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"Anglo-Saxon" and "Viking" Mens Hairstyles

7/2/2021

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In our presentations we endeavour to create convincing and well-researched impressions of the dress and accoutrements of people of particular cultures, sub-periods (ideally century, half-century or even decade) and of particular status or societal role. Recently there has been a trend towards re-creation of assemblages from specific graves, though most such contexts fall well short of providing sufficient evidence on which to entirely base all details of costume, let alone other more ephemeral aspects of appearance.  ​One such matter is that of hairstyle. We very frequently encounter individuals with very strong opinions on the matter of what hairstyles the people of late- 
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"Criticise our haircuts one more time, I dare you..."
antiquity or early medieval period would have had, and are keen to point out how wrong we are, for our variously either “too modern” or “too clichéd” haircuts. Such criticism raises two questions;  What do we really know about the hairstyles of nominally “Anglo-Saxon” and “Viking” period peoples?    What is our group’s authenticity policy with respect to this issue?
In this article we hope to address both questions with respect to male hairstyle and grooming, with a further article on womens’ hair and head-wear to follow. 
(Originally published in October 2019)

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"Moving Blog"

7/2/2021

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In 2011, almost immediately after the founding our group, the Thegns of Mercia, we began a blog (on blogspot) to serve as a website for the group, with news posts about our activities, but also as a place to store and share articles. Initially these were mainly intended to serve as guides and primers on various subjects internally within the group, but with us not being in a position to administer restricted access, they were effectively out in the open, and begun to be shared around, necessitating a fairly rapid climb in our editorial standards.    
We later built this website as a vehicle to share our reconstruction work, and to advertise our living history services, but the old blogspot page has continued trundling along in the background, with the occasional article posted and then shared through our social media pages, particularly when what we had to say felt topical.  However, its become clear that the maintenance of the old blog left much to be desired - its format increasingly dated, and the web tools increasingly unwieldy.    Having trialled the tools here with our "Recent Reconstructions" blog this seems the obvious choice to relocate our wider discussions of history and archaeology topics.

This blog will therefore serve as the new repository for our articles, going forward, with the old blog still available at thethegns.blogspot.com but increasingly not actively maintained.  Some of our favourite content from the old blog may be re-edited and migrated over here too. We hope this new format will be both more readable and more visually engaging, as well as better integrated with our wider work.
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Can we all please calm down about the pipe lady?

7/2/2021

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Recently a photo of an intact early Anglo-Saxon skeleton absolutely skewered by a modern cable or pipe, has gone viral. It’s a powerful photo emblematic of the trampling of heritage by modernity, and brutal disrespect of human remains. Except it isn’t; this is not the scandal you're looking for...

(Originally published in May 2019)
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    Exploring the history, archaeology and cultures of the "Anglo-Saxon Period" (encompassing the Migration and Viking Ages).

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