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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Dec 11, 2024

What are Zierscheibe? 🧵
On the internet, the word has been used to describe the specific Germanic sun wheel which was used by Himmler to decorate the floor of Wewelsberg castle (used as a school for the SS). In fact Himmler took the so called “sonnenrad” or” black sun” design from a Zierscheibe, but Zierscheibe just means “ornamental disc” and such discs have many different symbols on them. The example here was found in Niederbreisig. 1/5

The decorative discs, cast from bronze, were part of a Germanic woman's belt-fastened sash in the late Merovingian period (6th-7th century). They are particularly common in Germany, and Holland, but are also found in France, England, Scandinavia and Italy.

Today they are associated with allegedly solar motifs. These include sun wheels, black suns and swastikas. You can see why the Nazis liked them. However such geometric designs are no more common than theriomorphic and anthropomorphic-figurative motifs.

Pictured: Alemannic Zierscheibe from Herbrechtingen (6th century), from pfahlheim, a Frankish eg with sunwheel, several german designs 2/5

These variants feature a man on horseback - possibly a god. The left one is Frankish and the right is Alemannic from the NYC Met museum 3/5

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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Oct 29, 2024

🧵 Some British and Australian people WRONGLY dismiss Halloween as a commercial American custom. Others think the origin of pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns is exclusively Irish or at least “Celtic”. In reality these lanterns are as much British as Irish, and the tradition is found in other Germanic nations such as Germany and Sweden too.

pic: Traditional turnip lantern at the Museum of Country Life in Ireland 1/7

Prior to the American pumpkin tradition, people in Ireland, Scotland and England used turnips, swedes and mangelwurzels. The lanterns were associated with the Catholic holiday of All Hallow’s Eve in Ireland, but protestants in Britain sometimes moved the festival, such as in Somerset where it was held on the last Thursday of October and was called “punkie night”. Punkie means ‘jack-o-lantern’ in West Country dialect and these were carried about in a tradition much like trick or treating in America. They didn’t always have faces carved on them, but they were always intended to scare away evil.

The word punkie probably comes from Old English Pūcan or pūclas which were evil spirits in Anglo-Saxon folklore, cognate to Swedish and Norwegian puke “evil spirit”. The Irish word púca”spirit” is probably a loan from Old English as the p sound didn’t exist in primitive Gaelic.

pic: punkie night in Hinton St George, England. 2/7

The earliest attestations of carving such lanterns are from Worcestershire in England in 1840, Hampshire, England in 1838, and Scotland in 1808. So there is no reason to think it originated in Ireland. Various traditions of bonfires and carrying root lanterns or blazing fagots while going door to door for food existed across the British isles but the switch to pumpkins instead of turnips occurred in the USA.

The tradition of using turnip lanterns was still extant as far East as Sussex in 1973 when it was recorded among children there by Jacqueline Simpson in the Folklore of Sussex. Therefore, the introduction of the American pumpkin jack-o-lantern in Britain occurred while the native turnip tradition still existed, so there has never been a time when British people DIDNT make jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.

pic: My wife and I carved these pumpkins last night 3/7

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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Jun 24, 2024

Some controversy has arisen recently about the “Dark Briton” phenotype. Such people are found all over Britain and Ireland but are more common in Wales, Cornwall and Southern Ireland. In Britain prior to the 1950’s we used to refer to such people as “black” which is confusing now due to modern racial terminology. In this thread I will explain that British people have diverse phenotypes and that these swarthy people are just normal natives of the British isles.

