When characters in fantasy fiction sit down to a meal, we have a pretty god idea of what to expect. If the setting is Europe-ish, you can count on hearty bowls of stew, roasted meats dripping with savory juices, ripe wheels of cheese, and maybe a little bread to dab up the sauce with. If the setting is Asia-ish, expect sizzling pans of vegetables and fish, skewers of meat steaming with spices both hot and sweet, and maybe a little rice to dab up the sauce with. (And I’m sure some of you out there who have read books I haven’t can tell us what food to expect in Africa-ish, Americas-ish, or other-ish settings.) The trouble with this picture of food is, historically speaking, it’s backwards. The sizzling meats, steaming vegetables, and spicy sauces are not the food. The bread, rice, and other grains are the food.
ActionMovieKid’s Awesome Adventures
ActionMovieKid is a terrific YouTube channel that I just discovered. It’s run by ActionMovieDad (also known as Hashi), who does the videos mostly with Adobe After Effects. He writes of how the channel came to be:
“My 4-year-old kid is awesome. He gets into some epic situations which remind me that life is an adventure. Now his sister’s getting into the action too. Buckle up.”
Below are my current favorites. They’re all really short, but there are many neat longer compilations, too.
Toy Lightsaber by ActionMovieKid
Get in the Boat! by Action Movie Kid
Scary Bridge by Action Movie Kid
3-Year-Old with a Real Portal Gun by Action Movie Kid
It’s so great when adults take kids seriously enough to immerse themselves into their adventures. And I especially love how well Hashi incorporates his kid’s expressions into the videos.
P.S. ActionMovieKid is also on Facebook and on Twitter.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Fantasy Religions: Religious Experts
If you’re inventing a fantasy religion for a story or game, you’ll probably want more than just buildings and rituals. Who uses those buildings? Who performs those rituals? Not just the everyday believers but the people whose job it is to carry out the functions of the faith. For many of the stories we tell that involve imagined religions, knowing something about the people who have expertise in that religion is important.
There are many different kinds of religious experts, even within most religious traditions, and their roles and lives can vary enormously, from the highest priest of a central temple to the attendant who sweeps the dirt off a rural roadside shrine. Some cultures have complex hierarchies of religious people or divide them into many different roles, while in others all people who follow a religious life are the same. Some religious traditions have no special personnel at all.
To try to list all the possible variations of religious people would be overwhelming and unhelpful. Instead, I’d like to offer a way of thinking about different kinds of religious experts that is flexible and practical, especially for worldbuilding. To that end, consider this question: what is it about a person with a special religious role that makes them special? Here are a few possible answers, and bear in mind that more than one of these can apply to the same person.
Special powers
Some religious experts are believed by the adherents of their faith to be endowed with a special ability to invoke divine aid, at least under certain conditions. Historically, it is common to refer to religious experts with such special powers as priests, but different traditions have their own terms.
A familiar example in the modern west is the priests of Catholic Christianity who have the power to, among other things, invoke the miracle of transubstantiation. Many other religions practiced today also have priests who perform important rites, such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, and Ifa. The priests of most historical religions with an organized structure also fall into this category, including those of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, the Aztecs and the Maya. Many traditions require specific circumstances, locations, and rituals in order for the invocation of divine aid to be effective, but others hold that every act of a holy individual is imbued with divine force.
Hidden Youth Kickstarter
Life is tough as a flute girl working the streets of Athens—and that’s before the monsters attacked. When the city’s guardian statues suddenly come to life and start rampaging through the city, Mnestra, an Egyptian girl, and her Thracian friend Lampedo get separated in the chaos. Can Mnestra find the courage to rescue her friend and confront not only the monsters tearing up the city but also the most powerful man in Athens?
My short story “How I Saved Athens from the Stone Monsters” will be published this fall in the anthology Hidden Youth, a collection of 22 short fantasy and science fiction stories about young people from marginalized groups throughout history. This anthology follows the previous collection Long Hidden which told the stories of people who are often left out of speculative fiction.
