Saxon a spectrum

Quite right, fedup. Historians cannot apply modern ideas/beliefs to even the Victorians, let alone ancient civilizations which had quite different world views (i.e. the world was created in 7 days) and ideas about how people behaved (women ran ale houses since they brewed ale, for example). It is impossible, pointless and quite wrong to apply modern ideas to the past.

We should really start on transing many more famous dead men. That might make men concerned about this trend, if Gandhi, say, was suddenly viewed as a trans woman for his values and the spinning etc.

The gift that keeps on giving, this transing of the dead! If we applied modern concepts to historical and prehistorical events, we would theorise that the kilts of Scotsmen were really worn for the same reasons as mini skirts are worn now or in the more recent past, that war paint was a form of make-up used by transgender women and so on.

The Victorians applied their contemporary lens to history and other cultures, and we later blamed them for that. But now the new generation is making that same mistake.

It's also interestingly retrogressive, as it tries to put 'women' (only redefined) back into the extremely patriarchal box where none of them ever did anything outside the prescribed gender norms of the era they lived in. Yet the people doing this don't see themselves as the defenders of patriarchy, or at least believe that they have made a private contract to be released from the rules, only at the expense of everyone else being firmly locked up in the old rigid gender boxes.

He was killed near Dublin. I suppose they might have brought such a high status person to his family home for burial. Some say Boneless refers to impotence. On the other hand Mac Imhar / Mac Ivor families were thought to descend from him. Would infertility show on DNA - if they ever got any ?

And by the way, Buckland is deep in Jute territory, so not Saxon, and as non-Vikings, would have worshipped Woden, not Odin. And another interesting snippit, they took the Romano-British name Dubris, of which the case ending made it mean "at the waters" and changed it to Dofras, with the same case ending, so the ethnic change over may not have been complete or violent. The Buckland sword wielding maidens may have been Celts. Not a place I'd go to draw general conclusions about populations from.

Prince Buster!

Perhaps it wasn't used to his face? cf Al Capone:

Don't call me Scarface!

The Repton archaeologists were more explicit about the possible identity of the grave as being Ivar's. Goodness knows how someone with his reputation allowed the nickname.

@Musomama1 Are they making a poor attempt to identify as the Spice Girls?

Yes, I know!

This thread is wonderful. I thought I'd enhance it further with a picture of Saxon.

Yes there are similarities, but they are definitely not the different band Def Leppard.

Ivar the Boner-less, more like.

I thang yew.

You’re milking it now …

The supervisors for this shite should give their heads a wobble. ‘a trend for re-examining historical figures using modern gender categories’ is just really, really poor historical practice.

dreadful stuff. But… academic standards vary so wildly and peer review is no guarantee when the reviewers are also producing shitty work.

maybe the Telegraph should report this

It’s the analytic frame that’s most obviously wrong.

Why on earth are they applying 21st century gender stereotypes and notions of ‘transgender’ to the Saxons?

That’s completely stupid.

This is almost certainly empirically wrong. It's seven kinds of silly in other ways, but it also seems to have missed key recent data about the graves it discusses.

A big DNA paper published in Nature in 2022 showed that a number of burials from this period with an apparent mismatch between sex and grave goods were simply wrongly sexed. The skeletal remains looked to be one sex, but they turned out to be genetically the other. Skeletal sexing is very reliable, but not 100%. It's based on the shapes of different bones, and in a small percentage of cases it is misleading.

This is the DNA paper: https://rdcu.be/dxPqz

Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P. et al. The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature610, 112–119 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2

Page 114: "We note that several burials with weapons that were previously identified as female and discussed in the literature23,50 have turned out to be genetically male in our analysis (see the highlighted entries in Supplementary Table 1). Of note, however, a single individual still displays a sex–gender difference: a teenage boy buried with an equal-arm brooch, beads and a knife (grave 122 in West Heslerton)."

The DNA paper included over 50 individuals from the Buckland cemetery in Dover, Kent, which is the site the PhD student discusses. It's the obvious site, since it was well-known to have a few cases of apparent discrepancy between skeletal sex and gender presentation as expressed in grave goods. But was is the important word here, since the 2022 paper makes it clear that all but one of these apparent cases from all sites were misleading. The PhD student (or at least their supervisors) really ought to know about these recent results from the site they are studying.

Or, "No, you're a bloody Holstein!"

This is one of those threads that demonstrates what a clever, erudite lot MNers are, I love it! Polymaths, polyglots, poly..whatevs... I salute you.

Amongst the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, wasn't there someone who said 'Hey what about me? I'm Frisian!' and they all said ' Oh stop being nesh!'

And so so soooooooooooo many versions of it!

So you are saying he was Ivar the Phwoarless?