Historically there have been a number of popular pseudo-historical explanations for these darker people. The most common was that they were descended from Spanish sailors washed ashore after the Armada sank in 1588. This is nonsense. A somewhat more plausible theory that was common among academics of the 19th century is that they are native Britons who have less Anglo-Saxon blood. 1/6 🧵

While it is true that such people are more commonly found in Western regions like Cornwall and Wales (Tom Jones pictured is Welsh - the 1st map shows averaged regional phenotypes) they are also found all over the island. What’s more, many Welsh and Cornish etc are very fair with blonde hair and blue eyes. The fairest skinned people in the world live in Northern Ireland which is “Celtic”. So we cannot say the pre-Saxon Britons or Celts were all dark, and that blondism in Britain was a Germanic introduction. In fact, many Danes are dark too, so this narrative is just a crude simplification. That said, it is probably the case that the frequency of the phenotype being rarer in the East has something to do with Anglo-Saxon ancestry being higher there (pie chart map w data from Gretzinger et al 2022 shows red as Anglo-Saxon which is up to 50% in the East, compared to just 25% in Cornwall, blue = Iron Age Briton). 2/6

With the advent of the genomic revolution circa 2010, modern pop science, including my own work, has led to new kinds of folk-explanations for these people. The knowledge that the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Western Europe (WHG) were darker skinned, and that the next people, the first farmers of Neolithic Europe (EEF) also had Mediterranean complexions has led people to the informed assumption that darker skinned natives of Northern Europe today must therefore exhibit archaic phenotypes.

These dark WHG were thought to have been replaced by the lighter EEF in the Neolithic who in turn were replaced by the still lighter Beaker folk at the start of the Bronze Age. In reality it is more complicated than this. The chart below shows that even in the Palaeolithic light skin existed among Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and light eyes among WHG but the process which made these combine and become typical of Europeans occurred much later and isn't just a matter of who has the most archaic admixture. Later selection pressure played a more important role.

Art of a WHG man by @mossacannibalis
WHG woman by @beaker_the12224

3/6

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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Apr 26, 2024

How old is the steppe hypothesis of an Indo-European homeland? 🧵

A European origin for the PIE language was first suggested by Heinrich Schulz in 1826. Most people still thought it was in Asia because Sanskrit is so archaic. In 1851 Robert Gordon Latham, in a prologue for Germania by Tacitus, argues again for a European urheimat (see pics)

Latham suggested Lithuania as a possible origin, but significantly, he also identified the Pontic-Caspian steppe as of likely significance to the PIE speakers, mentioning the Volga and the Dnieper.

It was Johann Gustav Cuno in his Forschungen Im Gebiete der Alten Völkerkunde: Die Skythen 1871 who first posits the great plain of Northern Europe as the only possible place in the world from which the majority of Indo-European languages could have dispersed.

In this region, he argued, and no other, the conditions of life are not too easy, or the struggle for existence too hard, to make possible the development of "such a great energetic race."

Now we know that the Corded ware culture expanded in all directions across this plain, the Eastern boundary of which is the Urals from which the Aryans of Asia have their origin, while to the West they eventually became Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic speakers.

Cuno was wrong to think PIE originated on the Northern European plain (although the Ukrainian steppe is included as part of the greater definition of the plain, but he wasn't using that definition), but it certainly was the main point of dispersal for IE languages.

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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Mar 11, 2024

Left: 19th c. Japanese depiction of an Englishman
Right: 18th c. Chinese depiction of an Englishman

Left: 1860 Japanese depiction of an Englishman walking Right: 18th c. Chinese depiction of an English people

Compare to the 18th c Chinese depiction of a Swede

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Tom Rowsell

@Tom_Rowsell

Feb 28, 2024

🧵Fairy euhemerism 🧵
A popular current within Victorian Fairy lore was a belief that fairies of British folklore (deriving from Saxon/Norse elves as well as Gaelic Sidhe) were in fact an historical aboriginal race of the isles who were darker and shorter than the "Aryan" invaders (a term they used to refer to the Beaker folk in those days) who replaced them. 1/5

In his effort to prove that the fairies derive from racial memories of the "small-statured pre-Celtic race", folklorist David MacRitchie was determined to demonstrate that the focus of longbarrows in fairylore is due to their being of pre-Indo-European manufacture.
2/5

Some of his contemporaries correctly identified the longbarrow builders as belonging to the Mediterranean race, while MacRitchie wrongly thought they would have resembled Lapps or the Ainu of Japan (see pic). He also erroneously identified the Neolithic race with the Iron-Age Picts of Scotland, due to the fanciful medieval descriptions of Picts as a diminutive pygmy-like race. 3/5

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