![]() ![]() ![]() All these things chalk up to a culture in which war paint would not be out of place. There is evidence of filing teeth and accounts of terrible battle cries. Warriors painted their faces to scare their enemies, it wouldn’t be the only thing that the ancestors did to give themselves a psychological advantage. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to make the leap of conjecture (yes, I know it’s a leap) that the warpaint isn’t mentioned in the sagas because it was normal. ![]() There is also talk about facial tattoos as markings that never disappear. The documents were written during peaceful meetings, so descriptions of makeup would not be warpaint but having the technology to make eyeblack means that it’s only a small jump to actually using it at war, especially given contact with people that did use it in war. It’s a toss-up: some people use texts by al-Tartushi and ibn Fadlan to say “yes they did”, others point to those same texts and say that they are only proof of makeup, not war paint. Warpaint was used by the ancient Norse warriors. The time has come for me to go fully into the land of conjecture! I’ve been kicking this topic around for a while and have yet to be able to get anything concrete on it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |