Tag Archives: colour

The Bifröst – Rainbow Bridge of the Gods… or is it? (reblog)

So the other day I was thinking about the colors of the rainbow when something I had read in the Prose Edda came back into the back of my mind and began to nag and eat at me. The Prose Edda says that the Bifröst has three colors. Three colors. Three. That just did not compute for a hot minute. I sat there stumped thinking about how a rainbow on even a meagre day has more colors than that.

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This reblog is a chance for me to post another cool picture of the aurora borealis.

What exactly was “red gold”?

If Freyja wept tears of gold, we would expect them to be the colour of the drops above, right? However, in the Prose Edda, Snorri describes them as “red gold”, rauðr gull. (Gylf. 46) Was this just poetic license, or was gold different in the Middle Ages?

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The Battle of Magenta

Everyone is familiar with Gertrude Jekyll’s dislike of magenta – “malignant magenta”, as she called it. Many other writers of her period were equally dismissive, such as Alice Morse Earle, who said that as she glanced back through her writing on the subject, she felt the word “made the black and white look cheap.” (Kellaway: 93-5)

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Indigo: Seventh Colour or Odd One Out?

Seven planets, seven notes in the Western major scale, so of course seven colours in the rainbow. Isaac Newton even felt that there were similar intervals between colours and notes. (You can hear the tones and see their associated colours on YouTube.) Presumably indigo fitted in well between blue and purple, but most modern scientists who study light consider the spectrum to consist of six colours, the primaries and their complementary colours.

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