history

Quotes: Mistakes in Lesser Matters

ErikLeave a comment

The Roman writer Vitruvius had some opinions about public art, expressed here in a critique of the city of Alabanda in western Anatolia, modern-day Turkey:

The people of Alabanda are sharp enough when it comes to affairs of state, but they have been found foolish for their mistakes in lesser matters, since the statues in their gymnasium are all arguing lawsuits, but the ones in their forum are holding the discus, running, or playing ball.

Vitruvius, On Architecture 7.5.6

(My own translation)

Vitruvius’ gripe about the statues in Alabanda may seem odd at first. Why is it foolish to have statues of people playing ball in the forum? Why shouldn’t there be statues of people pleading cases in the gymnasium? Vitruvius’ point is that the statues the Alabandans chose for their important public spaces didn’t match the functions of those spaces.

The gymnasium was a place for the men of the city to socialize and spend their leisure time, but above all to exercise and improve their bodies. The forum was a public space that served many functions, but importantly among them it served as a courtroom for trying legal cases. Vitruvius was clearly of the opinion that art in public spaces should mirror the functions of those spaces: statues of lawyers belong in the forum, and statues of people playing sports go in the gymnasium. In his opinion, the Alabandans made the foolish mistake of setting up the right statues in the wrong places.

Vitruvius’ text is a useful indicator that people in antiquity thought about the visual culture around them and had opinions about the appropriateness of particular subjects, themes, or styles for particular spaces. You couldn’t just slap any old statue anywhere you liked; there were rules to be followed, and the Alabandans had failed to follow them.

At the same time, Vitruvius’ remark is also useful evidence that not everyone shared the same opinions. Vitruvius may not have appreciated the Alabandans’ choices for public statuary, but the Alabandans clearly saw no problem with them. Maybe they thought that lawyers arguing in court should be inspired by the vigor of athletes or that people exercising in the gymnasium should be reminded to also improve their minds like the great orators of the past. We don’t know for sure, but it’s good to be reminded not only that people in the past had opinions about the world they lived in, but that those opinions could and did differ. What one person considered an artistic mistake was for someone else a sensible decorating plan.

When we read ancient sources, it is important to remember that they represent one person’s perspective, not necessarily a universal ideal.

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

Imagine Being Surrounded by Maps

Erik3 Comments

The Villa Farnese is a gorgeous Renaissance palace in central Italy, built in the early 1500s and richly elaborated with sculptures and frescoes. One of the rooms in the villa features a map of the world filling the wall at one end, with detailed maps of the continents on the other walls, under a ceiling decorated with constellations. Standing in this room, the magnates of the villa could see the whole world, as it was known to scientists and cartographers of the day.

The map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Etienne (Li) via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

Looking at this space, it occurs to me that a room like this would make an excellent setting for a scene in a fantasy or historical story. Many such stories play out over long distances, and knowing how one territory or city relates to the others around it as well as to the shapes of the land can make a huge difference in understanding the stakes and possibilities in play.

Africa, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbèra via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

In a visual medium like tv or movies, it could be very helpful to have a visual in the background while characters are discussing important movements or plans, but even in text, putting your characters in such a place could give you an opportunity to describe them looking at the map, tracing routes of travel or the borders between nations, and arguing for their plans.

Europe, from the map room at Villa Farnese, photograph by Ulrich Mayring via Wikimedia (Caprarola, Italy; completed 1574; fresco; by Giovanni Antonio de Varese)

Maps make everything better!

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

The Sacred Argippaioi

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The Greek historian Herodotus provides some interesting information about a people living in the mountains beyond the eastern steppes whom he calls the Argippaioi:

They are said to be bald from birth, men and women alike, and they have flat noses and large chins. They speak their own language, but wear Scythian clothes, and depend on trees for their food. The tree they live off of is called “pontic.” It is about as big as a fig tree and bears stone fruits the size of beans. When the fruit is ripe, they strain it through cloth, and it yields a thick black juice, which they call “askhy.” They lick this juice up or mix it with milk and drink it; they make cakes out of the thickest of the leavings and eat them. They do not keep large flocks, for their pastures are not suited to it. Each of them lives under a tree, which they cover with white wool felt in the winter, but not in the summer. No person harms them, for they are said to be sacred, and they carry no weapons. Their neighbors refer conflicts to them for judgment, and anyone who flees to them for refuge is safe from harm. They are called Argippaioi.

