A Wild Aoife appears!
That’s what you get for wandering around in a forest, loads of random encounter battles 😀
Well, that’s actually the last Bata Neart page of 2018. I need both comics to take a 2 week break, meaning that Bata Neart returns on:
Friday 4th of January 2019
..where I’ll hope you’ll be back to sooth your New Year’s hangovers with….whatever the hell Aoife has in mind here. I hope you enjoy the holidays!!
And once again Aoife comes within an inch of her life. And from more than getting beaten with Bata Neart this time. Live dangerously, Aoife. Never change. XD
@Azreal: Indeed! She risks a lot more than getting “Boinked” on the head this time. Especially now that Áine is there too! 😀
Aoife, do you want to get set on fire?
… I mean, that will make Ashling think you’re hot… for about 0.02 seconds. And it’s the wrong kind of hot.
@Itmauve: Well…it’s the right kind of hot if you are in the Arctic….for about 0.02 more seconds….and then it will be the wrong kind of hot again 😀
(BTW, welcome to Bata Neart!!! :D)
Well, Aoife’s three for three. First the bird, and now Aine and Ashling. If there were any Formorians around, she’d probably startle them, too.
And, don’t forget that there are two Garda on the way, as well. Will Aoife score a clean sweep, or will they turn the tables?
Find out next year. ^^
@AskAoifeAndAshling: What do you all have planned for the Christmas season?
@Azreal: Probably the usual. Aoife will tend to come over to my house and hang out for a while. We should bring Áine this time, she doesn’t have anybody. What do you think Aoife?
Oh yes! I think she’d really enjoy it.
But…erm…Ashling? Have you got ideas what I can get her as a present?
It’s surprisingly hard to figure out what to get a girl who has…well…nothing…
How about clothes?! She’s been wearing my stuff and any Large T-shirts you happen to own. None of it fits right. We should defiantly include an I.O.U. to go shopping for a bra that FITS her(!)
(Blushing) Oh yea….we should really do that 🙂
You might want to figure out how to explain why you’re celebrating Yule four days late. Aine will prolly be puzzled by that.
@Kessy: It’ll probably be a while before she get’s a hang of the Gregorian Calendar, so she might not notice ;D
However a few Christmas traditions might not seem all that strange to her at all, especially the decorations, many of which may date back to Celtic Ireland. Decorating a Christmas tree was based on a tradition designed to help guide spirits. Burning a Yule Log was done in worship to a mother goddess, and even to this day in Ireland it is traditional to light a fire in the fireplace on Christmas….even if it is not that cold of a day.
So she might not be too put out….at least until people start putting on Christmas TV…that she won’t have a clue what’s going on ;D
Ummm, Aine was raised by Druids – I don’t think she’s going to need a calendar to tell when the solstice is. But yes, I’m sure she’ll fund a lot of the celebrations quite familiar. Well, prolly not Christmas shopping…
@Kessy: Oh yea, I forget they were good at that. There’s even a 5000 year old megalithic tomb in Ireland called Newgrange in which the tomb chamber has been perfectly aligned to be illuminated by the solstice sunrise. Tickets to be in the tomb during solstice are very hard to come by (. When I went on a school trip there, they instead simulated it for us by shining a light down the shaft that was designed for this 🙂
Did the Celts celebrate Yuletide? I always thought that was a Germanic tradition.
@Azrael: I believe most of the modern names for the quarters and cross quarters come from the Celtic tradition: Yule, Imbolic, Ostara, Beltane, Midsummer, Lammas, Mabon, and Samhain.
To be honest there’s a lot of uncertainty about the exact nature of pre-Christian Celtic religion. The Christians were pretty thorough in destroying anything they couldn’t suborn for their own use.
@Rawr: Wow, you got to go to Newgrange for a school trip? That’s incredibly cool. Sure beats the Liberty Bell. LOL
@Kessy: Wow, it was cool? Strangely enough, back in when I was a kid visiting Newgrange (which as a school trip usually included the entire Boyne Valley artefact complex, including the Hill of Tara) seemed kind of run of the mill. Thinking back now, I recon Irish school kids are horribly spoiled when it comes to Prehistoric Wonders.
Although I just called Newgrange “run of the mill” there, what I mean is that we take for granted. It’s there, and it’s ALWAYS been there ;D That doesn’t take away from the awesome impression of the place. There’s something about entering a 5000 year old tomb which had been engineered to have internal lighting during the solstice and also that we still don’t really know much about it. It was originally thought to be a grave (bodies were found when it was unearthed in the 1800’s after being undisturbed for over 2000 years) but no one is sure what it was really for originally. One legend suggests that it was designed to hold The Dagda, or possibly other Tuatha dé Danann.
