ANST - Purple, Black, & History

John Ruble jruble at urocor.com
Sat Feb 28 12:03:29 PST 1998


Talen expounded:
> And on the subject of purple, why is it that since it was "rare" in
> period
> to see this on a shield that SCA heralds insist it's bad form and
> shouldn't
> be used?  Considering how little has survived through history, I think
> that
> 
"Common Knowledge" insists that purple was rare in period. Þóra
Sharptooth wrote an article on "Viking Tunic Construction"
(http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/viktunic.html) and this is what she
said:

	Evidence for the use of particular colors is strong in
particular areas: reds are most often found in the Danelaw, purples in
Ireland, and blues and greens in Scandinavia proper (Walton 1988, 18). 

Notice the purple... It is from lichen dyes and/or from overdyeing with
red from madder and blue from woad. While this has nothing to do with
heraldry, you were talking about purple and I thought I'd throw this in.

As a side note on black, in Old Norse the word for blue was the same as
the word for black.  The color of a raven was the same as the color of a
clear sky.  And in the sagas, people who set out to commit a murder
frequently put on a blue tunic first.  It was foreshadowing to the
Norse, like putting a black hat on in a cowboy movie.

-Ulf
***VENI, VIDI, VICE-I came, I saw, I partied


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