Tools, ancient and modern
Published: Mon, 06/01/15
As promised Roland took us on a trip to Stockholm. The capital of Sweden is a beautiful city and driving into town was the only time we saw a traffic jam in Sweden. The main objective of our visit was to see the National Historical Museum. Even there we had to be quite selective and visited the gold room and the Viking gallery. The gold room is a circular vault blasted into the bedrock below the museum. It is full of gold and silver, mainly looted or extorted from other countries.
It does make me wonder why educational authorities are so keen on visits to national museums. First you teach children that they should be honest and that stealing is wrong. Then you take them to the national museum so that they can see all the precious things their country has stolen over the centuries. Maybe you only notice the contradiction when you get older.
The Viking gallery was really fascinating and perhaps the single display which intrigued me the most was the wooden toolbox recovered from a bog during the 20th century. It could be nearly 1000 years old but the contents would still be useful today. The only thing really missing was a rechargeable electric drill. However you can see the spoon augers they used instead in one of the pictures. In another picture there is a bar of iron with holes of varying size in it. This would have been used for forming iron nails, essential for shipbuilding and all kinds of carpentry work. Joshua Calhoun came to the UK a few years back to teach some smithying at our summer camp. As we were setting up the first thing he did was make a former for making nails rather like the one in the picture, I still have it in my garage.
There were lots of marvellous things in the museum. However it was that toolbox gave me a real sense of connection to the unknown craftsman who owned (and somehow lost) those tools. It would be great to be able to meet him and compare our tool boxes. There would be a few items in my box that would surprise him but many more items would be recognisable over the centuries. You can see the pictures at http://iceandfire.org/sweden15.html just scroll down the page.
Stav as a whole is about connection to the wisdom of the past while making the practice relevant to today. The martial arts training that comes out of Stav is not re-enacting viking combat by dressing up and pretending to fight with copies ancient weapons. The purpose is to understand the principles of survival and conflict resolution which are appropriate to all times and situations. The most basic principle is combining intention, action and movement. Next Saturday in Crewkerne I will be showing how this principle is both learned and applied through Close Quarter Combat and cudgel training. It doesn’t really matter if you train in Stav or want to apply this principle to another martial art, it will work either way.
Details of next Somerset Stav Course at http://somersetstav.co.uk/sd.html
regards
Graham