Gate’s house.)  But it wasn’t just personal aggrandizement.  It was a calculated move as part of Louis’ strategy to centralize all power in France on himself and keep the nobility under his thumb.  By creating such a seat of luxury and wealth, he made it de rigueur to see and be seen there, so everybody who was anybody (anybody who might possibly have been a threat, that is) had to be there in person.  Similarly, by setting up a system of dispensing favors and power by physical proximity to his royal self, he kept the most powerful people the closest to him.  And I’m sure that he found the irony of keeping the second-most-powerful people in the kingdom waiting hand and foot on him utterly delicious.  His reign and designs set the social and political course of France for a century, leading ultimately to the Revolution, with all of its chaos and blood.

It’s interesting and kind-of strange.  Even in the cadres of  most-powerful-people-in-Europe, a few seem to stand out.  I guess that’s not surprising — most Americans know only about a very few presidents of the US either, let alone the other congress-critters and supreme court judges who have critically shaped our country.  Still, none of the US leaders resonate in history with the intensity that people like Henry, Ferdinand and Isabella, or Louis do.  Which is, of course, a lot of the point — by design, none of the US leaders can hold that kind of power.  (A great thing, if you think about some of the psychos we’ve managed to elect over the years.)  But it’s certainly an odd feeling to think about those eras and people.  Educational, but makes me spend a lot of time recompiling world views and going “hmmm…”

Oh, and Henry didn’t write Greensleeves either.

Edit: My Spanish postdoc wrote in with some corrections about Spanish history. (Good to have someone who really knows something giving feedback!) Here’s what she had to say:

The Catholic king and queen never join the two kingdoms. As a matter of fact, when Isabel died, she passed it to her daughter, Juana, who left it to her son Carlos V, who finally inherited everything their grandparents had … as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from his other grandad). Which is kind of funny, because Carlos V shouldn’t have inherit any of his grandparents lands if his uncles/aunts had had a child before dying.

Spain as a unique kingdom is a really modern concept that many current Spaniards are not even happy with :-)

Magdalen College Tower in Oxford

Wednesday, the four of us (me, Terran, Mom and Dad) piled into an Evan Evans Tour Company bus for a day-long tour of Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Warwick Castle.  High-density bus tours aren’t our usual mode of signtseeing — Terran and I have found that we’d actually rather see fewer places in-depth than glance at lots of them — but it seemed like this one hit places we hadn’t thought to go, and it seemed like it would be fun to see what a bus tour is like.

Courtyard of Balliol College in Oxford

Reactions are mixed.  For one thing, getting there better be half the fun because you spend half your day on the bus.  Like anything road dependent, it’s hard to know how bad traffic will be, which makes it impossible to accurately guess when you’ll get home.  We were fairly lucky this time, though.

The walking tour of Oxford was perfunctory at best and left us feeling a bit grumpy about the prospects for the rest of the day.  We were there a shorter time than it took us to get there from London by bus.  The tour took us through the streets to the fronts of some famous buildings and shared a lot of interesting tidbits from Oxford’s long history, but it didn’t include the *inside* of any buildings or even into any of the college courtyards.  Such tours were possible — we saw signs for interior tours of the Bodleian Library, in which Terran and I are very interested, and some other more in-depth walking tours as we strolled the steets.  We can go back to do these, and we’d already planned to, but my folks were stuck with a surface overview so shallow that it wasn’t clear whether it was worthwhile to have gone at all.  We took a few lovely pictures, at least.

Me, Mom, and Dad at Shakespeare's Birthplace

We boarded the bus with a lot of trepidation after Oxford and continued to Stratford-upon-Avon.  Terran and I had heard it was a pretty kitchy place with little to see, so we’d considered this stop to be of least importance.  We turned out to be wrong.  S-u-A turned out to be charming and educational.  The Shakespeare Birthplace home is authentically restored and features guides in every room to describe what daily life was like for the upper middle class of the time.  We learned a lot.  Actors in costume roamed the birthplace and the main drag of the town, breaking into spontaneous drama of scenes from random plays.  And there were flowers in the gardens blooming everywhere, which helped keep my mood high.

We also learned a lot of the known details of Shakespeare’s life that renders him far less mysterious than the collection of urban legends I had heard.  The path of his life is actually well understood and not even so insane for his day: he worked in London as a playwright for twenty years, returning about three times per year to visit his family.  His wife and children lived with his parents.  When he made enough to retire, he retired fairly young and built a comfortable manor house in S-u-A that he and his wife lived in until he died.  The retirement house was unfortunately torn down by a crotchety owner who got sick of pilgrim Shakespeare fans knocking on his door in hopes of getting a look-round.  Seems like a truly bizarre way to react — most people would have just sold the place to someone who actually wanted to run a tourist attraction.  At least, this is what the tour guide told us, and I’m sure every word is meticulously researched. :)

The tour continued through the rolling hills of the Cotswold agricultural region,

Warwick Castle

again filling us with history while we drove.  The area was lovely, and getting there started to actually be half of the fun.  Since we have no car and would rather avoid driving, we’d never have been able to see the Cotswolds in this way.

Warwick Castle was another pleasant surprise.  It’s the ancient fortress of Earl Warwick the Kingmaker, power-player of the Wars of the Roses, that was sold to the Madame Tussauds Company of wax museum fame in the 1970s to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the locals.  The company turned it into a tourist museum with a surprising amount more taste than their wax museum chain.

