Children’s drawings from 1220
A tweet causes enthusiasm: How the doodles of a seven-year-old from the Middle Ages conquer the web
A drawing of the boy Onfim
© Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to a rather obscure Twitter account, a seven-year-old achieved unexpected fame with his artistic experiments. The special thing: the little one lived in the 13th century, his pictures date from around 1220.
There are many users on Twitter who serve a special, often rather obscure niche with their account. One posts only funny photos of cats, another quotes daily passages from an ancient church book, another posts strange photos from cookbooks from the 70s (lots of eggs, lots of jelly). It’s unusual things like this that make Twitter really entertaining for a lot of people. After all, only opinions, arguments and politics all day long are not much fun. One of these rather unusual accounts is also “Weird Medieval Guys” (weird medieval buddies), an account run by a young woman from Scotland with an interest in medieval literature and a good sense of humor.
While the operator devotes her studies and working hours to the more serious content and background of medieval manuscripts, she shares the comic pages with Twitter users: strange drawings that the monks placed in the books at the time. Mythical animals, involuntarily funny war scenes, many funny depictions. With this content, the woman behind “Weird medieval guys” has now collected almost 400,000 followers. But with a recent post, she unexpectedly caused a particularly big stir.
Tweet generates a lot of interest
For once, instead of an amusing drawing of a bored medieval monk, she posted something else: a boy’s doodles made on pieces of birch bark around 1220. There is a lot about it that is special: Firstly, the little boy, whose age experts estimate at around seven years, wrote his name on it. His name is Onfim, probably a variant of the name Anton, and he lived in Novgorod, Russia. He spoke and wrote Old East Slavic, from which the Russian and Ukrainian languages, among others, later developed.
Secondly, that these impressive finds have survived at all. Something as fragile as birch bark usually perishes very quickly, and simple drawings and homework like Onfim’s—unlike expensive, laboriously produced manuscripts—were not kept by anyone or given special protection. It is a small miracle that the boy left us his “works”, and that is probably due solely to the loamy soil of Novgorod, which also preserves wood.
A completely normal child – from the Middle Ages
But why did the drawings of the boy Onfim cause so much excitement on the net? More than 16,000 people have already liked the post by “Weird Medieval Guys” and almost 3,000 have retweeted it. The answer is probably: They give an unusual insight into the life of normal people in the Middle Ages, into the life of a normal child. And what Onfim draws is no different from what children draw today. For example, he paints a fearsome dragon. “I am a wild monster,” he writes next to it. And underneath: “Greetings from Onfim to Danilo.” Danilo is believed to have been a (school) friend of the seven-year-old.
Or a brave knight on horseback, sword in hand. He probably wanted to be one of those when he grew up – in any case, Onfim explicitly wrote his name next to the sword-wielding heroes. But the boy’s schoolwork was also found: he practiced the Cyrillic alphabet, copied passages from the Bible (the touching sentence “God, stand by your servant Onfim” also appears). 17 birch barks from Onfim were found by archaeologists, five with text only, the rest also with drawings.
Onfim will not be forgotten
While boy Onfim’s existence and heartfelt legacy was apparently new and poignant to many Twitter users, the seven-year-old from 1220 is quite a figure in his homeland: there’s even a small bronze statue in Novgorod depicting him with a pen and holding a piece of birch bark. But what nobody knows: What later became of Onfim. Did he get old? Did he start a family? Did he travel the country with his friend Danilo as a proud knight? Unfortunately, nothing is known about this.