"Early Saxon double/layered tunics?" Topic

Hi,

I'm painting up a batch of Splintered Light 15mm early Saxons, and the unarmored warriors all appear to be wearing double tunics: the longer sleeves of an under-tunic are depicted along with a short-sleeve over-tunic.

The vast majority of information I can find indicates that they would have normally been wearing a single, long-sleeve tunic, or at least that any under-tunic would have been covered by the long-sleeve over-tunic.

Is there any opinion on this one way or the other? The mid-arm sleeve breaks are pretty defined, so I could either paint double-tunics, paint bare arms with short-sleeved tunics, or do some file work and try to just paint long-sleeved tunics (or some combination of the above).

Thanks for any advice!

Cheers,

Christopher

This isn't historical advice, but I have a bunch of 10mm spearmen I just repainted with the same kind of sculpt. Originally I treated it as a single long-sleeve tunic. But I didn't like how it came out, and in the repaint went with two tunics in different colors. I like the latter look much better.

Paint them so it looks good to you. If in doubt just go for the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" excuse…

Wikipedia link does say "The tunic … had either long or short sleeves", but I haven't seen any other evidence for short sleeves that I can recall. But to be fair, we don't have all that much evidence for the early period, before we start getting much in the way of art and literature as sources; and there is the occasional short-sleeved earlier German tunic on sources like the Marcus Aurelius column, which could be ancestral to early Anglo-Saxon styles. So personally I'd paint them as is.

Thanks for all the advice. Now that I take a second look at the figures, one arm will eventually be covered with a shield, and the other is sometimes covered by a cloak, so the issue isn't as important as I first thought. I'll experiment with long sleeves and double-tunics and see what looks best per pose.

Cheers,

Christopher

yeah, i always just paint them with long sleeves underneath the short sleeves. no ones ever said anything and it looks good.

but if somone ever did comment i'd just say they were from Seattle and the dark ages were known for being grundge. : )