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:)
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
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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
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*.
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?
Of course, then you have to assume that the expert you rifle is right as a theoretically possibility. . . .
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 :-/
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)
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.
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.