Vikings

In idle (or tired) moments on these mostly once-a-year trips that we take, I sometimes wonder why we do this.  Though we never start with any Educational Goals, we are always surprised by things that stay with us, and this time the presence of the Vikings in the British Isles is one of those things.  In the British Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and again yesterday in the Archeological section of the National Museum in Dublin, we saw some pretty amazing artefacts (UK/Ireland spelling) from the hundreds of years during which the raiders from Scandinavia were here.

Among the zillion exhibits in the British Museum, one stunning collection came from a Viking ship that was buried in about the seventh century, in a place northeast of London called Sutton Hoo.  The artisans of that time had amazing metal-working skills, if the decorations on these horns is any indication:

And try this ceremonial helmet (admittedly a replica, but the real thing is equally intricate, just not shiny):

Here in Dublin, hoping to avoid the predicted rain, we visited the large Archeological section of the National Museum, which was very conveniently located around the corner from our hotel.  (Another sunny day surprised us.)  We saw yet more stories of the Viking presence in the 7th to 9th centuries.  Though they started their incursions into Ireland mostly to raid monasteries and then go home, after a while they started spending the winter here, and built up established communities, including Dublin.  (I guess winter in Dublin is kinder than winter somewhere in Norway; no plan to test that.)  Again, metal-working was well represented in the exhibits, as in this brooch to keep your winter cape around your frozen shoulders:

And here's a cute little model ship, with cute little oars and everything . . made of hammered gold:

We also learned that the forces loyal to Brian Boru, Irish king, may have won the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, but they did not succeed in kicking Sitric and his Vikings out of Ireland (contrary to what every Irish schoolkid has been taught).  For one thing, Brian died, while Sitric survived and continued to contribute to Viking/Irish society.  By that time, the two cultures had mingled and intermarried, and were no longer distinct.  Apparently the legend of Brian Boru is getting some revisionist attention these days; he did not throw a cherry tree across the River Liffey.

Sunny in Dublin

We've had rain on and off during our stays in London and Edinburgh, and it was good to have a mostly sunny day in Dublin on Thursday.  So first, a few sights that any rain-conscious tourist would appreciate:

Blue sky!

A pub with flowers!

I don't know . . . decorative footprints set into the pavement.

Wait a minute.  Why is the lovely lady on the O'Connell monument holding a snake that seems ready to chomp on her forearm?

OK, there was more purpose to the day than just enjoying the sun.  Trinity College of Dublin was founded in 1592, before there were any universities in London (though St. Andrews in Scotland had Trinity beat by 182 years). We had a fine 30-minute tour led by a PhD student, who was both informative and amusing.  (I encouraged him to come to Alcatraz so that I could return the favor.). Here's the bell tower, which graces one of the large squares of the college:

Our tour ended at the old library, whose most famous possession is The Book of Kells, a stunningly illuminated medieval book of the four gospels.  Not surprisingly, no photography is allowed in that part of the library, so you'll have to look it up to see how beautiful it is, not to mention how much work it took to copy the text and create all those tiny elaborate illustrations.  But one entire floor of the library is a single 200 foot-long room with some huge number of volumes on its high high high shelves:

and busts of Important Scholars among the old volumes:

Finally, on a walk on the north side of the River Liffey, we came to the Garden of Remembrance, which commemorates all the strife between the English and Irish.  The sculpture, above a long reflecting pool, shows swans or geese rising up, with people falling and straining against the violence:

We've had a very interesting week of Scottish and now Irish history, and my simple conclusion is that the American colonies were very fortunate to get shuck of the English as early as they did.  Of course I knew that invasions, suppression, and revolts happened over the centuries in the British Isles, but actually Being Here makes that knowledge a lot more immediate and painful.

We ended the day in St.Patrick's Cathedral, with the Evensong service.  Choirs singing in church affect me strongly, so I look for these opportunities, and I never knew until today that Leonard Bernstein wrote at least one Anthem for Anglican choir and organ.  (It was not reminiscent of West Side Story.)  Thanks to the Guinness family, the church was significantly restored in the 19th century, and a large park was created beside it:

Yet Another Fabulous Museum

Our third full day in Edinburgh was miraculously free of rain, despite all the locals' warnings that Saturday's sunshine would quickly disappear.  OK, it wasn't bright and sunny today, but after a fair amount of rain in London, just staying dry was a pleasure.

