Hadrian’s Wall… In Legos!

Erik

Brick to the Past is a British Lego-building group that bases their creations on historical landscapes and architecture. One of their builds from last year was inspired by Hadrian’s Wall. The layout combines a stretch of wall, a Roman fortress and town, a milecastle (one of the fortified gateways placed at one-mile intervals), and a native village.

Hadrian's Wall by Brick to the Past
Hadrian’s Wall by Brick to the Past

The buildings are full of delightful details and clever Legosmithing, like the use of a cogwheel over the main door of the bathhouse to represent the wild-haired head that was often associated with springs and baths in Roman Britain, like this fine example from Aquae Sulis (present-day Bath).

The bathhouse by Brick to the Past
The bathhouse by Brick to the Past
Pediment from Aquae Sulis
Pediment from Aquae Sulis, detail of photograph by Velvet via Wikimedia (Bath; 1st c. CE; stone)

Hadrian would be proud. Here’s a picture of the original, from Milecastle 37. They do kind of look like Legos, don’t they?

Milecastle 37, photograph by Erik Jensen
Milecastle 37, photograph by Erik Jensen

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

I’ll Have Elevensies with My Elevensies, Thanks!

Eppu

Beer brewers Night Shift Brewing in Massachusetts made a Baltic porter aged in apple brandy barrels. They call it Elevensies, and describe it as dark and of high gravity.

Night Shift Brewing elevensies_square-01
Elevensies beer by Night Shift Brewing
Night Shift Brewing Elevensies
Elevensies beer. Screenshot from Night Shift Brewing

Sounds like it would’ve made a perfect partner for our Prancing Pony dinner. Maybe we can still find some…!

Found via File 770.

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!

 

“The Celts” and the Victorian Hangover

Erik5 Comments

160328WandsworthNo, this is not a post about how ladies and gentlemen of the nineteenth century recovered after too many pints of Guinness. Rather, it is about how nineteenth-century ideas about culture and identity have held on so tenaciously in popular history that even now, over a century later, we still have to struggle against them when trying to talk about peoples of the past. One of the subjects that often brings up these outdated ideas is “the Celts.”

Searching for the Celts

Here’s how the Victorian version of history goes. Between 500 and 400 BCE, a new group of people known as the Keltoi to the Greeks or the Gauls to the Romans, whom we call the Celts, emerged in the area of southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. From this homeland, they expanded explosively outwards in all directions led by aggressive warrior princes who fought from two-wheeled chariots with long iron swords. They raided Italy and Greece but were prevented from conquering those regions by the armies of the Greeks and Romans. In the west and north, however, the native peoples were far less sophisticated and could not resist the invaders. The Celts conquered France and Belgium, northern Spain, and the British Isles until at the western shores of Ireland their expansion was finally halted by the Atlantic Ocean.

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Love & Friendship Trailer

Eppu1 Comment

A movie version of Jane Austen’s never-before-adapted epistolary novel Lady Susan is coming out in a few weeks (released on May 13), and the trailer is finally here.

Love & Friendship TRAILER 1 (2016) – Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel Movie HD via Movieclips Coming Soon

I’ve been waiting for it for a long time without any real idea of what it’ll be like, as I’ve never even heard of the writer / director Whit Stillman before. It looks absolutely hilarious! Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan seems perfect in every way; I’m also looking forward to seeing more of Jemma Redgrave, James Fleet, and Stephen Fry. Can’t wait! Fansquee!

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Native American Style Mainstream Genre Icons

Eppu1 Comment

Jeffrey Veregge, an artist and member of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington state, makes positively fantastic versions of mainstream genre icons like superheroes, movie characters, Transformers, aliens, and the like.

Jeffrey Veregge Early-Bird
Early Bird by Jeffrey Veregge

Veregge himself says of his work:

“This site, the work that is seen on it is a reflection of a lifetime love affair with comic books, toys, TV and film. Taking my passions and blending them with my Native perspective, artistic background and the desire to simply be me. Basically I am just trying to have fun and get back to that kid that went to art school to begin with, wanting to create artwork that I want to see and make just for the hell of it.”

