(no subject)

The late great Angus McBride was just an amazing artist, and his color plates for Osprey's The Vikings are really vibrant and thematically rich and badass. I could tell you what all of them are without having the book in front of me if you were wondering if they were memorable. One of the plates shows Scandinavian settlers in Vinland fighting off Skraelingar (Amerindians, probably Micmac). For the longest time I thought the detail of a woman reaching for a sword was just a storytelling detail which McBride stuck in. It's pretty typical of the sort of neat little fidgety thing he'd stick into a painting.

A while back I was poking at Wikipedia's entry on medieval women at war, and there's actually an account of one of the female settlers, Leif Eiriksson's sister Freydis, grabbing a dead man's sword to fight against the natives. The incident isn't exactly the McBride painting, but it's close. So I'm now pretty sure that's what McBride got in his artist req, and what he painted accordingly.