Ceiling paintings by Westerwijtwerd and Woldendorp
In the churches of Westerwijtwerd and Woldendorp in the Groningen Ommelanden there are ceiling paintings from the 14th century depicting a duel , about the meaning of which various assumptions are made. These range from the ritual duel or judgment of God to the symbolic representation of the struggle between good and evil. Both pictures are so similar both in the arrangement of the figures and in the depicted scene that they must be one and the same subject, which was worked on by different artists. Leaving aside the different hairstyles and clothing, the explanations concentrate on the armament and the battle scene.
The armament
Both fighters carry a round shield , long sword and a Kletsie , the Frisian jumping spear . The Kletsie is a combination of an extra-long infantry spear and a Kluvstock . It is a jump pole with a plate or fork at the lower end, the latter so as not to get stuck in the morass when jumping over ditches (similar to that of a pole vaulter), provided with a lance tip at the upper end and a thickened handle in the middle, as can be seen on the Upstalsboom seal, among other things . However, in both cases the skewer shown is too thin to serve as a (wooden) jumping pole.
The fight scene
The scene shows the first fighter on the left, how he, with the round shield in his left and the raised spear in his right, is throwing at his opponent. He stands on the right and has already discarded his spear. It has obviously ricocheted off the shield of the first and is bent (not splintered!) On the ground. The warrior himself has drawn his sword and crouched waiting for the opponent's throw. The scene depicted here is known from classical literature:
"Said it, and in swing he sent the far-shading lance,
Hit and miss right on the Peleiden's shield;
But the spear bounced far from the shield. Hector was angry. [...]
So he spoke and drew out the sharpened sword,
Which hung down his waist, big and huge. [...]
So Hector stormed, the sword in his right hand.
The pity pressed against him, and anger filled his heart
Impetuously. He held out the rounded shield to his chest. [...]
As for the sharpness of the spear, what Achilles shines
Wave in the right hand, furiously to the divine Hector,
Peeking the beautiful body where the wound is most easily attached. "
The viewer is witness to the decisive moment of Hector's fatal duel against Achilles outside the walls of Troy , as Homer did in XXII. Describes the song of the Iliad and how it was represented many times over the centuries in the Greco-Roman cultural area.
The pike
Although the skewers shown are obviously Kletsien, the shaft of the weapon shown is on the one hand too thin for a wooden jump stick, on the other hand the discarded spear is not splintered, as would have been the case with wood, but bent, i.e. made of metal. From the Roman Empire we know an iron javelin that was supposed to get caught in the opponent's shield and deform in order to prevent the fighter from using the shield: the pilum . In the Middle Ages, when the ceiling paintings were made, this had already been out of use for centuries; but pictures may have survived in which the Roman artist gave Hector and Achilles a pilum, simply because he knew of no other kind of javelin. So later the Frisian church painters also had the requirement to depict a bent lance, fused with the picture of the Kletsie - they knew no other spear. It also bears the lance that a knight on horseback depicted in the church of Den Andel (Groninger Ommelande) has inserted, the typical fork-shaped end of the Kletsie, which makes no sense with a rider lance.
In the course of more than 2000 years of cultural transformation, Homer's widely shading lance first became a pilum and finally a kletsie.
Conclusion
The myth of Troy has permeated European history since ancient times. In the Middle Ages, not only did various ruling houses try to prove their origins from the heroes who fled from the burning Troy; also Eggerik Beninga cited in his Cronica of the Fresen Sebastianusstraße Franck that the origin of the Frisians (erroneously) derives from the Trojans. We don't know who, whether as a crusader or a merchant, whether on water or on land, made the way from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, but he carried the fascination of the heroic struggle for Troy into the Frisian lands, the same fascination that Heinrich Schliemann had eventually, again centuries later, would lead to the ruins of the Hisarlik hill .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Mol, Johannes A .: Friese krijgers en de kruistochen. In: Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 4 (2001), pp. 88-117.
- ↑ a b c Raimund Poppinga: Achill in Friesland. Hanover no year
- ↑ Göhler, Johannes: The Frisian Sprungspeer: In search of traces of a forgotten medieval multi-purpose device of the marchers on the North Sea coast. In: Emder yearbook for historical regional studies of Ostfriesland 80 (2000), pp. 160-172.
- ↑ Homer: Iliad. Odyssey. Translated by Johann Heinrich Voss. Munich 2002, p. 385.
- ^ Archaeological State Museum Baden-Württemberg et al. (Ed.): Troy. Dream and reality. Stuttgart 2001, p. 132.
- ^ Loose, Dieter: Sub Aquila. The Roman military in the early imperial period. Norderstedt 2014, p. 44.
- ^ Beninga, Eggerik: Cronica of Fresen. Edit v. Louis Hahn. Edited by Heinz Ramm (= sources on the history of East Frisia 4). Aurich 1961, vol. 1, p. 111 f.