I am honored to have my work chosen for Hidden Youth, but this anthology needs our help to make it out into the world. Check out the Kickstarter for Hidden Youth and consider supporting this work.
Announcements from your hosts.
Making Dinner with Durin’s Folk
Here’s a look at how we made yesterday’s Dinner with Durin’s Folk.
The menu
- Sourdough rye bread
- Rosemary crackers
- Lentil soup
- Grilled sausages
- Honey-nut cakes
- Beer
- Whiskey cider punch
The idea for this month’s dinner is a meal that doesn’t actually happen in Tolkien’s text. We were trying to imagine what sort of a dinner the Fellowship might have enjoyed if they had arrived at Moria and found a thriving Dwarven colony there instead of a fallen kingdom. Not only is there no particular meal in the text for us to use for reference, in fact it is a bit of a puzzle to work out what proper Dwarven food would actually be like. Gimli doesn’t have much of an opportunity in The Lord of the Rings to serve up food of his own. There’s plenty of Dwarves and plenty of food in The Hobbit, but it’s mostly the Dwarves eating food prepared by other people—Hobbits, Elves, Beorn, etc.—or making do with what they can find in the wild. We don’t get much of a sense of what Dwarves cook for a nice dinner at home or offer to guests.
So, a little speculation is called for. We can start with the fact that Moria is underground. Thorin recounts to Bilbo that the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain traded with the Men of Dale for food rather than growing their own. (H1) We know that the Dwarves of Moria traded with the Elves of Hollin long ago, so Balin and company would probably have traded for food from the world outside as well. (2.4) Since the lands west of the Misty Mountains were quite desolate, most of the Dwarves’ trade would have been with people to the east, especially with the Beornings whose baking Gimli praises. (2.8) In those days of wolves and war, keeping the trade routes open for fresh food would have been difficult. The Dwarves of Moria would have mostly had to make do with food that would keep for a long time.
These are the ideas that inform our menu: ingredients that keep (salted and smoked meats, roasted nuts, dried lentils) and things they could have gotten in trade from the Beornings or other peoples east of the mountains (honey, bread, and flour).
Dining in Middle Earth: Dinner with Durin’s Folk
“’I thought it was only a kind of cram, such as the Dale-man make for journeys in the wild,’ said the Dwarf.
‘So it is,’ they answered. ‘But we call it lembas or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Gimli. ‘Why, it is better than the honey-cakes of the Beornings, and that is great praise, for the Beornings are the best bakers that I know of.’”
We never get to see proper Dwarven food in The Lord of the Rings, but what if we had? What would a proper Dwarven feast look like? For this month’s dinner, we try to imagine what sort of a welcome Frodo and the company might have received in Moria if they had come in better days, when Balin and his followers were bringing the ancient kingdom of the Dwarves back to life. Lentil soup, rye bread, rosemary crackers, a great pile of sausages, and honey-nut cakes make a hearty meal for weary travelers, with beer and whiskey cider punch on the side.
Instead of place settings, a pile of heavy plates stands near the food for an informal help-yourself serving. There’s also a utensils crock with a mishmash of forks, knives, and spoons. Two simple candle holders of black metal hold white tapers. They are accompanied by a tall white marbled pillar candle and a silver napkin ring for a little more flair.
A table runner with hexagonal woven decorations softens the polished stone table, and a striped scarf stands in for banners or wall hangings.
Chunky stoneware mugs for the frothy beer and simple pottery bowls for the soup are perfect for the setting.
Check out what’s it about in the introduction, or read the how-to!
Images by Eppu Jensen
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
Medieval Texts Hidden inside Newer Books?
After the invention of the printing press, old handwritten books and documents were commonly recycled as reinforcements in new bookbindings made in the 15th through 18th centuries. Now, thanks to an x-ray technique developed in the Netherlands, these hidden manuscript fragments are readable without destroying the book they’re a part of.
