Sunday, July 22, 2012

Rule, Britannia

You can't count yourself a true Anglophile unless you can hum this tune.  Britannia has been the female personification of Great Britain for centuries.  Here's a Victorian era version of the valiant lady:








And here's an interesting paragraph from the Wikipedia article regarding Britannia:


"By the time of Queen Victoria, Britannia had been renewed. Still depicted as a young woman with brown or golden hair, she kept her Corinthian helmet and her white robes, but now she held Poseidon's three-pronged trident and often sat or stood before the ocean and tall-masted ships representing British naval power. She also usually held or stood beside a Greek hoplite shield, which sported the British Union Flag: also at her feet was often the BritishLion, an animal found on the arms of England, Scotland and the Prince of Wales."


The version shown here contains the helmet, white robes and hoplite shield with the Union flag, but there's no trident, ocean, ship or lion to be seen.

2 comments:

  1. I think those are British army campaign tents, or perhaps they hearken back to the good old days, before the American colonies got frisky and opted out of the Empire.

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