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history and obscurity

One of the great offenses against world-building is to interject modern thinking into eras where neither the technology nor the social structure would have produce it.

Very easy to do by default if you haven't done enough historical reading -- especially of primary source -- when you don't realize that what comes natural to you is not the nature of the universe.  And a grave danger when dealing with eras where we have very little documentation so it's hard to piece together.  However. . . .


Sometimes I suspect that some writers pick eras that are very little documented to put their stories in (or scrub off a few serial numbers and then put their stories in), because they can paint their own notions Very Large over the wide expanses of blankness.  It can be very sad when a writer doesn't realize that an era is more documented than he realizes -- Ancient Greece, for instance -- and starts painting notions over things we know.  It can be very annoying when a writer takes advantage of the illiteracy of barbarian tribes to imagine they are different from any other barbarian tribe has ever been and instead like twenty-first century urban America.

Of course, this may not be the writer I read that's at fault.  Secondary sources, which may be all that the writer had to go on, often plaster their own notions very large over the material, and it takes a keen eye to ferret out modern day from actual evidence.  (Good secondary sources discuss how they make deductions from the evidence.  This is useful training for this purpose.)   Then it lasts forever.  I have read writers who parrot the wild guesses of Victorian anthropologists -- often extremely bigoted ones, whose views were as much devised to hurt as to be true -- with a childlike trust in their accuracy.

This -- The Myths of Avalon -- is a good article on how Celtic history and culture has been mythologized.  And the inspiration for this mediation on history and obscurity.  0:)

Comments

( 23 comments — Leave a comment )
bunn
Nov. 18th, 2012 09:01 pm (UTC)
Ummmmm.

I liked that article for refusing to accept the 'celtic women were strong' idea uncritically, and pointing out the way the law codes don't support it.

But I think it tends to fall into the same trap that it criticises:
"So what about Boudicca and Mebh and the rest? They all have one thing in common: they exist in exceptional circumstances. They do not represent the norm. "

But surely the point is that we don't have enough information to get a real idea of a norm, at the local, lifetime-length level?

Sources for the social structures of pre Roman Britain are vanishingly few. I've read the original sources for Boudicca, and I can't see that it's much more absurd to state uncompromisingly that she 'doesn't represent the norm' as it is to state that she does.

Bottom line is , we don't know, and short of a new find of hitherto-unknown documentation, we never will. Someone wants to write about Boudicca, they are going to have to make things up. It's only a problem if they claim their fictional reading is 'right'.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 12:41 am (UTC)
At a local life-time, perhaps, but on a historical level, we can get a notion from how many women feature like they do in the histories of those who write about Celts.
bunn
Nov. 19th, 2012 04:47 am (UTC)
I really don't think so. As she says "There was no great empire: the whole issue of pan-Celticism is coming increasingly under critical scrutiny from archaeologists and historians and being found wanting."

So the argument that we cannot generalise about people from, say, Ireland, or Brittany, or Scotland in 60AD from what we know about Boudicca - fine. Completely agree.

But it is, I think, misleading to go on from that to say 'these were varying people in different locations with varying practices' and then say 'but women never, ever played an important role in religion or politics unless their men were dead'. We simply don't have that kind of information.

We have a couple of historical accounts, both written by the other side, and one from over a hundred years later, and we have some rather confusing archaeology, for Boudicca. We have even less for Cartimandua, and I'm pretty confident we have no idea who ruled, say the Dumnonii in that period or for hundreds of years later, let alone what sex they were.

OK, so the Cáin Adomnáin tells us something about sixth century Ireland. But Boudicca is from a different culture, hundreds of miles away and *six hundred years* earlier.

Norfolk has relatively little in common with Ireland even now, when they share (more or less) a common language and media and are both in th EU : there's no evidence they could, or would be similar in a much earlier period when communications would be much harder. You can't generalise and say 'Boudicca was not the norm, because of the Cáin Adomnáin' - any more than you can say 'every Celtic land had its warrior queen'.

Establishing what a 'norm' is even for much later and better documented periods is hard.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:10 pm (UTC)
When virtually all the fragmentary evidence points one way, it still points that way if there's very little of it. A woman who can't even testify in court -- how much clout could she have?
bunn
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:41 pm (UTC)
But we don't know if Iceni women could testify in court. I'm pretty sure there is no evidence that the Iceni even *had* courts. The evidence on testifying in courts is from early medieval Ireland and Wales : miles away, on a different sea coast, and from much, much later. There's no reason to suppose the pre-conquest Iceni (or post-Roman Norfolk) would share that culture.

