mountainman wrote:
Thinking of which here is a bit I stuck on my blog a while ago:
The Stonehenge Blau Stones
http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/
Some time ago I was in correspondence with Geoff Kellaway, the first man to bravely stick his head above the parapet on the glacial transport theory for the bluestones.
He sent a paper in which he argues that the bluestones were never described as BLUE stones by the early visitors to Stonehenge, but that in the Middle Ages (ie around the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth and later) they might have been referred to in Ango-Saxon as BLAU stones — with the word “blau” meaning striking, different, or of unusual or striking appearance. This is interesting — I hadn’t come across this idea before!! Is anybody else familiar with it?
Of course, this would make sense, since the stones are not actually blue at all — they are not that different in colour from the sarsens. But it’s intriguing to think that from an early stage people might have recognized them as simply DIFFERENT.
Well if you look in the Anglo-saxon dictionary you find that blau/blae/blae-haewan is light blue whereas blaec is black.... and if you look in Chambers Dictionary there is such a long description ranging through the Germanic language etc that I won't bore everyone with it...... but what it says is that blue really did stem from various forms of the above ;).
As for the stones not being blue at later stages, I expect they discolour with age, but the new quarried stones from Carn Meyn are very blueish and would have been striking in their own right. That there are different types of stone taken from the Preseli range may point to something else, there is no answer at this stage, all theories are ongoing and do not come to a dead end, thats what makes discussion interesting, an acceptance of other peoples viewpoints.....
Surely in all this, stone is the fundamental material of the neolithic, in its texture, colour, flexibility for working and using tools. That it also held a religious significance, whether in ancestral terms or for its particular magic potency must be important as well....
