Anonymous Platypus

Medieval kids’ doodles on birch bark

Here’s something very special. In the 1950s archeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up hundreds of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century. Among the more notable scraps is a marriage proposal from a man called Mikita to his beloved Anna: “marry me - I want you and you want me, and the witness to that is Ignat Moiseev” (item 377).

The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read - and getting bored in the process.

The Five-ish Doctors is better than The Day of the Doctor.

Yes. I know. That is exactly why I am upset. You’re wrong when you say it “doesn’t intrinstically change the show” because yes, it does. Because every time we rewatch those episodes now, every time we see Nine’s rage at the Dalek, his guilt at having killed them all, his pain at being the last one left… every time we see Ten explain how his planet is gone, when we see the pain in his eyes when Donna tells him that his people burned… we will know, thanks to this special, that it didn’t. That it never really happened. That his guilt isn’t over a real thing, that it’s cheapened, that this man, our Doctor, will suffer for 400 years over something that has now been ret-conned and never happened.

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