– Herodotus, Histories 4.23 (my translation)

This is an interesting passage both from a historical perspective and as storytelling inspiration.

Historically speaking, many of the details Herodotus presents seem to indicate some actual knowledge of a central Asian culture. The geographic description could apply to the Altai Mountains, which lie east of the broad Eurasian steppes. The physical description of the people might be a garbled attempt to describe Asian features. The description of the tree fruit and its use matches fairly well with traditional ways of using the fruit of the bird cherry. The tree covered in white cloth could be a Greek’s misunderstanding of a chum or other type of tent. In contrast to some of Herodotus’ wilder accounts of the distant regions of the world, it sounds like he may have gathered some fairly accurate information about peoples in central Asia, which he put together as best he could given the limits of his own knowledge. The trade routes that we know as the silk road were already active carrying people and goods across Eurasia in his time, so it is not implausible that during his research among the Scythians he might have learned about peoples at the farther end of the route.

On the other hand, the idea of a sacred people who live without weapons and are left unharmed by their neighbors is an interesting concept to think about as a writer. Herodotus perhaps mistakenly associated privileges that belonged to a priestly or shamanic class with a whole people, but what if there actually were a sacred people living in peace in the mountains, acting as wise advisers to others and providing refuge to the desperate? What would it be like to live in such a culture, and what kind of conflicts could arise among a people who don’t fight? What worldbuilding could you do around such an idea? In one kind of story, the sacred people could be a refuge for the hero on their journey and a source of wise counsel, like the Elves are to Tolkien’s Hobbit heroes. In a different kind of story, imagine how power struggles would play among a people who do not fight, who even must not fight in order to preserve the awe that their neighbors feel for them. Replace the battles and murders of Game of Thrones with competitions over personal purity or devious advice given to neighboring peoples, and you could have a story that is dramatically different but with just as many opportunities for vicious betrayals and sudden reversals.

History can be a great source of writing inspiration when we get it right, but it can spark good narrative ideas even when it’s wrong.

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

Tomyris: Standing for Women

Erik2 Comments

The Greek historian Herodotus tells us a story about the death of the Persian king Cyrus that centers a fascinating female character, Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae.

Cyrus, king of Persia, wanted to expand his empire eastward into the lands of the Massagetae, a nomadic people ruled by their widowed queen Tomyris. Cyrus at first proposed marriage to Tomyris as a ruse for conquest, but she refused him. He then mustered his army and prepared to invade.

Cyrus’ adviser Croesus cautioned Cyrus against trying to fight the wild Massagetae, but since Cyrus was determined to proceed, Croesus proposed a stratagem to overcome them. Following Croesus’ advice, Cyrus led his army into Massagetae territory, then had them make camp and prepare a sumptuous feast with plenty of wine, but they did not eat it. He then withdrew with most of his army, leaving behind his weakest soldiers.

When a part of the Massagetae army led by Tomyris’ son Spargapises came upon the Persian camp, they easily defeated the Persian troops there. Then they saw the feast. Being used to living rough, they had never seen such an amazing spread of food before, so they immediately sat down and filled their bellies. When the feast had made them all drunk and sleepy, Cyrus led the rest of his army back to attack them, easily defeating the Massagetae warriors and capturing Spargapises.

When Tomyris learned of her people’s defeat and her son’s capture, she sent a message to Cyrus proposing a peaceful end to the conflict: if Cyrus returned Spargapises safe, Tomyris would allow the rest of Cyrus’ army to retreat from her lands unharmed. If he refused, Tomyris promised to satisfy his desire for blood. Cyrus refused, and when Spargapises came to his senses and found himself a prisoner, he killed himself.

Tomyris then marshaled the rest of her people and fell upon the Persians. The fighting was intense, but at the end of the day the Persians were routed and Cyrus himself was killed. Tomyris found the body of Cyrus and thrust his head into a wineskin full of blood, fulfilling her promise to slake his thirst for blood.

It’s a good story, as many of Herodotus’ are, but what are we to do with this as historical evidence? Did any of these events happen? Did Tomyris even exist?

We have reasons to be skeptical. No other historian mentions Tomyris, not even other historians who wrote about the life of Cyrus. The story Herodotus tells is full of dramatic moments that sound like they come from a Greek tragedy rather than from history. Cyrus figures as the tragic hero, a noble leader driven by ambition to attempt something that wiser men warn against and meeting an ironically fitting end. Tomyris’ line about sating his thirst for blood is a bit too on-the-nose to be real. Does anything in this story hold up?

The Massagetae at least were a real people, known from plenty of other sources, one of many nomadic cultures of the Central Asia steppes. Ancient sources are uncertain about their location, placing them anywhere between the Caspian Sea and the Altai Mountains, although whether this variation reflects the migrations of a mobile people, smaller sub-groups joining and leaving a tribal coalition, or just the ignorance of Mediterranean writers about the geography of Central Asia is hard to say. Among many ancient steppe cultures, women could wield both weapons and power. The idea that Cyrus died while leading an unsuccessful campaign against steppe nomads is likely to be true, and it is plausible that those people might have been ruled by a woman.

The rest of Herodotus’ narrative has more to do with Greek literature and oral tradition than with historical events, but that narrative also serves a larger point for Herodotus. Many powerful and wise women feature in Herodotus’ account of history. Tomyris is the first whose story he tells in detail, but she is followed by many others in both large roles and small, with Artemisia of Halicarnassus, who commanded her own ships in Xerxes’ invasion of mainland Greece, among the most prominent. Tomyris in some ways prefigures Artemisia: a wise warrior queen who gives the Persian king a chance to save himself from defeat and embarrassment, though he fails to heed her.

Tomyris appears near the beginning of Herodotus’ history, playing a role in the life of the first Persian king; Artemisia comes in at the end, taking her place next to the last Persian king to feature in Herodotus’ text. The repetition of the theme of the wise warrior woman at both the beginning of Herodotus’ history and at the end gives it a particular weight and prompts us to consider what point the historian was making. Herodotus’ text is layered with subtle messages, and many of the stories he tells have some applicability to the audience he was writing for. Herodotus lived and worked in Classical Athens, a society in which the status of women was low.

Women’s participation in Athenian social and political life was a casualty of democracy: since Athenian democracy was based on solidarity between citizen men across class lines, as manifested in all-male institutions like the voting assembly and the hoplite militia, the stronger the democracy was, the more women were pushed aside. Herodotus was a fan of democracy. His text points out how democracy, and especially the Athenian version of it, gave the Greek allies the strength and resilience to resist invasion by the monarchic Persian Empire. At the same time, he also seems to have been warning his Athenian audience that by leaving women out of public life, they were squandering one of their most valuable resources.

While contemporary Greek philosophers and playwrights were denigrating women’s capacity for rational thought and scoffing at the idea of them playing a role in politics, Herodotus had a different message. In his narrative, women can both lead military forces to victory and give sound advice on political matters, two areas of life that Athenian women were barred from. Herodotus’ women keep their heads in a crisis, and powerful men would be better off if they listened to what women told them.

Tomyris may be a fictional or heavily fictionalized character, but she helps us understand a critique of Athenian democracy as framed by someone who both lived with and admired it.

Image: “Head of Cyrus Brought to Queen Tomyris” via Wikimedia (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; c. 1622-1623; oil on canvas, by Peter Paul Rubens)

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

A Decade of Co-Geeking!

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We started this blog together back in June 2015 with no grand ideas or plans, just wanting a place where each of us could post about the things we geek about and where we could post jointly about the things we geek about together. We had no idea what the next decade would bring us, but it’s been a fun ten years, and we’re still at it!

2025 05 Vanha Porvoo yhteiskuva

For a little celebration, we decided to take a short trip to a place we’ve both been interested in visiting for a while: the old town of Porvoo. Porvoo is a small city on the Finnish southern coast a little to the east of Helsinki. It’s like most Finnish cities except for its remarkable old town.

2025 05 Porvoonjoki ja rantamakasiinit

A large portion of the northern half of the city is made up of well-preserved colorful old wooden houses along cobblestone streets, all surrounding a medieval church.

2025 05 Porvoon keskiaikainen kirkko

While many of the house exteriors are legally protected, it’s not a museum or living history exhibit, just a part of town where ordinary folks and families live. Walking around there, though, is a little bit like stepping back in time.

2025 05 Vanha Porvoo Kellokujan aurinkokello

Whatever brought you to Co-Geeking, we hope you’ve enjoyed our work. We look forward to another ten years, and who knows how many more!