Jeffrey Veregge Shield-Logo
Shield by Jeffrey Veregge

Several of his designs would make fantastic fabric prints, like this Flash-inspired one, for example:

Jeffrey Veregge scarlet-blurr
Scarlet Blurr by Jeffrey Veregge (2012)

If there was a fabric Flash version, I’d use it for pencil cases, zipper travel pouches, or a table cloth. Or maybe tall, tall shades with a wide border on the bottom; that would look really striking.

Visit Veregge’s home page for more!

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Race and Culture in Hannibal’s Army

Erik3 Comments

160322elephantTor.com published an article online today about diversity in Hannibal’s army written from the point of view of historical wargaming. It is a interesting article and well worth a read, but unfortunately it misses the opportunity to really address questions of racial and cultural diversity in ancient warfare. Here is a quick attempt to address some of the things that were lacking.

Race and culture

Race is a term with a lot of baggage, as we are all painfully aware, but it means different things in different contexts. In modern parlance, it describes a socially-constructed division of human beings into more or less arbitrary categories, largely on the basis of skin color and other physical features. In a fantasy context, it refers to distinct species of intelligent creatures like Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, and so on.

The unaddressed problem in the Tor.com article is the conflation of race and culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, overtly racist theories of history posited that people of different genetic backgrounds naturally had different qualities. Many of these stereotypes still linger in our popular culture: the stoic Indian, the mischievous Irishman, the passionate Italian, etc. This belief in racial character was encoded in early classic works of fantasy like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which gave us the stubborn Dwarf, the ethereal Elf, the vicious Orc, etc.

Even as we struggle to root out this conflation of race and culture from our modern life, it lingers on in works of fantasy and science fiction: the logical Vulcan, the boisterous Klingon, the decadent Centauri, the proud Dothraki. As we look back at history, we have to think of the people of the past not in terms of racial qualities but in terms of cultural contexts. People of different origins often do behave differently, but those differences are explained by the cultures they lived in, not the races they represent.

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Fantasy Religions: Sacrilege, Blasphemy, and Heresy

Erik1 Comment

160321SibylWhen creating religions for our stories, one of the things to think about is how the people who follow that tradition respond to offenses against its rules and principles. Is your character running the risk of torture and death if they question the accuracy of the sacred texts, or are they just going to get a stern glare from their grandmother for using the wrong hand to swirl the incense at the family altar?

Just as there are lots of different religious traditions that people practice in many different ways, there are lots of different ways of disrespecting religious ideas and offending the people who hold them. I’m going to talk about three kinds of religious transgression today that are often confused with one another. The differences between them are important, though. Which of these kinds of transgression a society recognizes and how it responds to them reflect important things about its history and religious traditions. These three are: sacrilege, blasphemy, and heresy.

(Or, as we call it my house, Saturday night.)

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Making Supper at the Prancing Pony

Erik

Here’s a look at how we made yesterday’s Supper at the Prancing Pony.

The menu

  • Root vegetable soup
  • Cold chicken and ham
  • Bread and butter
  • Cheese
  • Blackberry tart
  • Beer

erikchef1No meal in The Lord of the Rings is more clearly described than the supper laid on by Butterbur of Bree at the Prancing Pony, and we have stuck to the letter of the description: a hearty vegetable soup and cold chicken and ham served up with bread, butter, and cheese, with home-brewed stout to drink and a blackberry tart for dessert. (1.9)

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Dining in Middle Earth: Supper at the Prancing Pony

Eppu1 Comment

“In a twinkling the table was laid. There was hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough to dispel the last of Sam’s misgivings (already much relieved by the excellence of the beer).”

LotR Dinner3 Dessert

Barliman Butterbur serves up a filling supper of good home cooking at the Prancing Pony and we’ve done our best to do his fare justice. We have a soup of roasted root vegetables, cold chicken and ham, and bread with butter and cheese. A simple blackberry tart makes a satisfying dessert and a home-brewed blackberry stout goes with it all.

LotR Dinner3

We imagined a material culture in Bree-land that combines Hobbit and Bree Human features, possibly with some Dwarven-made touches. The color white is pulled from Mr. Butterbur’s white apron and the white tablecloth on the four Hobbits’ dinner table. Expanding on that, we used mostly white dishes, white candles, and clear glass. The soup bowl with leaf imprints on its inner surface is similar to the green one in the Long-Expected Party. A fabric-lined basket holds a variety of bread, and half a wheel of cheese invites nibbling.

LotR Dinner3 Main

And there’s pie!

LotR Dinner3 BW

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!