You could write something that assumed they did, and it could be very entertaining - but it would be no more valid than if you wrote something that assumed the Iceni shared a culture with, for example, the Germanic peoples who lived on the other side of the North Sea (who are closer and for most of recorded history, have had trade links with that area).

Extrapolating from very fragmentary evidence for historical periods like pre-Roman/early Roman Britain is a *load* of fun, but it is just guesswork.
marycatelli
Nov. 20th, 2012 01:36 am (UTC)
Ockham's Razor indicates that they probably, being human beings, did not have a culture in which women were men's equals.
bunn
Nov. 20th, 2012 09:17 am (UTC)
I'm not sure that thinking of 'women' primarily distinguished as a group isn't an example of modern thinking in itself. Lots of different ways to carve up society and give some people precedence: wealth, family, religious roles, aptitude, disability: sex is only one of them.

Does a noble tribal lady who is buried with great riches have more in common with a man buried in the same way, or with the the poverty-stricken corpse showing signs of deprivation disease found tumbled into a ditch?

We think of 'men' 'women' because that's a fairly obvious visible distinction when you are dealing with a situation where you may need to be able to recognise thousands or even millions of people.

But in a situation where you know a hundred-odd people, with whom you will share your entire life, it seems reasonable to consider that you might deal with them on a more individual basis: Boduoc the laborer, Boudicca the Queen, Vindex my uncle who is a blacksmith, Aethelbald the man from across the sea, Rian who lives in the cottage at the end and has red hair...

Something I often notice in American fantasy writing is that they struggle a bit with class divides : either they are too absolute, or they don't exist at all.
coffeesvp
Nov. 18th, 2012 10:05 pm (UTC)
It amazes me how many facts writers must know in order to write believable fiction.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 12:44 am (UTC)
It amazes me even in fantasy. Which is one reason why I would never write a mundane work. 0:)
nagasvoice
Nov. 19th, 2012 04:30 am (UTC)
Scholars argue over original sources and finds in archaeology from the start, and insult one another's translations. After seeing how dinosaur finds have got repeatedly reinterpreted, based on how the fossils were drilled out of the matrix (eyeroll), you start wondering about everything else.
It can be really difficult for a person who doesn't know the material of that period to realize how much absurd claptrap is dragged onward forever until somebody points out an absurdity in a timeline or a piece of conflicting evidence that was there all along.
Some topics have all kinds of material to wade through, and others, there's just nothing to work with but maybe a few master's theses with only the summaries in English. (Yes, back in the days of card catalogs, I briefly grappled with a topic where the only resources were pomology studies in Russian. Arrrgh.)
How many writers will go to the trouble of getting peripheral, questionable materials translated, just to check on it? OR to contact the scholars in their language about it?
But *now*, if I ran across something like that which I thought I really needed, after I ran some searches to figure out if there's any other interested parties talking about it, then I might pop over onto little_details, or one of the linguistics sites, and ask somebody who speaks that language what their opinion is, or what their translation is, and I'd probably get an answer.
Of course, this may or may not be somebody who's expert. They may or may not know who to point you to who really knows more.
Just having that very first step is really *wonderful*.
ford_prefect42
Nov. 19th, 2012 07:15 am (UTC)
*further* complicated that translation is itself inherently colored by the assumptions the translator makes about those very same "norms". Norms which can change to a shocking degree amazingly fast. Consider "bitch" within our own lifetimes. In my parents' youth, the word meant female dog, and it's still used that way, but rarely. When I was a kid, it was a deraugatory term for a woman, and it's still used that way sometimes, but more frequently, just within the last 20 years, it's become frequently a generic alternate word for women. Even sometimes used complimentarily. Had such a shift taken place in 60AD ireland, how would such changes be tracked by historical translators working at a remove of 2000 years with very limited data?

And to be honest, what level of competence do we ascribe to the pure academics that study such things? Other than "better than anyone else" that is. To what degree are we to assume that those academics are able to put aside their own modern prejudices?
nagasvoice
Nov. 19th, 2012 08:28 am (UTC)
@ ford_prefect42, yes, I agree strongly. I'm reminded of arguments about slang in Shakespeare, the topic getting slammed around by folks where I was just watching like it was a pingpong game. That one is not a subject I have *any* expertise in.
ford_prefect42
Nov. 19th, 2012 08:44 am (UTC)
And that's *shakespear*! A source written in a presently comprehensible language, during an exquisitely documented period, and one of the most studied and rigorously interpreted figures in all of history. If there are such arguments about that, then how much more on, say, gilgamesh? And it's not simply slang, terms go from slang to normalized in a shockingly short period of time, over the course of a hundred years, a long time for a human, but looking to any time frame before the rennaisance, it can be hard to pin down a given linguistic trend much more precisely than that. So the translations of many documents are subject to tonal interpretation which may be more subjective than even the *best* data available can translate *correctly*.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:15 pm (UTC)
One should read primary source in one's native language if only to get some feel for how the language changes.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:14 pm (UTC)
Watching the experts dispute is yet another thing that makes me glad of secondary worlds. 0:)

Of course, then you have to assume that the expert you rifle is right as a theoretically possibility. . . .
bunn
Nov. 19th, 2012 08:51 am (UTC)
Good point. I'm uncomfortable with this idea of an unchanging 'norm' - let alone the idea that fiction should try to stick to it.

