Random: Doodleanalia

[nebroadwe]

I'm fascinated by the personal documents that survive from earlier historical periods, particularly the ones for which reconstructing daily life is a matter of digging up trash heaps and attempting to relate what one finds there to the scanty documentation available. An afternoon spent perusing the Vindolanda tablets, for instance -- a cache of wooden tablets unearthed north of Hadrian's Wall at a fortress staffed by Roman auxiliaries during the first and second centuries of the common era -- is a joy to me: they include everything from business correspondence to birthday party invitations (Tablet 291, if you want to have a look). It's like eavesdropping on your ancestors. (Or somebody's ancestors, anyway.)

So running across a link to "The Art of Onfim: Medieval Novgorod Through the Eyes of a Child" over at Making Light brightened my morning considerably. Young Onfim liked to doodle on birchbark and, by a happy combination of environmental circumstances, his doodles survive. Talk about the chance preservation of ephemera -- this is wonderful stuff, the refrigerator art of the Middle Ages, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden puts it. Go and have a look ...

Comments

[rudbekia.livejournal.com]

Thank you *so* much for the link to the birch bark pictures! I have a 7yo son, and the themes are not all that far apart.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

One of my pediatrician friends once walked us through the usual stages of kids' drawings of human figures -- must show this to him and ask for a guesstimate about where Onfim sits on the scale.