All of this mystery just added to my own wonder of Prehistoric Ireland. That wonder translated over time to my comics…which led to Bata Neart…which alas morphed into a story about a magic teenager and her hyper Brunette friend 😀
Well, let me put it this way: in the US Newgrange tends to be mentioned in the same breath with Stonehenge and Carnac in France. In terms of ancient mystical places we generally consider it to be in a category second only to places like the Giza Pyramids. Pagans tend to consider Newgrange to be an especially holy place. Personally I’d love to visit
Wow, that’s actually really surprising. I always reckoned that Newgrange wasn’t really generally known beyond folk who were interested already (or after the fact with Tourists who had the place as part of a bus-tour of Ireland). I knew that Stonehenge was part of International general-knowledge, but it is surprising to hear that Newgrange is up there too (although great to hear).
Newgrange itself is a impressive structure and the images really don’t do it justice, this really is one of those places you have to go to yourself (…and no I’m not working for the Irish Tourism Board here ;D )
There is a bit of national pride placed on the structure too. At just over 5000 years old, the ancient Irish sort of beat the ancient Egyptians to it in making complex passage tombs like this one. It predates the Giza Pyramids and a lot of other wonders from back then. Given the possible scale of their abilities, it’s not really surprising that future generations would depict these people as the highly powerful Tuatha Dé Danann.
Welllll…. I was speaking as someone who’s interested in ancient sites. Never underestimate the ignorance of the proverbial person on the street. For the, “Didn’t King Tut build the pyramids?” crowd, no they probably haven’t heard of Newgrange, but they might have heard of Stonehenge. I’d say that Newgrange is probably about as well known to the general public as, say, the Carnac Stones, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, or the Terracotta Army.
Ah, that makes more sense in my mind now, thanks for the clarification Kessy 😀
I knew that Stonehenge was pretty well known and has been depicted often in Western media over the years. Newgrange never really got that level of attention.
I’m going to guess that is part of why they “creatively” restored the site in the 70’s to its current ‘easy-for-tourists-to-visit/notice’ form. Many of the other passage monuments in the area are a lot more subtile, essentially just doorways in large rounded hills….kind of like Hobbit-holes I guess ;D
Hey I got 2 out of 4 on that list I am not a totally ignorant American after all 😛
But in all seriousness I never had head of Newgrange and it really is amazing. to think this place was already 3 thousand years old when Jesus was being born.. It just blows the mind! Here in the south part of the united states we do have a few acient earthworks like this, but not nearly this old. there is a place about 100 miles from where I live called “Poverty Point” its was the sight of the largest and oldest settlements for the American indians. Its around 3500 years old, Its not as flashy as Newgrange must be but its still really cool. Expecialy the earthworks.
I didn’t know about Poverty Point myself until you just mentioned it. It looks really cool, and impressively designed. I love this kind of history, it suggests a mysterious a deep past that we know very little about. There have been suggestions of vast cities and civilisations across the ancient Americas that just make you wonder. I love stuff like this 😀
Poverty Point belongs to a group of cultures called the Mound Builders who flourished in what’s now the central US for thousands of years, building a large urbanized civilization. The greatest city of the Mound Builders (that we know of) is Cahokia, in southern Illinois directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Cahokia flourished about a thousand years ago and was the “capital” of the Mississippian culture. (We don’t know a lot about their political organization.) It’s the site of Monk’s Mound, the largest pre-European monument north of Mesoamerica.
There are a couple of reasons the Mound Builders aren’t terribly well known. They didn’t have any any sort of writing system and didn’t tend to build in stone very much. Although a few of the very early Spanish explorers did make direct contact with them, by the time European settlers arrived in the area their civilization had been completely wiped out by disease to the point where even the surviving tribes living there knew almost nothing about them. I think there’s also a certain resistance in US culture to the idea that there were great native civilizations in what’s now the US before the arrival of Europeans. It undercuts the narrative of settlers taming a virtually uninhabited wilderness. It also perhaps raises some uncomfortable ethical questions.
There’s also a large number of somewhat mysterious stone structures in the Northeast US of unknown origin. They include cairns, standing stones, and underground stone chambers. They tend to be ignored and are often dismissed as having been build by Europeans during the colonial era, although what function they would have served is unclear. they sometimes get attributed to pre-Columbian voyages to the New World by various Europeans. Vikings, Irish, Knights Templar, and even the Phoenicians are often mentioned. Personally I see no reason not to go with the simplest explanation – they were built by Native Americans. Probably the best known of these is a place called America’s Stonehenge. Yes, it’s as much of a tourist trap as the name suggests, and the site seems to have been extensively modified in the 1930’s by the guy who turned it into one. There may well have been nothing there at all prior to that time.
Awesome post Kessy. I love this kind of stuff.
(PS. Sorry the site didn’t auto publish your comment. For some reason it put it in the spam folder…even though you are on the white-list of posters.)
Leave It to Kessy to set me strait on my facts lol Ok so I may have been missremebering I went there like 6 years ago and I did not really remeber much of the particulars! I just remeber climbing the big mound thats shaped Like an eagle and being really impressed that somone built somthing so awsome!