#Nancy Graves

[2shy]

Nancy Graves, IX Sabine DM Region of the Moon, 1972, Lithograph on Arches Cover white paper and Mylar with chine colle, 22.5 x 30 inches

[oncanvas]

Six Frogs from the Simca Series, Nancy Graves, 1985

Screenprint on paper 29 ½ x 41 ¾ in. (74.9 x 106 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA

[woundgallery]

Nancy Graves, American 

[pussyluvr2000]

Every time I see Nancy Graves' work, it makes me want to abandon representational art. It is so exquisite.

[frenchcurious]

Nancy Graves (1939-1995) Quasi Quasi 1977. - source Sotheby's.

[bal-bullier]

Nancy Graves

Head on Spear (1969)

[coochiequeens]

As modern science and better archeology methods reexamine historical sites more of women’s history will emerge

by Sarah Durn September 27, 2021

  

The National Museum of Stockholm's Ride of the Valkyries was painted during the Victorian period, which saw renewed interest in Vikings. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.

In 1871 on the sleepy island of Birka, Sweden, Hjalmar Stolpe, a Swedish entomologist turned archaeologist, discovered the lavish grave of a Viking warrior. Around the seated body were the remains of two sacrificed horses, as well as a double-edged sword, a scramasax (a long, thin knife), a bow, a shield, and a spear—every weapon known to the Viking world. It was an astonishing find, especially since Viking warrior graves rarely contain more than three weapons. There was also a full set of hnefatafl, the board game often known as Viking chess, which indicates the strategic thinking and authority of a war leader. A thousand years ago, the site would’ve abutted the Warrior’s Hall, where a garrison lived to protect the bustling Viking town of Birka. The weapons, game pieces, location: Everything told scholars that the man buried in what is known as grave Bj 581 was a prominent, well-respected Viking warrior. No one was really prepared when DNA tests were conducted in 2017 and a new story began to emerge. This was a prominent warrior, all right, but the occupant of Bj 581 wasn’t a man. She was a woman.

Viking historian Nancy Marie Brown’s new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, explores what life might have been like for the warrior woman of Bj 581.

Using more evidence from the recent tests conducted on the remains, Brown traces her journey from Norway to the British Isles to Kiev then, finally, to Birka. Brown imagines the unnamed warrior meeting other prominent Viking women, such as Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, or Queen Olga, ruler of the Rus Vikings in Kiev. She also explores the Viking sagas and contemporary sources with a new lens.

How did you initially get interested in Vikings—and female Vikings in particular?

When I went to college, I actually wanted to study fantasy writing and, you know, learn to write like Tolkien. I learned very quickly that that was not appropriate for an English major in the 1970s, so I decided to study what Tolkien studied, and he was a professor at Oxford University, teaching Old English and Old Norse. So I started reading all of the Icelandic sagas that I could find in translation. And when I ran out of the English versions, I learned Old Norse so that I could read the rest of them.

One of the things I liked about [the sagas] the most was that they had really interesting women characters. There’s a queen in Norway who appears in about 11 sagas, Queen Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. She led armies. She devised war strategy. And then I was looking at the valkyries and the shieldmaids and thinking, you know, these are really interesting people that have always been considered to be mythological.

So when I learned in 2017 that one of the most famous Viking warrior burials turned out to be the burial of a woman, that just absolutely dazzled my imagination.

Is this the first confirmed grave of a female warrior that we have?

This is the one that has the best proof. There are one or two others that have since been DNA tested and proven to be female. But in each of these cases, it’s hard to say if the person in the grave, whether male or female, actually was a warrior, or if the object that we are interpreting as a weapon was used for hunting or for some other purpose.

In this case, it’s every Viking weapon known to history. So it’s such a clear result. And the DNA was so completely female.

When Stolpe discovered the Viking gravesite Bj 581 in 1887, he assumed the remains were of a man. That assumption was shown to be wrong 140 years later. Rapp Halour / Alamy Stock Photo

What do we know about the life of the Viking warrior woman in Bj 581?

