What’s the color of War?

Posted by Häuptling in Culture & Tradition | 2 comments

Apr 21, 11

“In every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered…”, Cornelius Tacitus wrote in Germania, around year 100 c.e. The tribe Harii chose moonless nights for their attacks, and painted themselves and their equipment in black, in order to achieve a demonic appearance, and probably also because of the tactical benefits this sort of camouflage gave them.

Besides that sort of early guerrilla warfare, war in the early days was not so much about hiding from the enemy, as it was about intimidating him with a ferocious appearance. There’s a quote by Julius Caesar in Commentarii de Bello Gallico where he stated that:

Pliny in his Historia Naturalis wrote about the use of glastum as bodypaint for the women of the British isles, in certain religious ceremonies. According to most sources, these words are supposed to mean woad, the biennal plant Isatis tinctoria, native to Northern Europe and the British isles. It can be used for (blue) coloring and dyeing, after a special fermentation process.
It should be made clear, that the word vitro doesn’t actually mean woad per se, it’s referring to a roman type of glass which ranges from blue-greenish to clear blue. Glastum on the other hand does mean woad specifically (even though it’s a matter of debate among some few). In Welsh, Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and other tongues, glas or glass means blue, obviously referring to the Roman type of glassware, and/or the coloring abilities of the plant. And the other way around, places like Glastonbury in Somerset for example, are supposed to mean something like “place where the woad grows“ – which thus more or less confirms the thesis.

Whether or not the tribes of Britain painted themselves with woad specifically – or something else – is not known. But the claim that “celts/picts did not paint themselves with woad” has anyhow become the “vikings-did-not-have-horned-helmets”-mantra of the celt/pict besserwisser community. Besides the claim that there’s no factual evidence whatsoever for this (besides what is mentioned earlier), which is indeed correct – they also claim that is not possible to use woad for bodypaint. This however is not true at all, and anyone who still don’t believe it can turn to the excellent works of Catherine Cartwright-Jones for reference. She have gone through with some serious investigations and experiments with woad and indigo, and clearly shown that it is fully possible to use woad for bodypaint – despite the stubborn claims of the contrary from many others.

The word woad itself is of Germanic origin, namely Proto-Germanic *waidán and *waidáz, deriving from Proto-Indo-European *wAit-, and is called vejde in Swedish, wede in Dutch, waid in German and so on. It is not clear whether or not any Germanic tribes used any warpaint as well, except for the example of the Harii – who are said to have painted themselves black prior to their nocturnal attacks (or more specifically nigra scuta, tincta corpora, meaning black shields, colored bodies – i.e. the mentioning of the bodypaint is not color specific). But given the close relations between continental Celtic tribes and the Germanic tribes, it isn’t at all impossible. These two groups got along pretty well, intermingled, and exchanged and shared a lot of cultural elements between the two of them, even though they largely still remained two distinctive cultural groups.
What we do know, is that the Germanic people at least clearly used woad for coloring of textiles, and even the cape of Odin himself is said to be dark blue. Blue is traditionally also a color of nobility, hence the name “Royal Blue” which is still widely used today. Blue was and have thus been a color of war and nobility – two sides of the same coin – among northern Europeans all through the ages, practically until the introduction of the idea of camouflage on the battlefield, and the downward spiral of importance of the nobility in the modern society.
In Sweden during the 1700′s, the soldiers under Karl XI and Karl XII were called Karoliner, and their uniforms were yellow and blue – woad blue (vejdeblå in Swedish). Traditionally, the blue parts of the Swedish flag is also the blue of woad. From the 13′th to 16′th century, growing woad was a valuable source of income for Thuringian farmers, dyers, cloth makers and weavers. The Prussian army had large demands on woad dyed fabric, until the introduction of indigo (imported from India), which was chemically identical, but much cheaper. Import and use of indigo was initially prohibited, to protect the interests of the German woad industry. But eventually indigo prevailed anyway, as woad could not compete with the much cheaper indigo from the east in the long run. Indigo itself was later defeated by synthesizes woad dye, introduced by BASF in 1878. Today garments dyed with organic woad are considered a luxury, and often appear in lines of more exclusive jeans from well renowed fashion designers.

Ground woad pigment

The process of dyeing with woad and indigo is similar. Leaves are crushed and fermented with human urine for a couple of weeks to produce a vat. The vat in turn, can be further processed into crystals or a powder. It was discovered that alcohol improves the strength of the color. Even urine deriving from alcohol consumption gives a somewhat better result – which gave the woad dyers back in the days a good excuse to drink lots and lots of alcohol (of course instead of adding clean alcohol to the urine, even though it had given a better result, but why waste a good drink?). Even today, the German terms “Blau machen” – literally making blue – refers to a form of absenteeism on “blue Mondays”, typically caused by excessive drinking or partying through the weekend.

In the quest of putting together the bits and pieces of our Northern European past, and in the hope that the woaden blue shall once again be known it its true context, we proudly display it along with our own Wotan Klan™ brand.