It's the norm for Britain to have a male prime minister. All prime ministers have been male for the last 270 years, apart from between 1979-1990. But I don't think we can conclude from that that all future prime ministers will be male, or that fiction should always feature male prime ministers, or that Margaret Thatcher was PM only because there were no suitable male candidates.

Thatcher hails from the borders of Iceni country. We probably can't deduce anything much about female British warrior leaders from that either, but it might be fun to try. :-D

Academics certainly do carry their prejudices with them, but they are so much easier to spot once things have moved on a bit. I'm always reluctant to laugh at Victorian historians. They may have got a lot of things wrong, but probably so do we, and I must say, their work tends to be a lot more readable and well expressed than a lot of historical research today :-/
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:17 pm (UTC)
Reading primary source does give you at least a modicum of ability to pick out your own era's most grievous prejudices.
bunn
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:45 pm (UTC)
Yes, absolutely - and reading several translations of the same document, from different periods, can be very enlightening too.

I find in particular with Cassius Dio, if you can't figure out what he is trying to say in one translation, if you can assemble 3 or 4 different translations from different periods, it can be quite enlightening!

(OK, I admit it. I may overresearch just a tad :-D)
marycatelli
Nov. 20th, 2012 01:34 am (UTC)
This was how I figured out Aristotle must have been a worse writer than Plato, when all his translations were heavier than Plato's regardless of translator.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 01:49 pm (UTC)
"Bitch" has even shifted meaning as a derogatory word for a woman. C. S. Lewis cited it in Studies in Words as an example of a word drifting toward a superfluous synonym for "bad", since it was rapidly losing its ability to point out a specific fault.

Oddly enough, he used "cat" as a derogatory word for a woman that still kept enough meaning to not be such a synonym, and it's still got that edge to this day.
marycatelli
Nov. 19th, 2012 02:11 pm (UTC)
Of course, that means you are already ahead of the game: you are aware of the possibility of an issue. Not only a historically ignorant writer but one who swallowed other people's secondary source uncritically are the grave dangers here.
johncwright
Nov. 19th, 2012 04:03 pm (UTC)
Supreme Excutive Power
"One of the great offenses against world-building is to interject modern thinking into eras where neither the technology nor the social structure would have produce it."

Hear, hear!

I still recall the day when, for better or worse, I grew out of my omnivorous reading phase, when I would read anything in SFF for my delight, and began to be a critical reader, and found my tastes too refined (or, alas, too jaded) to be sated with merely anything.

It was the day I put down a Robert Jordan book and could not pick it up again. I mean no disrespect for the author, and I confess I have more than a little nostalgia for the days when junkfood of the brain could satisfy me.

But what shook me out of my youthful tastelessness was exactly what you are talking about. It was the sudden shock of realizing how unrealistic it was that all the characters, all of them, would make the kind of social assumptions and speak in terms of the moral grammar of a modern technological egalitarian democracy.

WIZARD OF EARTHSEA by Ursula K LeGuin does not make this error, and neither does LORD OF THE RINGS by JRR Tolkien.

I am reminded of the skit in Monty Python's HOLY GRAIL where modern radicalism is put in the mouth of a peasant who questions King Arthur's right to be king -- saying that supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses. The reason why the skit is so funny is that the anachronism is so jarring.

What happened with me as a reader of Robert Jordon is that unfortunately, the books began to seem to me like that comedy skit, except that the comedy was unintentional, because the anachronism was unintentional. I once again insist that I mean no disrespect to Robert Jordan, who is a writer whose success must be admired. My tastes had narrowed, and I found I could no longer enjoy a story I wanted to enjoy.

In all fairness, I should add that WHEEL OF TIME takes place in a post-apocalyptic medieval setting, and not a medieval one, and so a broadminded fan could argue that any social conventions from the previous technological era could indeed still linger once their causes were gone.
marycatelli
Nov. 20th, 2012 01:32 am (UTC)
Re: Supreme Excutive Power
You outdid me. I never got into the opening chapters, and so never progressed far enough to see that.
( 23 comments — Leave a comment )

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