On Sunday we toured Edinburgh Castle, which was well worth the time, but today we went to the National Museum of Scotland, and the Castle loses its blog spot in comparison.  The Museum is very large and very contemporary in its layout, signage, and interactivity.  If you have any interest at all in Scottish history, you can't cover it in one day.  And the history is hardly everything there is to see -- there's also science and mechanics and biology and Egyptology and Pacific Island culture and much more that we didn't even touch.

The building itself consists of a thoroughly renovated old gallery, illustrated by this:

. . . except that there are at least three similar huge gallery rooms, so full of exhibits (some of them reaching up to the third level) that my photos are unreadably full of stuff.  In one room there's a 20-foot high steam engine, a couple of rockets, an old propeller plane hanging from the ceiling, a train engine, and Jackie Stewart's Formula One race car.  Plus a bunch of hands-on exhibits for kids to try out, a bit like the Exploratorium.

I always like juxtapositions showing Land Of Old And New.  Here's what I assume is clever renovation -- retaining the steam radiators at the base of the slender columns -- against a component of a particle accelerator in the background:

I asked Dan to stand beside the sperm whale jaw to be sure that the scale was clear:

But wait; there's more.  The other side of the Museum is a very new modern stone building whose content (I think) is all about The Kingdom of the Scots, from distant prehistory to modern times.  Partly because of some great exhibits at the British Museum, we wanted to start at the beginning with ancient ancient Scotland.  One striking exhibit showed jewelry and other personal accoutrements dating back to 3000 BC, with the artifacts mounted on contemporary sculptures like this:

This represents a tiny part of the Museum's information on Very Early Times, and I had to skip many centuries ahead to learn more about Mary Queen of Scots.  Though she reigned as Queen for only six years before she was forced to abdicate in favor of her son, she had a big influence in bringing the arts, philosophy, and science of the Renaissance to Scotland.  As you may know, her cousin Elizabeth did not protect her from her enemies when Mary fled to England in 1567, and finally had her condemned as a traitor and executed twenty years later.  [Memo to self: learn more about all that intrigue.]

Nerd Alert

Not much later, a mathematician named John Napier (who also defined logarithms, which I can barely spell) produced a tool to make multiplication and division easier.  It's called "Napier's Bones," and I was excited to realize that it uses a method that we now teach in the Sanchez School third grade, where I learned it a few years ago.  The "bones" are ivory rods that you align to show you multiplication tables, and you use the diagonals to get partial products, then add to get the total.  (I can teach you if you're interested.

According to Wikipedia, Napier modeled the bones after an Arabic process of "lattice multiplication," which is what today's math text calls it.  Hah!  My third-graders are using a very old method, made more popular by John Napier in 1617!

Heartbreaking Disappointment

Saturday in Edinburgh started out beautifully sunny and full of promise.  Since we first decided to include Scotland (at last!) on this trip, I had wanted to go to Glasgow to learn more about Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose design work influenced so many people whose work I like (David Lance Goines, Frank Lloyd Wright, and notable others).  So today was the day: we took a 50-minute ride from Edinburgh to Glasgow, got off the train, and started the Rick Steves walk that would end at the Glasgow School of Art, where Mackintosh had studied.  He designed every detail of one of the School's buildings, which now, of course, is famous.

On the way, we passed the Willow Tearooms, which he also designed:

Though I was afraid it would be just too treacly, it was in fact very enjoyable.  We were headed for more Mackintosh, and feeling good.

Following Rick's map, we went uphill to Renfrew and Douglas Streets, wondering why the brick building at the corner was fenced off, and where the School might be.  Well, we found it on Renfrew:

But by then the heartbreak was obvious.  The building suffered a fire just last Friday -- eight days ago -- and our visit was clearly not to be.  Here's the front door:

and along the front wall:

And the side of the building, where the fire had grown from the basement to the roof:

This disaster was by far the worst thing we experienced on the trip (far worse than being pick-pocketed in London and cancelling my debit card).  I talked to a policewoman nearby

who said that quick work by the fire brigade had helped to save 90% of the contents and 70% of the building.  This seems incredible, but I hope it's true.  Nonetheless, it will be many months before the building and its exhibits, offices, classrooms, and studios will be back.  It took the firefighters eight hours to ensure that the fire was out, and workers have begun now to remove the top of the building "brick by brick," she said, to save pieces for restoration.  This is very unfortunate.

Ships and Clocks

Dan and I both enjoyed reading Longitude by Dava Sobel, which describes the challenge of determining the location of a ship at sea, and the solution to the problem through the development of a reliable clock.  (This is not the place to elucidate the problem or the solution; just accept the obvious fact that ships need to know where they are, and that navigation hasn't always been as easy as GPS.)

