November contest entry

[Aethelraed_Unraed]

The new topic came as a lucky one for me as I just happened to have nearly finished an artwork in which Bronze Age clothing is heavily featured I've made them available for download, along with my Viking clothes, over at the user contributions forum.

Midsummer Dance
A depiction (no historical accuracy claimed except for the below stated) of a Bronze Age Proto-Germanic Sun ritual, ca. 1400 BCE. Somewhere in present-day Denmark, the tribe gathers before the fires, where the young priestesses dance to honour the Sun.

Historical are the clothing, the Sun chariot and the fact that in Germanic culture women are especially associated with magic and religion. The fact that many summer solstice festivals are celebrated with bonfires also lends credence to my use of fire, although that's mainly to make an easy transition between foreground and background. For the archaeological finds I based this scene on, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot for respectively the clothing and chariot.

The fact that the female Nordic Bronze Age wardrobe happens to include a miniskirt and crop top is only fortunate

Resources used:
Background texture https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luhasoo.jpg by Martin Mark
Ground texture by seamless-pixels.blogspot.com
Poses taken from the CMU mocaps https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/ ... conversion

Created with Makehuman and Blender Cycles, and a bit of Gimp to remove some of the more obvious noise.

[duststorm]

Very cool picture.
Seeing the fire I first thought it was a witches sabbath Anyway, it's interesting to have some background on the picture.

[Aethelraed_Unraed]

Very cool picture.
Seeing the fire I first thought it was a witches sabbath Anyway, it's interesting to have some background on the picture.

Thanks!
It basically is a witches sabbath In Viking-age Scandinavia, female witches were held in high regard and had high societal status. Interestingly, in a reversal of the 16-17th century, it were male witches that were discriminated and sometimes persecuted.

As a general rule, misogyny didn't become very prevalent until the advent of Christianity. The Germanics had surprisingly modern women rights compared to the Christian and (high-class) Roman cultures. For instance, there are multiple accounts of shieldmaidens in Viking literature, Germanic women generally married around 18 years of age with men of a similar age, and the weregild (fine for killing someone) for killing women was about equal to that for killing men (twice as much among the Allemanni, half as much among the Saxons, equal among the Frisians). That's one of the reasons why I like the Egtved Girl clothing so much (besides the fact that it looks surprisingly sexy for Bronze Age clothing ): it looks almost modern and therefore in a way symbolises the pre-Christian values, that were in many ways much more modern than later laws.