animals

Visual Inspiration: Whiskered Treeswifts

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Whiskered treeswifts (Hemiprocne comata) live in various subtropical or tropical forests in Southeast Asia.

Macaulay Library David Cathy Cook Whiskered Treeswift

They remind me of swallows, but are more colorful. Especially the combination of grey plus blue in the wings and back appeals to me.

Setting personal color preferences aside, wouldn’t it be so much more interesting to read a secondary world fantasy story with, say, messenger birds that look like whiskered treeswifts rather than the uninspired and unoriginal corvids?

Yes, corvids are AMAZING birds, but they’re used EVERYWHERE. Could they not be replaced by something else in a fantasy story? Or at least made vibrantly colored?

Image by David and Cathy Cook via The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

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Visual Inspiration: Steller’s Sea Eagle

Erik

Here’s a bird of prey with a different look. The Steller’s sea eagle has white bands at the front of its wings, on its legs, and on its tail. It also has a short, thick yellow-orange beak.

Steller’s sea eagle at rest on ice, photograph by Michael Pinczlits via Wikimedia

The normal range of this eagle is along the coasts of northeast Asia from the arctic to Japan, but in recent years there have been sightings as far away as Texas and Nova Scotia.

Steller’s sea eagle hunting, photograph by Julie Edgley via Wikimedia

I’d love to see more birds like this in media, not just the usual suspects like the bald eagle and red-tailed hawk.

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

A Writing Rabbit

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There’s an interesting character in this scene from a Classic Maya vase. In the main scene, an aged underworld god is enjoying the company of a bevy of young women, but below him a rabbit scribe is keeping its eyes out and its ears perked while taking notes.

Scene from the “Princeton Vase” via Princeton University Art Museum (found Nakbe, Guatemala, currently Princeton Art Museum; 670-705 CE; ceramic with painted stucco)

None of the rabbits I’ve ever known in my life have been so practical!

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Visual Inspiration: Bohemian Waxwing in White

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Leucism or pigmentation loss results in partial coloring in individuals, like this amazing Bohemian waxwing:

Tumblr Make Rantala Leucistic Bohemian Waxwing

Very striking, isn’t it! A white waxwing would catch your eye anyway, but the red and yellow wing and tail tips are the truly arresting parts. Wow.

I just can’t but wonder how well one would do in nature. In northern Fennoscandia it would be okay in the winter, because even with the climate change the northern Nordic areas get snow, but summer might be tough.

Image by Make Rantala on Instagram, found via Beauty in All Things on Tumblr.

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Visual Inspiration: Frog Lives up to Its Name

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The mossy frog or Vietnamese mossy frog (Theloderma corticale) comes from Southeast Asia. (Apparently it’s known by many other names, too, like Tonkin bug-eyed frog, but that just sounds offputting, doesn’t it?)

Flickr Smithsonian National Zoo Mossy Frog

Not the only animal with camouflage to play dead when threatened, the mossy frog does it cuter than others, if you ask me. Very effectively, too, if the photo below is any indication:

Flickr mamojo Vietnamese Mossy Frog

Just think if your fantasy role-playing game had a party of player characters traveling through a clearing in a wild, overgrown forest dotted with mossy boulders, which suddenly started moving… and turned out to be huge frogs! Or a secondary world story with villagers somewhere in the boonies struggling to catch and cook these abnormally large frogs before they eat the village’s harvest.

As a total side note: while writing this post I learned that one of the synonyms for camouflage is the phrase plain brown wrapper. I’ve no idea how I’ve never come across that before, but now I know it. It’s one of the joys of language learning to me: you never really stop picking up new words and expressions. 🙂

Images: On a stick by Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Rawpixel via Flickr (CC BY 4.0). Camouflaged by mamojo via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Epitaph for a Pig

Erik

Carved gravestones with images and short poems celebrating the deceased were common in the ancient world, but it wasn’t just people who got them. This one commemorates a pig who apparently died in some kind of traffic accident. Like other Greek epitaphs, this one is phrased in the first person, as if the pig were narrating its own story.

A little pig, everyone’s friend, a young quadruped, I lie here, after leaving behind the land of Dalmatia to be offered as a gift. I walked through Dyrrachium and Apollonia in my longing, and passed through the whole earth alone untouched. Now, by the violence of wheels, I have left the sunlight behind. I longed to see Emathia and the phallic chariot, but now I lie here, and my debt to death is cleared.

Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecarum 25:711

(My own translation)

The story seems to be that a pig was bought somewhere in Dalmatia (the Balkans) and driven overland toward the plain of Emathia in Macedonia (west of modern-day Thessaloniki), to be offered as a sacrifice in a festival for Dionysus (which often involved a large decorated phallus carried in a procession). The stone was found in Edessa, a city right at the edge of Emathia, and it seems that here the poor pig got run over by a cart.