In 2017, by testing her bones and her teeth, [scholars] could say she was between 30 and 40 years old when she died. They could also tell that she ate well all of her life. So she came from a rich family or maybe even a royal one. She was also quite tall, about 5’7”. By the minerals in her inner teeth, [scholars can determine] she may have come from southern Sweden or Norway, and also that she went west maybe as far as the British Isles before her molars finished forming. She didn’t arrive in Birka until she was 16.

We also have her weapons and a little bit of clothing that were found in the grave. And these link her to what is known as the Vikings’ East Way, which was the trade route from Sweden to the Silk Road.

We can link, through the artifacts and through the bones, that she could have traveled from as far west as Dublin to as far east as at least Kiev in the 30 to 40 years of her life.

How do we know that there were Viking warrior women?

They are mentioned many, many, many times in the literature. In most cases, they have been dismissed as mythological because, of course, we know warriors were men. But we don’t know that. That is an assumption that is based on traditional Victorian ideas that because women are mothers, they’re nurturing, they’re peacemakers, and they don’t fight.

That’s not historically true. Women have always fought. And they appear in most cultures until the 1800s, when Viking studies and archaeology pretty much started. So we sort of have this problem of bias in our earliest textbooks.

But now we have actual scientific proof of one warrior woman in the Viking Age. And as the scientists who did the study say they would be very surprised if she was the only one.

This small female Viking warrior figurine discovered in Harby, Denmark, has been interpreted as a mythological valkyrie. John Lee / National Museum of Denmark

There’s this assumption that the warrior men of myth must have been based on real people, but it’s not the same for the mythical warrior women. Why is that?

It’s just an assumption based on what people think women are like. Most of the material we have from the Middle Ages was written by men, and most of the material we have until the 1950s was written by men, and women are slowly making their way into the field of Viking scholarship. But many of them are still working under the assumptions that they were taught.

I noticed when I went back and reread some of the sagas in Icelandic that there wasn’t this clear distinction between the warrior women being mythological and the warrior men being human. When you actually look at the old Norse text, there’s a lot of words that have been translated as “men” that actually mean “people,” but it’s always been translated as “men” because it’s a warrior situation.

If you’re translating, you have to make decisions and sometimes your decisions have repercussions that you don’t expect, like writing women out of the history.

By the time Hjalmar Stolpe excavated Bj 581, he had become adept at recognizing where graves could be found in the hummocky Birka landscape. WS Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Is it possible for historians to remove all of those biases?

No, I don’t think it is. I think we all are looking through our own lenses. But we have to revisit those sources every generation to see past biases. So when you have layer after layer after layer of removing biases, you may get closer to the truth.

What most surprised you in the course of researching your book?

One of the controversies right now in Viking studies is should we really be talking about men and women at all? Maybe there were all kinds of different genders. We don’t know if there were more than two genders in the Viking age. Maybe it was a spectrum.

If you look at this one group of sagas called the Sagas of Ancient Times that are often overlooked because they have all these fabulous creatures in them, like dragons and warrior women. It’s really interesting [because] these girls grow up wanting to be warriors. They’re constantly disobeying and trying to run off and join Viking bands. But when they do run off and join the Viking band, or, in another case, become the king of a town, they insist on being called by a male name and use male pronouns.

So it was very shocking to me to go back and read it in the original and say, “Wow, all this richness was lost in the translation.”

[captain-gillian]

seven(ish) sentence sunday (nancymarjan edition)

thank you for the seven sentence sunday tags @carlos-in-glasses @paperstorm @sugdenlovesdingle @lemonlyman-dotcom @fifthrideroftheapocalypse

and @nancys-braids for tagging me, you're all in the queue <3 here's more of my nancymarjan 3+1 that i'm finally almost finished

Marjan produces a long, skinny black envelope from the drawer in the nightstand and holds it out toward Nancy, “I have a little something for you.”

Inside are two tickets for a sold-out Fall Out Boy concert in two nights' time in Miami. Nancy couldn’t get tickets for their Austin tour date, nor the time off to go further afield to the Fort Worth date. As she turns the ticket over in her hand, she tears up a little. This was so Marjan, to surprise her with exactly what she wanted, to get the tickets, Marjan would have had to have planned this several months in advance, not knowing if they’d even still be together by then. 