It’s all possible with macro x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF), which allows even pages glued to each other to be read. Dr. Erik Kwakkel at Leiden University, one of the academics behind the Hidden Library project attempting to uncover more of these fragments, has both been interviewed and written about the process.
Dr. Kwakkel describes the importance of this discovery for The Observer like this:
“Every library has thousands of these bindings, especially the larger collections. If you go to the British Library or the Bodleian [in Oxford], they will have thousands of these bindings. So you can see how that adds up to a huge potential.”
He blogs about his projects and findings at Tumblr and at medievalbooks; see the latter e.g. for the exclusive behind-the-scenes post on the Hidden Library project.
Now I’m hoping we will eventually find a wealth of medieval texts in bookbindings. It’s really fascinating what we can discover with modern technology!
Image: A printed book with medieval manuscript fragments inside the spine, photograph by Erik Kwakkel (Leiden, University Library, nr. 583; 16th c. with 12th c. fragments)
Land Tenure
Land tenure. The very words sound boring. Perhaps they conjure images of gray-haired men in tweed jackets with elbow patches picnicking beside a barley field. But stick with me for a minute here, because land tenure is an important thing to know about in understanding historical cultures and for building your own fictional worlds.
Land tenure is one of several terms historians use to describe the legal structures surrounding the control of land. (Technically, the term land tenure is only used in British common law. Other legal systems use different terms, but this is one you’ll see a lot of in English-language history texts.) The question of who controls a piece of land is always important, but it is especially vital in agrarian societies in which land, specifically farmland, is the basis of wealth. Land tenure is about figuring out who gets to use a piece of land and under what conditions.
In some cultures this isn’t an issue. Some legal systems allow only an either-or choice, you either own a piece of land or you don’t. Under other traditions, no one owns land at all. But in certain kinds of societies, the question of who controls a plot of land and under what conditions they hold it is at the heart of many conflicts.
It’s the same basic principle that applies today when you rent an apartment. As a tenant, you have certain rights in the use and enjoyment of the apartment, but the landlord also has rights they can enforce such as demanding rent and keeping the apartment in a usable condition. Landlords have good reason to want to keep as much control over their property as they can. They don’t want tenants messing things up and making it harder to rent the apartment profitably in the future, plus they want to be able to easily get rid of tenants who make trouble or don’t pay their rent. At the same time, renters also have good reason to want as much control as possible over their apartments. They want the security of knowing they won’t suddenly be thrown out and have to look for a new place and they want to know that no one’s going to be coming in and messing with their stuff. There is a tug-of-war between different interests and the balance of legal rights between landlords and tenants reflects the balance of power in larger society.
Computer Issues (SATW Style)
I’ve been having computer issues on and off for a couple of months now, so my part of the posting here will continue to be lighter than normal until they’re resolved.
It’s not all bad, though: whenever my computer has been acting up really bad, I pretty reliably end up returning to one particularly brilliant Scandinavia and the World comic.
The character in the snippet above is Brother Finland. As a fellow Finn, I feel his pain (especially when Brother Sweden – of all people! – walks in and fixes the computer with a touch). And usually I then end up reading more SATW, which is a great stress relief.
Image: Computer Technician, detail of a Scandinavia and the World comic by Humon
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Quotes: Soon I’ll Have to Switch to Finnish
“German is my last recourse for emotional outbursts and my grammar goes all to hell–heck!–when I’m mad. Soon I’ll have to switch to Finnish or learn a new language to stay ahead.”
– Kat Richardson: Poltergeist
A first-time father ponders on the nigh impossibility of keeping his language in check in front of his toddler son.
We do have some great swear words in Finnish, but, then again, I’m biased. 🙂
Richardson, Kat. Poltergeist. New York, NY: Roc, 2009, p. 88.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
