Tag Archives for Iceland

Lego Doctor Who: The Secret of Stonehenge

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from the Lego Doctor Who by thegreattotemaster

How can we resist posting this one? The strange genius who generated this objet d’art lives in Iceland. This salt ceramic dough henge is just the sort of odd thing we like. Here is the video of the 2nd episode. The link for the first is here. (The haziness of the video, by the way, is an indication of pre-dawn in the story. The light improves as the clip continues.)

As we said, we sense there is some kind of strange genius going on here and, if he continues on the path he’s on, we expect great things from the totemaster!

Note the trilithon, bluestones–this builder has taken time to look at Stonehenge. Score: 7 druids, and, yes, they were awarded partly for attitude!

The Arctic Henge, Iceland

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photo from Northsailing News

After a day of holiday family stuff, we finally get to posting the different henge we promised. We sweep almost half way around the world from Antarctica to the Arctic where the nights and not the days are long just now. Let’s talk about a question Clonehenge has been grappling with all along: What makes something a Stonehenge replica?

Is something a Stonehenge replica only if it was meant to be one? Or if people call it one? If it has a trilithon? Or, and this is a type we’ve shied away from so far, if it performs a similar astronomical function, no matter what it looks like? An example of the latter is “Manhattanhenge,” but that one was inadvertent. We’ve found a small genre of structures that do not look like Stonehenge but that were built to do what Stonehenge does, and our post tonight concerns one of those.

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photos from arctichenge.com

In the far north of Iceland, in an area with a 360 degree open horizon, a unique edifice called the Arctic Henge (see another good page on it here) is being built to mark and catch the sun and other heavenly bodies as they move around the sky. Interweaving science, mythology, geography, and tourism, the project promises to be beautiful, educational, poetic and even transforming, a chance to feel the connection between a point on the surface of our planet and the light-bearing actors in the dramas of the heavens. Will it evoke for moderns what Stonehenge must have evoked for those who visited it at its height?

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There are other structures in this genre–a sunwheel at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst comes to mind, a  grouping in a park in Wichita Kansas, and a project called Kepple Henge that we hope to post later on.

They all look different, but they have purpose in common. Are they Stonehenge replicas? Not in the sense we’ve been using for that term until now, but at winter solstice the resemblance comes to the fore. Like Stonehenge they seem to forge a bond between us as entities of the landscape and the dance of the bodies in the dome above us.

The Arctic Henge doesn’t yet exist, so no druids for it. However, as its builders claim to have 68 dwarfs, they are probably okay with that!

See the beautiful picture of the northern lights over Arctic Henge that NASA posted April 30, 2012.