“Dude, these have been sold out forever. How did you get these?? And printed tickets too? Everything is digital only these days!” Nancy makes no attempt to conceal her excitement.

“I have my ways,” Marjan tells her with a smirk. “Besides, I know you keep your tickets from every concert and movie you’ve been to. It felt right that you should have physical tickets for this one, too, so I called my sister Sahar. She has a friend who works for Ticketmaster, and we got it organised.”

Nancy doesn’t display her ticket collection. They’re just piled in a shoebox on her bookshelf; she’s always intended to display them, maybe frame them. But she’s never gotten around to it; she wouldn’t have expected Marjan to have ever noticed. But she shouldn’t be surprised that Marjan noticed, and Marjan remembered; Marjan sees her like nobody else ever has. Sometimes, it feels like Marjan knows her better than she knows herself.

open tag <3 & no pressure tags under the cut

@fallout-mars @literateowl @welcometololaland @im-overstimulated-and-im-sad @pelorsdyke

@bonheur-cafe @tailoredshirt @reyesstrand

[eroticlamb]

cathy limb (left) and debbie graves (right) in the 90s ₊˚⊹♡

posted this 2 the wrong blog before oopsies

[your-stranger-halfblood-things]

Stranger Things season 5 teaser trailer in order:

1. Max in the hospital

2. Vecna and his vines in the Upside Down

3. M*leven fighting

4. A quick flashback to the painting

5. A one second clip of Will and Mike kissing

6. M*leven fighting again

7. Vecna doing spooky plotting stuff

8. A comedic line from Murray

9. Jonathan and Nancy fighting back to back

10. Someone's grave, but we don't see the name yet, but everyone is huddled around there

[infinite-orangepeel]

u just had to bring up the six lil mf nuggets, didn’t you harrington ?

[2shy]

Nancy Graves, I Part of Sabine D Region, Southwest Mare Tranquilitatis from Lithographs Based on Geologic Maps of Lunar Orbiter and Apollo Landing Sites, 1972, lithograph, 57.4 x 76.2 cm

[laurapetrie]

THE GIRL IN THE SONG, round one: marianne faithfull (team jagger) vs. hermione farthingale (team bowie)

IN FAVOR OF MARIANNE: - She's Marianne Faithfull! - "Graceless lady, you know who I am / You know I can't let you slide through my hands." IN FAVOR OF HERMIONE: - "They say you sparkle like a different girl / But something tells me that you hide / When all the world is warm and tired / You cry a little in the dark / Well, so do I." - "It was long, long ago, long ago / And I still can't touch your name."

[fastcardotmp3]

thinking about various versions of Chrissy Comes Back Wrong again and Chrissy, whose mutilated body was buried 6 feet under, who was given a funeral in the local church, a whole mountain of flowers in her memory.

Chrissy, whose body is dead but whose mind is just trapped in Vecna's grasp, trapped where he has control of it, trapped in whatever memory or nightmare he wants to keep her in until she becomes useful.

Until there's reason to release her mind, send it crawling back to a body reanimated with the snapping of bones back into place, breath coming back in choking heaves and embalming fluid still cold in her veins.

And then she's alive again. Alive and 6 feet underground with her name on a placard awaiting a stone yet to be carved.

Alive but different.

Her chest is tight with heaving, sobbing, panicked breaths, but it's like she instinctually knows that it doesn't matter, that she won't run out of air in this pitch-dark box because she doesn't need it.

Chrissy doesn't need air anymore, doesn't need blood in her veins, doesn't need the beat of a heart in her chest despite the way she can still feel the motionless weight of it there.

Chrissy doesn't need any of it, as she scrabbles hands across the lid of her first and final resting place looking for a latch, but she needs something.

She needs to do something.

She needs.

Chrissy has been hungry before, is the thing. Chrissy has trained herself to ignore hunger, as much as a person can do such a thing, but this is unlike any of that.

It's not telling her friends she ate before she left and watching them sip on milkshakes at the diner with a lightness in her head; it's not eating only the meal portioned out for her by her mother and laying in bed with a growling stomach later that night.

It's uncontrollable, this hunger. It's vast and thick and all-consuming to the point where she hardly even realizes when she pushes hard enough against the lid to hear a crack!

