Britannia

EXCLUSIVE: Britannia Winter Solstice Red Band Trailer
We watched Britannia on Amazon Prime last week. It's a bit of swords and sorcery set in Merry Olde. There's a some history (the Roman emperor Claudius did send his General Aulus Plautius to invade Britain for a second time in 43AD), but pretty much the rest of it is made of whole cloth. Never-the-less, it gave me something to think about.

First off we have a Roman encampment with rows of canvas tents staked out. Never seen it done before in a movie (nor in real life, but we're talking about show business here). That's probably because it's a lot of trouble (meaning expense) and if it isn't critical to the story you can get away with someone just casually mentioning that he has 20,000 troops at his disposal, you don't have to build an entire camp just so you can show it on the screen. The camp that we saw on screen wouldn't have been big enough to hold 20,000 troops. It looked more like a hundred tents which would have been adequate for a thousand men, more or less, but still it's more than I've seen before. They did all this just so you can get a feel for the situation.

The tents looked remarkably like the tents used by the US Army 100 years ago, which I thought was a little odd. Surely in 2,000 years we would have developed a better tent, but then I realized we were probably using the original Roman plans on how to raise, train and equip an army. I mean it worked for them and you can't argue with success.

Then we have iron bars on the prison cells and chains hanging on the wall and I'm wondering if they really had that much iron back then. Wikipedia tells me that in Europe the Iron Age ran from around 500 BC to the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC. It also tells me that the Iron Age is part of "prehistory", so the end of Iron Age coincides with the beginning of history. In the Mideast this happened around 5,000 BC. In Britain this starts around the year zero when the Romans started showing up and writing things down.

I didn't include the weapons as an indicator of metal-working ability because making small things is relatively easy compared to making big things. To melt a 10 pound bar of iron takes nearly ten times as much heat as it takes to melt 5 pounds. Still, equipping an army with metal weapons and armor is a sizable undertaking.

Then there's the sorcery. We have a crazy man out running around loose. He has visions. And fits, and manic phases and calm rational phases. Kind of like you might see with a real crazy person. This guy is special though. He has skills, like hypnotism and the ability to sell his visions as prophetic. When he is rational, he can apply these skills.

We also have drugs, psychedelics mostly. Did the Druids have drugs? Manda Scott has a few words to say about Britannia, Druids and Drugs.


Donovan - Hurdy Gurdy Man (1968)
The show opens with Hurdy-Gurdy man by Donovan. It's a song about love songs and I'm wondering why would you pick something like that for show about violence, so I did some checking. Previous to Donovan, there was:

"Der Leiermann" ("The Hurdy-Gurdy Man"): Back of the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man, cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. His begging bowl is always empty; no one listens, and the dogs growl at him. But his playing never stops. "Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?" -  Song #24 in Winterreise (Winter Journey) by Franz Schubert

and previous to that there was:

The hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument that produces sound by a hand crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. It is generally thought to have originated from fiddles in either Europe or the Middle East some time before the eleventh century A.D. - paraphrased from Wikipedia

So while hurdy-gurdy doesn't go back to the dawn of time, it does go at least halfway back. And the song was released in 1968 when LSD was all the rage, so, trippin'.

Update November 2019 replaced missing video and fixed some typographical errors.