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The Mighty Apple II Personal Computer
Sometime in the early 1980’s my family got its first computer–the amazing Apple II. Although making bespoke cards for grandma on the daisywheel printer and struggling unsuccessfully with the grammar of DOS was exciting, nothing about the high-tech wonder was as thrilling as the promise of epic medieval adventure! Somehow, I obtained a pirate copy of Ultima II and soon I was off to save the minimally rendered realm!
The Graphic Violence of Ultima II!
Unfortunately, as a computer pirate, I lacked a map or any instructions, and my piteous little pixelated knight died naked and unarmed many a time before I finally figured out how to enter a town and haggle with a virtual arms dealer. Then, with my meager stock of gold, I was able to purchase a bargain level mace…but I had no idea what that was.
“What’s mace?” I asked my mother.
“It is a spice used for fancy cookies” she responded. However, after giving away my precious 3 GP for such a thing, I was entirely unsatisfied with the answer.
Time to fight some dragons…
“No, it’s supposed to be a weapon. I want to know about mace the weapon!” I desperately begged.
“Hmm, I guess it’s also a sort of spray that women use to fend off muggers.”
The graphics of Ultima II relied heavily on the power of imagination: combat was rendered as a momentary glowing halo, but the finer details of carnage (and weaponry) were not pictured. As I imagined my fearless warrior spraying pepper spray in the eyes of marauding orcs, the joy of the game was greatly diminished. I nearly gave up on role-playing games altogether before I remembered the huge and fraying Webster’s unabridged dictionary (the ultimate vessel of human knowledge in those dim pre-internet days when we lived far from any library or bookstore).
A young me fighting the goblin hordes (simulation)
Webster’s saved my faith in computerized role-playing games: it turns out a mace is a war club, typically with spikes or flanges (as well as also being a “rod of office”…and a spice…and a spray). In fact the primitive brutality of the concept has appealed to humankind for a long, long time. Some of the most ancient weapons from the palace-cities of Mesopotamia are maces, and, as our mastery of materials improved, so too did our spiked clubs.
CAS-Iberia Gothic Flanged Mace 2
Although it has been a long time since I saved the world from the wicked sorceress Minax (or even played any computer game at all), my love of all things gothic remains unabated. Here therefore is a gallery of fancy gothic maces which should satisfy any eldritch death knight or priggish paladin.
A Very Fine 15th Century (Late Gothic) Mace in the Museum of Lucerne, Switzerland (with three Landsknecht pike heads)
The two maces are part of the original stock of the Imperial Vienna Armory
CAS-Iberia Gothic Flanged Mace 1
Heavy Flanged Mace
Very Fine Gothic Mace c. 1510, German or North Italian
German “Gothic” Mace, circa 1480
A&A High Gothic Mace
Replica Mace from Wulflund.com
Ceremonial Mace
I must say they look quite formidable! My ten year old self would have been delighted to know how scary and pretty the mace could be. But the years have mellowed me greatly. Now I might be tempted to try baking some of those fancy spice cookies and offering them to the orcs first….
What sort of monster could refuse lemon mace sugar cookies?
Today we head back to Gotland for another ancient knotlike symbol. The Saint John’s arms is a square with loops at each edge. The shape is actually not a knot but an unknot: if you pulled at it you would discover that it is a torus which has been twisted.
Fornsalen Museum, Visby ( Gotland ). Picture stone with Saint John’s Arms Knot (photo by Wolfgang Sauber)
The symbol appears carved on a 1500 year old image stone from Hablingbo, on the island of Gotland (a Swedish Island in the Baltic Sea). Ever since then it has appeared throughout the Scandinavian/Baltic world to demark sights of interest. Although it is especially common in Finland (where it gained a reputation for warding off evil), the Saint John’s arms can be found blazoned upon cultural attractions throughout Belarus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden.
Rana museum, department of Natural history in Mo i Rana (Nordland, Norway)
From its obscure Scandinavian roots, the Saint John’s arms vaulted into international fame during the 80s. Originally Apple computer utilized the “open apple” and “closed apple” as its command keys (I even remember these from my old Apple IIe and my halcyon days of adventuring in the realms of Ultima). In 1984, when the Macintosh personal computer was introduced, Steve Jobs decided that using the apple for shortcut commands was denigrating the brand. According to Apple insider Andy Hertzfeld, when Jobs saw how many apple commands were in an early version of MacDraw he peremptorily told the design team, “There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!” The bitmap artist, Susan Kare, flipped through her dictionary of international symbols until she found one that easily translated into 16 bit-resolution. It was the Saint John’s arms symbol—which the symbol dictionary said indicated camping grounds in Sweden.
So today the Saint John’s arms, a mysterious Viking symbol carved on a weird rock on a haunted island, is in use everywhere that Apple computers are.
ferrebeekeeper 