Bog People....

Yesterday I went to see the exhibit on the Bog People at the Museum of Civilization.

Bog People are people who were thrown into bogs in northern Europe from approximately 12,000 B.C. to approximately 1,000 A.D., for reasons of ritual. Goods were put in the bog too, and due to the chemical properties of bog, these things were preserved - randomly it seems, or whimsically, depending on the chemical nature of the bog in any location.

Here's a picture of a bog person and here's what the museum has to show us.

Sometimes the bodies were mummified and pretty much intact, like the one above. With some, all the bones dissolved. With others, the skin. Hair seems to have been good at staying as it was and in some cases the hair colour is obvious.

Because they had to keep the rooms dark to preserve the artifacts, the exhibit it a little spooky to start with - especially since the subject is ritual human sacrifice. The designers of the exhibit decided to play that up, so the spookiness is intensified. While we were there, a French tour guide was giving a commentary that was basically performance art - with the aid on an actor who was the ghost of a bog person, appearing in difference eras.

Two bog people had names and identities: the Yde girl, who decayed rather badly after she was dug up, and Red Franz, named from his red hair and from his being found in a place called Franz. The Yde girl was killed at about the age of 16. Her ghostly reconstructed face was one of the creepier items of the show.

A few highlights:

1. A piece of cloth more than six feet long - I'm not sure how long - woven about 1,700 years ago to wrap around two corpses. Most of the colours had faded but the fibres were intact and you'd think it was woven recently. I've never seen anything like it.
   
   
2. The "trackway" - felled treetrunks that were used to make a boardwalk into the bog.
   
   
3. Photographs by an artist named Wolfgang Bartels, who specializes in photos of bogs. His pictures were haunting, fascinating and beautiful - who would have thought bogs were beautiful? I was reminded of scenes of the Dead Marshes in "The Two Towers". Here's his picture of a modern trackway, looking very like the ancient one:
   
   
   
   
   
   ( fajrdrako babbles on excitedly about history )

Men's fashions....

After the bog people, we went to the other exhibit at the museum: on men's fashion.

The bog exhibit was dark and spooky and intense. The men's fashion was given a light, frothy tone. It wasn't billed as Canadian fashion, but it was all fashion since the time of European colonization of Canada.

The oldest clothing was the most beautiful. Coats intricately embroidered with flowers like they might have worn at Versailles in Champlain's time. Waistcoats that were even fancier than the coats.

My favourite item was a cloak worn by Pierre Eliot Trudeau about 1970. Absolutely gorgeous! Warm looking, warm enough for a Canadian winter, and excruciating to look at on a hot July day.

There was an amusing article blown up from an item in the Montreal Gazette, about a man in the 1880s who sued another man for calling him a 'dude' in public. A dude was a "a vulgarly dressed man who dresses well and tries to be a gentleman, but can't.'

Huh. I thought it was just Americans who sued each other a lot. I guess I was wrong. (No offense to Americans intended....)

There were drawings from about 1790 of dandies of the time. One of them, a thin, rakish, over-fashionable man had his hand in his pocket in a certain way - it looked as if he was fondling his genitals. Lynne said to me, "What do you think he's doing with that hand?"

"I don't know, but it looks improper," said I.

The gentleman standing beside us cracked up.

There was an item on the Canadian Papal Zouaves, with their rather fancified uniforms - 400 French-Canadians who went to defend the Vatican against the Italians in the 1870s. I'd never heard about them - I wonder what became of them?

I liked the description beside a black leather jacket: "Though the garment's original appeal was practical, offering a barrier of protection against earth, wind and gun-fire, over time it came to have a risque allure."

The item that excited me most was trousers from 1800 or so, with a display of fly openings. It showed clearly how the fly was styled on the kind of trousers Horatio Hornblower would have worn - something I was researching desperately when I was writing Hornblower slash.

( Fashion and fashion meme )

Bog Artist....

Browsing for pictures of Bog People, I found an interesting site: an artist named Kathleen Vaughan who uses Bog People as subject and inspiration for her art. I think this is very cool. Her pictures capture the same timeless eeriness as the bodies do.

She has a good quote from Virginia Woolf: "We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."