It’s certainly unusual for an animal to have a gravestone like this. There was a custom of writing joke epitaphs for animals, but few people went to the expense of actually getting them carved in stone. Perhaps this pig was special, or perhaps the gravestone represents a kind of substitute for the religious act of sacrifice that was no longer possible once the pig was killed on the road.

Whatever the case may be, that was clearly some pig.

Image: Copy of pig stela, photograph by Philipp Pilhofer via Wikimedia (Edessa; 2-3 c. CE; carved stone)

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Roman Leather Toy Mouse from Vindolanda

Erik

The Roman fort at Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall in Britain has been a source of many remarkable finds. The unusual conditions at the site preserved many examples of the kinds of organic material that usually disappears to decay, including wood, textiles, and leather. When the onset of the covid-19 pandemic delayed the start of the excavation season, researchers at Vindolanda used the time to reexamine some leather scraps that had been turned up in earlier seasons and came across an unexpected find: a toy mouse!

Toy mouse, image via Vindolanda Charitable Trust (Vindolanda; 1st-2nd c. CE; leather)

The mouse is cut from a flat scrap of leather and has markings on the body to indicate eyes and fur. Mice would have been a common sight around the fort and the nearby village, a constant nuisance to a community that depended on stored grain to survive through the winter. Since we know there were families and children in and around the fort, this mouse might have been a child’s toy. Or perhaps it was made to be slipped into some unsuspecting legionary’s bedroll for a practical joke. Whatever the original intent for this mouse, it’s still cute two thousand years later!

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write.

Hipposandals

Erik

This strange-looking contraption is a Roman hipposandal, a forerunner of the horseshoe (from the Greek word “hippos,” meaning horse). It could be applied to a horse’s hoof, with the side pieces bent around to hold it in place or tied on with leather straps. Hipposandals like this one were known in the ancient Mediterranean (examples have been found in Greece and Italy), but archaeological evidence for them is concentrated in Roman contexts in northwestern Europe.

The function of hipposandals has been debated. They were not practical for long-term wear and were designed to be temporary and removable. One use may have been to protect injured hooves from further deterioration while healing. Some versions were also made with spikes on the bottom that could have given a horse extra traction while walking on loose or icy ground. Either use might explain why they appear to have been more common in the colder, wetter parts of the Roman world. In places like Britain and the Gaulish Alps, horses were exposed to soft, wet ground in summer and frozen roads in winter, which took a greater toll on their hooves than the hard, dry ground more typical in the Mediterranean.

One reason we are so uncertain about how exactly hipposandals were used is because no ancient source talks about them in any detail. Hipposandals are one little piece of material culture that would have been part of the everyday experience of people in the past, so mundane and unremarkable that nobody thought it was worth writing down just what they were for or how they were used. This is one more example of the paradox familiar to historians: the more typical and ordinary a thing was for people in the past, the more mysterious it is likely to be to us.

Image: Roman hipposandal, photograph by G. Garitan via Wikimdia (currently Musée de Saint-Remi; Roman period; iron)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write.

Lion-Slaying Women in the Roman Arena

Erik

Performing in the Roman arena, whether as a gladiator, a beast-hunter, or some other kind of violent entertainer was mostly a man’s job, but that doesn’t mean women never took part. The poet Martial celebrated a woman (or women, Martial is vague on the details) who slew a lion as part of the games put on the emperor Domitian.

Warlike Mars, unconquered in arms, serves you, Caesar,
but this is not enough: Venus herself serves you, too.

Martial, On the Spectacles 7

Fame used to sing the tale of how great Hercules
laid low the lion in Nemea’s wide valley.
Enough of that old legend: now after your games, Caesar,
we have seen such things done by women’s hands.

Martial, On the Spectacles 8

(My own translations)

Some scholars think these are two separate poems, others that they were originally one poem and the first two lines got accidentally split off at some point when manuscripts were being copied out. In any case, it seems pretty clear that women also took up arms to perform for the crowds in Rome.

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They’re Good Dogs, Xenophon

Erik

The ancient Greek author Xenophon is best known for writing about the life of the philosopher Socrates and his own experiences in a company of mercenaries in the Persian Empire, but he also wrote a handbook on hunting, full of practical advice for youngsters taking up the sport. He devotes a fair amount of time to the proper care and handling of hunting dogs. Here’s his advice on keeping your dogs in good shape:

It is a good idea to take [dogs] into the mountains frequently, but not so much into farmed fields, for in the mountains they can hunt and track game unimpeded, but fields are not good for these exercises because of the paths. It’s good to take your dogs into rough ground even if they don’t find a hare, for this sort of terrain helps develop their feet and bodies. In summer, let them run out until noon, in winter throughout the day, any time apart from midday during the autumn, and in the evening in the spring, since this is when the temperatures are moderate.

Xenophon, On Hunting, 4.9-11

(My own translation)

Having grown up with a dog and having a number of friends who keep dogs, even if we never used them for hunting, I can’t argue with this advice.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.