Coming to London meant that we absolutely wanted to go to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where both astronomy and chronometry have a long history, so we did that on Wednesday.  While in Greenwich we went to the National Maritime Museum, where -- duh-- we saw lots of ships, and we also saw the Cutty Sark, the last of the multi-mast bazillion-sail Clipper ships bringing tea from Asia at then-blinding speeds.  Today we went to the British Museum, where we saw (in addition to the Rosetta Stone and stunning Anglo-Saxon remains found in 1939) more stuff about ships and clocks.

So first to Greenwich.  Here's a view through the rain of the Observatory on the hill:

and here are some of the time-keepers of interest:

 

a twenty-four hour clock

 a wall-mounted year-round sundial

and "H1," the first clock made by John Harrison that kept reliable time at sea.

We expected the National Maritime Museum to be dark and dusty, with little unreadable plaques.  Wrong!  It's a very modern museum with many kid-friendly touches and interactive displays, and lots of interesting history.  Perhaps a bit kitschy, but very fun, is this display of figureheads from sailing ships:

and nearby, the Miss Britain III, which in 1933 was the first boat to reach 100 MPH on seawater:

John Harrison spent many years on his seagoing chronometers, and here is "H4," which was finally acknowledged to be reliable enough to allow a navigator to determine the longitude of his ship:

And now to the British Museum (a source of endless wonder), and two more time-related objects.  This  bell-ringer was part of a larger clock, and I just liked the figures:

And finally, this, ummmm, alarm clock not only ran along on its little wheels, but also fired a little gun from its little bow, which set off all the other little cannons.  I wonder how many times it actually worked.  But it's beautiful:

War Memorials in London

Americans make a big deal of the country's participation in the two World Wars, as they should.  But the experience in other countries where the wars were actually fought is even more impressive and moving.  On Monday we passed a number of war memorials.  Here are two close-ups from a Battle of Britain memorial near the Westminster Bridge:

(Please be sure to notice the dog, which should pull at your heartstrings.)

Gas masks are always pretty horrifying, both for how they look and for what thry try to protect against. The women in this are at home, I guess, but in the next memorial we saw, it was different:

On Tuesday we spent hours in the Churchill War Rooms and museum.  The first surprise was that this underground complex of rooms, from which Churchill and his cabinet ran the war, is only just below the street, nowhere near as deep underground as the Tube.  The six feet of humongous steel beams encased in concrete might or might not have protected the rooms if a bomb had dropped right on the street above.

A section of the novel Life After Life describes the main character's work on a rescue team during the Blitz, and that part really brought home to me the terror, stink, grime, and exhaustion of her experience.  Not surprisingly, the War Rooms have a lot of the same flavor.  The attached Churchill Museum has much more detail on his whole life, which is fascinating but a bit hard to take in fully during one visit.  The video of Churchill's funeral in 1965 was a flashback for me: one of my weekend trips from Stanford-In-Italy was to Switzerland, where TV in a café happened to be showing the funeral live.  It was very moving to stand and watch, only about a year after watching TV coverage of JFK's assassination and funeral.

It was not a surprise to see how cramped the War Rooms were, especially with all the people doing their work down there month after month.  (The lights were on for five straight years.) This contraption provided artificial sunlight to counter one of the hazards of the job:

In addition to all the military men, a number of typists -- women, of course -- worked down there.  They had special gas masks with headphones attached that (I think . . .) allowed them to continue hearing dictation while typing during a gas attack.  Kinda hard to imagine that situation.  The angle of this photo isn't good, but you can figure it out:

A surprise to me was the Enigma Machine, with which the British broke the German codes -- a very big deal.  The machine is like a big typewriter, not the huge thing I would have expected:

A little more light-hearted, a photo that I think was meant to cheer the home front.  It's comforting to clean your gun with the little lady knitting at your side:

And finally, an admonition to the better-dressed among us from a wartime poster.  You know who you are, and it's not OK.

Signs and Street Art

 It's always fun to have photos of unusual things seen on the street.  Here we have a collection of signs and public art.

From Tuscany, some intricate fixtures high on walls:

  

 

 

Outside Dario Cecchini's butcher shop in Panzano, a sign that I think refers to the Gallo Nero (black rooster) icon for Chianti wines:

And from London, a sign I liked:

Finally, two sculptures in Trafalgar Square.  First, the ubiquitous British lion:

and then, the less well-known Giant Blue Chicken: