Combat Scenes Research Articles

The Bowman and the Bird on the Ruthwell Cross and Other Works: The Interpretation of Secular Themes in Early Mediaeval Religious Art

In interpreting works of mediaeval religious art, the question often arises whether all figures represented in them are properly understood as religious in content. There is one class in particular that is uncertain in meaning: the animals and associated humans-the hunters, bowmen, and struggling figures engaged with beasts. For a student who is convinced that all in mediaeval art is symbolic or illustrates a religious theme, it is not hard to find a text that seems to justify a moral or spiritualistic interpretation of the hunter and the beasts. But there is also the famous letter of St. Bernard denouncing the fantastic sculptured capitals of the Cluniac cloisters as completely devoid of religious significance. This powerful, vehement statement of a great churchman, who was also a poet, confirms the view that Romanesque art includes much that was not designed as symbol or as illustration of a sacred text.' There are, nevertheless, examples to which Bernard's strictures might not apply and where our intuition about a possible religious content of the animal image leads us to inquire further into the criteria of interpretation. Sometimes we observe that the images of animals and hunters, whether in the main or marginal field, resemble neighboring themes which have an undoubted religious sense. But even this resemblance is not decisive, for the problematic theme may elaborate freely an extra-religious aspect of the religious representation as in images of violence from the Old Testament bordered by scenes of animal and human combat in the frame. Thus on one of the Meigle stones in Scotland, Daniel with the Lions is surrounded by hunters, hounds, a centaur with two axes, a man with a club, and a dragon fighting a horned beast.2 Centuries later, and no doubt independent of insular tradition, above a capital in the cloister of Moissac with the story of Daniel in the Lions' Den, is an impost carved with droll figures of little men fighting with birds, beasts, and monsters.8 On the twelfth century bronze doors of Augsburg, a man struggling with a lion is probably Samson, since on a nearby panel the same figure wields a jawbone against a crowd of smaller figures who can only be the Philistines. But there is also a scene of a bear at a tree

Homeric Art

The phrase ‘Homeric Art’ is ambiguous. It may mean either the poet's description of works of art familiar to himself and his audience, or transmitted to them as the furniture of the legends; or the poet's own style of presentation, in relation to other modes of craftsmanship in his time. There is also the reproduction, by painting or otherwise, of episodes from the poems, and as these may be contemporary as well as later, the study of them merges in that of Homeric representations, either of scenes of combat, or of the wild life which inspired so many of the similes.

Analysis of Neuroses Developing After Combat in Four Individuals with Outstanding Combat Records*

The relation of the combat breakdown to the pre-existing personality was in part demonstrated in this report of four patients who developed combat neuroses. Mechanisms involved and some theoretical considerations were discussed. It was shown that intravenous sodium pentothal, when employed relatively soon after the traumatic experience, is at times useful in uncovering subjective material otherwise difficult to find in a brief period. As to the therapeutic benefits of such techniques of therapy, return of the patient to combat duty after treatment is not in itself a safe criterion of success since he may immediately be killed or hurt or readmitted to another hospital with a second breakdown. Careful comparative studies with long follow-up by energetic and well-trained psychiatric teams working near the front might provide the answer to this important question. It is most regrettable that the military services have not sufficiently encouraged competent and aggressive organized research in the field of war psychiatry. It has been this writer's experience that the psychiatric breakdowns of this war, like other neuroses, have to do with problems of infantile anxiety, hostility and guilt which are aroused by the traumatic situation. Guilt at killing the enemy is rare, but when it does occur it is seen to express a remorse concerning hostility which the patient has long harbored. Mourning and anxiety in connection with the loss of an unconscious homosexual love-object can be demonstrated in many cases. Anxiety at the sight of mutilating wounds through identification is often seen. Enemy assault, such as shelling, is especially disturbing to patients, who have unconscious passive feminine identification. “Blast concussion” is a very common precipitating agent of war neuroses. While little evidence of a resulting neurological lesion can be proven in the great majority of such cases, careful exploration of the meaning of the event to the patient will usually bring out that the blast was immediately interpreted as a confirmation of a specific neurotic fear, as, for example, that it is the long-expected punishment for an infantile “criminal” wish. Although a very large percentage of patients studied in the combat zone are not aware of psychosexual disturbances, in the author's material such disturbances appear to be basid in the production of their neurosis. The research value of the study of the combat neurosis does not now lie in preparing for the next war, since, should there be one, it is doubtful that the medical department would have much opportunity to operate at all. It lies rather in the opportunity for studies as to the nature of repression and defense, as to the value of brief therapies with the aid of drugs and hypnosis, and of the mechanisms of development of neurotic symptoms, as to the effect of anxiety upon the body, and as to whether a catastrophic event in an adult is alone sufficient to precipitate a chronic neurosis without a background of anxiety. There is considerable reason to believe that battle nightmares and the repetitive reminiscences of combat experience which harass most patients may indeed be symbolic, although it has been written to the contrary that the dreams and many of the symptoms are uninterpretable. The combat scene is certainly a very satisfactory representation of the bloody and violent fantasies, often motivated by unconscious, guilt, evidently mobilized in neurotic personalities by war experience. The most persistent sign of the combat reaction is usually irritability and other expressions of hostility, and the nightmares. In many case this hostility may be a substitute for or defense against depression or other form of current anxiety. In others, factors in the past history can be found which indicate the presence of a large amount of unconscious hostility with which the dreams then deal. The violence against the dreamer of the manifest contents seems at times to be in proportion to the dreamer's unconscious guilt. Combat nightmares are probably anxiety dreams with the same significance as those of any other neurosis. In cases sufficiently studied it has been found that the psychological connection between the traumatic event and the patient's pre-existing unconscious problems is made immediately at the time of the trauma rather than later, even though the clinical symptoms may not be apparent for some weeks or even months. Although the symptoms of these four patients were colored by the war setting, they represent in each case the exacerbation of an old neurosis, and their illness does not deserve a special name. In the writer's experience, such is the case with all persistent combat reactions.

Sir Arthur Evans: Gifts to the Ashmolean Museum

SIR ARTHUR EVANS has presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, of which he was keeper for a period of twenty-five years ending in 1908, his unique collection of Minoan sealstones and gems, gold rings and jewels, as an accession to the recently rearranged ‘Minoan Room’. The collection, as is recalled by the Oxford correspondent of The Times of February 2, is “far-famed and unrivalled”, embracing every period and class of the Minoan gem-cutter's art—prisms, button-seals, cylinders and ring bezels in steatite, cornelian, ivory and other materials, engraved with pictographs, scenes of ritual, bullfighting and other sports. Among the rings is the famous great gold ring of Nestor, the group of gold beads known as the Treasure of Thisbe, all engraved with scenes of ritual, combat and ancient legend. Since Sir Arthur began his archaeological explorations in Crete in the early nineties of the last century, both while he was keeper of the Museum and after, he has been liberal in contributing to its collections examples of the objects discovered by him in his excavations. With this latest gift, the Ashmolean collection of Minoan antiquities becomes the most important and the most complete outside Crete itself. Recent alterations of the Museum, in which the largest archaeological gallery has been divided into three sections, have made it possible for Sir Arthur, with the assistance of Miss Mercy Money-Coutts, to make a new installation of Cretan antiquities, in which the older collections have been supplemented by groups of casts, numerous photographs, diagrams and water-colour drawings, with figurines, smaller antiquities and pottery which he has transferred to the Museum from his private cabinets. His benefactions have not, however, been confined to the donation of antiquities from Crete. They include classical antiquities, large series of Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon coins, and other objects, as well as the great collections of stone and bronze implements, Anglo-Saxon jewellery and other material which belonged to his father, the late Sir John Evans.