She's hardly cognizant of her own frantic movements, doesn't have the wherewithal to acknowledge that she's stronger now, that something about the hunger makes her feel like once she's fed it she'll surpass even this desperation-fueled power.

Soil and insects rain down upon her as she pushes up and up and up; it gets under her nails as she claws towards the surface, in her mouth and up her nose and all over the pretty dress her mother had chosen for her to be buried in.

It was one which made her look particularly petite. It's been torn at the sleeves and the hem is hanging in rags by the time she realizes that in the impulse decision to dig she had locked herself into a singular fate.

Eventually she's going to resurface.

Eventually she's going to have to face the hunger.

---

Nancy Wheeler shouldn't be here.

They have so much work to do, so much to grapple with in the wake of their undeniable loss.

So many lives gone and so much destruction overtaking this town she has called home her entire life and Nancy should really be doing anything but being here.

The sun is setting and the others are having dinner at the Henderson house, one of the few with zero damage caused by the rifts opening in the earth, but Nancy just needs a moment.

She just needs a breath.

She just needs.

"We just keep failing you," she says to a girl's name carved in stone, forever sixteen and forever undeserving of the fate that had befallen her.

Nancy doesn't sit down, just stands on Barb's plot with her shoes sinking into deadened earth, greyed-out grass, and chokes on the feelings she can't have in front of the others.

Not when they're still in this fight, not when there's so much work left to do. She should be doing it. She shouldn't be here.

Fuck, Max still isn't awake and Eddie is on his way to very well losing one of his legs if they can't get his infection under control and Erica is the quietest she's ever been and the Byers boys are attached at the hip like they're scared to let each other out of their sight and Steve is carrying that damn bat around like it's the solution to all their problems and Mike is so much older than he was when he left for California and what is Nancy doing?

"I'm sorry. I'm so..."

She's crying at a dead girl like she's the one who's got it rough. Like she hadn't failed Barb and keeps failing all of them. Like she's not the one who said they should go to the Upside Down in the first place and now Max won't wake up and Eddie might lose a leg and--

The cemetery is empty, this time of day, because the people still sticking it out in Hawkins know that if the sun is setting you should get somewhere safe.

Nancy's stupider, more reckless than they are on paper, just by being here, but really she's just smart enough to know that there's no such thing as safe.

So when she hears a sound like-- like a person choking. Vomiting. Sobbing.

She has her hand on her revolver in the same whirl of motion as she looks behind her.

Nothing.

To the north, nothing.

To the west, nothing.

No one is out this time of day, as the short and hazy sunlight they do get fades into an even hazier orange and then black. But someone is here.

Nancy creeps towards the sound, because if a person is hurt then there's likely a creature nearby too-- a demo-something or other ready to rear back and wield its teeth and claws.

It takes a moment longer than she would like it to for her brain to catch up to her eyes when she sees what she sees. All the input is there, all the information needed to draw a conclusion, but even in Nancy's vast experience of the unexpected, she doesn't know how she could have expected this.

Pink dress gone muddy brown, shredded in places and slashed in others.

Bare feet and blonde hair changed almost entirely in color by the damp of the soil.

Heaving. Choking. Sobbing.

She hasn't been dead long enough for her to have a proper headstone, but the ground torn up all around the plot offers Nancy the final piece to a puzzle she hadn't known she was trying to solve.

Her jaw hinges open and she lowers her gun to clutch it one handed down by her side instead and she breathes--

"Chrissy."

Not a question, because there are a lot of questions here but that's not one of them.

Well.

It wouldn't be, except Nancy's quiet exclamation makes her presence known.

Except, even though Chrissy's chest is still heaving, she stills right there, collapsed on her knees.

Except, when she looks up. When she looks up, it's--

"Shit," Nancy whips her gun back up and trains it on the gleaming red eyes in front of her because maybe it's still a bit of a question.

She really shouldn't have come here.

[victusinveritas]

Nancy Fouts (American-British, 1945-2019, b. Seattle, WA, USA, was based London, England) - Shrunken Gloves 4, 2012, Sculptures: Shrunken Suede Gloves, Cast Resin Bones

[jonathanbyersphd]

Now you don't get it it's literally him