Warwick Castle grounds from the battlements

Bits of it were kitchy — the grounds looked and felt very much like an SCA event — but it was overall very well done.  We toured two wax exhibits: a recreation of a weekend social party in 1898 and one on preparing for battle during the Wars of the Roses.  So, Victorian and Medieval.  Then we took a speedy and heart pumping stair-climbing tour of the battlements.  In our usual slow style, we could have spent a day there, but we had a rollicking good time in two hours.

We pulled back into the city around 6:30, tired but in good spirits, and we had enough time for a comfortable dinner and a pint at our local pub, The Salisbury.

One of my personal favorite bits of touristing is doing the museum tour, and there’s plenty to choose from in Europe.  The grand cities have some of the greatest art musuems of the world, collecting over a millennium of masterpieces (mostly from Europe and North America, granted, but also some from further afield).  In our time here, Susan and I have been privileged to explore the Prado, Reina Sophia, Thyssen, Louvre, d’Orsay, National Gallery, and Victoria and Albert.  And that’s not counting other art museums that we’ve seen on other occasions or the vast amounts of art accumulated in palaces, cathedrals, churches, mansions, and random other tourist destinations.  It brings alive all those dusty memories of art movements that (for me) date back to high school, making them vivid and setting them in context.  Still, with all of this art trekking, we’ve noticed a few other features that aren’t mentioned quite so often.

For one, why is Jesus always pictured as having shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and a beard?

Jesus and his hairdo

For most of us, this is an image we’ve seen all our lives — so much so that we probably don’t even think about it.  There is always the observation that Jesus was, of course, almost certainly Semitic, rather than Caucasian (as he is usually pictured in Euro-derived art).  But I have never really heard anybody discuss this artistic convention about his hairdo.

I mean, really — where did this notion come from?  It’s everywhere — in art going back at least a thousand years, J.C. is drawn this way.  It’s there in medieval paintings, stained glass in cathedrals, Renaissance statues, and everything since, up to and including modern neon light displays.  You have to look hard to find a rendition of Jesus that doesn’t have those features.  But, as far as I know, we have no actual evidence or description of how he really looked.

So who came up with it?  Somebody had to have been first to draw him like that, and it has stuck ever since.  But who?  And why?  I suppose that it sticks because it has become a set of attributes that we use to identify J.C.  In the same way that the crescent moon and the third eye are attributes that identify Shiva to Hindus, Christians know to look for the coiffure.

Saint Sebastian (as rendered by Crivelli)

Another thing we’ve noticed is an overwhelming fascination with certain specific saints.  While the Catholic church acknowledges an incredible number of saints (over 10,000 according to the Wikipedia article), only like five or six ever show up in European art.  One of the favorites is Saint Sebastian.  The story is that this poor bastard managed to piss off Emperor Diocletian and got his ass filled with arrows for his trouble.  Miraculously, of course, he didn’t die, but lived on to work other miracles and harangue Diocletian some more.  (Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with Diocletian, who decided that he must not have done the job thoroughly the first time and had his soldiers drag Sebastian out, beat him to death, and toss his body into the outhouse.  Yum.)  Anyway, Sebastian is all over the place.  Everybody seems to love to paint him.  We’ve seen dozens of images of this poor fellow, all recognizable by the arrows.  (Sometimes only a couple, sometimes a porcupine’s complement.)  Usually, he has a far-away expression that is probably intended to represent his holy fixation on the heavens and his unconcern with paltry physical ephemera like being pincushioned with broadheads.  Unfortunately, too few artists can really capture “ethereal”, so it usually comes out feeling like a cross between marijuana mellow and constipated.

Salomé with the head of John the Baptist, as rendered by Caravaggio

You see a similar sort of ambiguous facial expression in the omnipresent images of Salomé.  So this chick either deliberately, or at her mother’s behest, requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter as a present.  Most teenage girls don’t get such extravagent gifts from their dads, but when your dad is the king, special rules apply.  (I would have gone for the red sports car myself, but hey — no accounting for tastes.)  So Herod’s soldiers dutifully brought her the head on a plate.  The funny thing

Titian's version of Salomé and John

is that she’s so often pictured almost completely impassively, or at most with a little distaste or perhaps some smugness.  But a surprisingly underwhelming reaction for someone who has just had a dish of gore dropped in her lap.  I guess I haven’t verified for myself, but I’m pretty sure that the Bible doesn’t say anything about her being clinically psychopathic or having dangerously flattened affect.  Or maybe that was just the kind of thing you got for your daughter in those days and she was used to it — had a dozen in her closet already.  I dunno.  shrug

Little old man baby Jesus

Ugly babies are another popular theme.  Specifically, ugly baby Jesuses.  We can’t quite figure out what’s going on, but our best guess is that it was way easier for Rennaisance painters to get adult female models than baby males.  (Or to get them to sit still or something.)  Or maybe it’s just that the painters are all struggling to make the little guy look simultaneously like a cute and helpless infant and the King of Kings with all the wisdom of the ages in his barely postnatal eyes.  For whatever reason, the galleries are littered with truly fugly baby Jesuses.  Warped little beasts that look sometimes more like a lizard and sometimes more like a goblin.  Sadly, I don’t have the absolute best example of this genre here.  They don’t allow photos in the National Gallery in London, but there’s an absolutely stunningly horrendous baby Jesus in their collection.  The kid is, I shit you not, gray.  And it’s not that the painting has aged — the other people in the painting are relatively normal flesh-toned.  In comparison, the little Lamb of God comes off as, well, a baby zombie.  “Awwww….  Kewt widdle baby zombie Jesus!  Smile for Mr. Painter man!”

Baby Jesus: lord of the pit fiends

Madonna with creepy child

With looks like these, the little guy would have had to have God looking out for him, to keep his parents from drowning him quietly in the night…