Hearted Youtube comments on Dan Davis History (@DanDavisHistory) channel.
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So called âp___s sheathsâ have been documented being used all over the globe, and they are worn styled in a variety of angles, depending on culture. One could even consider the late medieval and early modern âcodpieceâ which was often styled erect, and even styled in tumescent form in steel armor, as being a relevant example.
One reasonable possibility that would connect to the phenomenon you describe would be that Bronze Age Scandinavians used erect codpieces as items of warlike clothing, and so they would literally âgird up their loins for warâ by putting one of these on when they were fully prepared for combat. Treating a sheath or codpiece of this sort as showing that someone was fully prepared for war would serve the cultural purpose of encouraging warrior champions to âfight fairâ to at least some degree, in an environment when raiding was common, and it would also serve a narrative purpose in rock art and other visual portrayal distinguishing between champion combat or pitched battle where everyone was ready for battle, and other sorts of combat and violence in a maritime raid, or distinguishing between a champion in armor and his young âsquire.â
A man who was surprised by raiders early in the morning might well have time to grab a spear without really being prepared for combat, or a man who was surprised while working in his fields might well have had an axe or dagger or both, but still be far less capable of defending himself than he would have been if he had time to put on armor. Overcoming an unprepared man would not show off your skills and bravery to the same degree, and so a brave man would have reason to distinguish between this kind of combat, while a man who feared being murdered in his bed by raiders would have practical reasons for wanting to grant more honor and respect to the warrior who fought prepared opponents.
If the Battle of Tollense Valley is anything to go by, there was probably a really wide variation in the range of weapons and armor that a warrior might have to deal with, and so just using a specific type of armor or weapon to show warrior status, or the degree to which a warrior was prepared would be problematic. There might well have been warriors who did not wear armor for example, or warriors who wore bone, wood or leather armor, and at the extremes of âno protective clothingâ there is a great difference between killing a young Koryos warrior fighting in a berserk rage in pitched battle, and slaying a man as he flees naked from the arms of his wife in a night raid. Wearing the âcodpiece of battleâ and depicting this in art would tend to clarify the difference.
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Great doc Dan. The terminology for longbarrows and related tombs is a nightmare minefield. Even in Britain the terms barrow, cairn, howe, tomb and dolmen are used interchangeably, and that's just among academics! Now that scholarship is even more international, it makes it even more confusing. While we took the Breton word "dolmen" for smaller megalithic tombs, or the stone tomb sections of large longbarrows, in Brittany itself dolmen is used just for freestanding small chambers and sometimes for the elongated versions of these which are intermediary between the small dolmens and later large passage tombs, but sometimes they are called Allée couverte (covered alleys) whereas the larger tombs are either called tertre or tumuli - not consistently - but tertre is supposed to be a type of Neolithic barrow that is more round, according to some, yet for eg. the Kerlescan Tumulus is also known as the tertre du Manio and yet it is described by British archaeologists as a "long barrow" since at least 1868!! Here in UK we can be sure that no one will call for eg. Maeshowe a longbarrow, but it seems to me as much like one as some of the things on the continent that get called such.
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