Images by Eppu Jensen

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The Reimagining of Laocoon

Erik1 Comment

The sculpture of the death Laocoon and his sons is one of the mot famous works of ancient art. Carved from several pieces of marble that were fitted together with metal pins, it represents a dramatic moment from the legends of the Trojan War. When the Greeks carried out their ruse, pretending to withdraw from Troy but leaving behind a giant wooden horse, the Trojans were skeptical. While some Trojans wanted to bring the horse within their walls, the priest Laocoon warned the Trojans not to trust the Greeks. The god Poseidon, who favored the Greeks, sent a serpent from the sea to kill Laocoon and his sons, which convinced the Trojans to reject Laocoon’s advice and bring the horse behind their walls, unwittingly sealing their city’s doom.

This marble statue, depicting that dramatic mythological moment, has a dramatic history of its own. It was found in pieces in the soil of an Italian vineyard in 1506 and quickly gained attention. One of the first people to see it was the artist Michelangelo. Classical scholars noted that the Roman author Pliny had described with admiration a similar statue of Laocoon, and believed that this work was the very one that had impressed Pliny. The fragments were acquired by Pope Julius II for display in the Vatican palace. Several of the major artistic names of the Italian Renaissance worked on restoring the fragments and carving replacements for parts that were missing, among them not only Michelangelo but Raphael and Bramante.

In some ways, the Laocoon was the perfect sculpture for time in which it was discovered. Interest in relics of Greco-Roman art was growing, and the rich and powerful were starting to regard the acquisition and display of antiquities as a useful mark of status. Among those antiquities, large-scale marble sculpture was the most highly prized. The belief that the Laocoon statue was the very same one that Pliny had praised conferred upon it a special aura of authenticity. It was not just any ancient statue, but an ancient statue with a known origin and history, whose quality was vouched for by one of the great names of Roman literature.

At the same time, while the authentic antiquity of the sculpture was crucial to its value as a collector’s prize, it was also particularly suited to contemporary tastes. The fine delineation of the figures’ musculature in a pose of high emotional drama was perfectly adapted to the interests of artists of the Italian Renaissance. Even though it was a product of pagan Rome, the subject and its execution had resonances for a Christian audience. The agony of Laocoon’s body in a moment of divine intervention made a parallel to the agony of Jesus on the cross. The slithering serpent attending on a moment of fateful choice echoed the tale of Adam and Eve. For a Christian pontiff who was also a powerful political figure and a connoisseur of Classical art, it is hard to imagine a more perfect sculpture.

(The sculpture was so perfect for Julius, in fact, that one scholar has suggested that it was not an actual ancient sculpture but a forgery by Michelangelo himself. The evidence for this idea is weak, however, and it has not found wide acceptance among scholars.)

Yet, as perfectly adapted as the Laocoon sculpture was to the time in which it was discovered, times change, and the sculpture has changed with them. Since the Pope’s artists first reassembled the sculpture pieces and created their own replacements for the missing parts, the Laocoon has not remained the same. Over the past five centuries, artists and restorers have repeatedly gone back to the sculpture and changed it, readjusting the positions and postures of the figures, creating new replacements, and treating the surface. The position and postures of the two smaller figures has been changed. The angle of the main figure’s arm has been revised. Traces of paint were cleaned away to make the marble gleaming white. The Laocoon that we can see today in the Vatican Museums is, in important ways, not the same sculpture that came out of the vineyard soil in 1506.

Whenever we look at an artifact from the past, we must bear in mind that what we are seeing is usually not what the object originally looked like. The Laocoon statue is perhaps an extreme case, given how much attention it has garnered since it was first excavated, but we always remake relics of history to better fit what we in the present think the past should look like. Julius and his artists wanted a complete and glorious masterpiece of Classical art, so they made one out of the pieces from the vineyard. Today we want an instructive and historically accurate piece of sculpture, so we have removed many of the replacement pieces carved by the pope’s artists and rearranged the original pieces in ways that we think are more authentic. Yet since long before 1506, no one has seen what the Laocoon sculpture originally looked like, and no one in the future ever will.

Thoughts for writers

Just as Michelangelo and his fellow sculptors reimagined a relic of the past, whenever we look to the past to inspire our writing, we are always creating our own version of it for our own needs. However much we may seek and value historical accuracy, we are telling stories in and for our own times; they will always reflect what we believe and value about ourselves. This is a strength of fiction and fantasy, not a weakness. The important thing is to be thoughtful and purposeful about how we use and reimagine history when we look to it for inspiration and not let our unexamined, unthinking biases shape how we understand it.

Image: Laocoon and his sons, photograph by Wilfredo Rafael Rodriguez Hernandez via Wikimedia (found at Rome, currently Pio Clementino Museum, Vatican; 1st c. BCE-1st c. CE; marble; believed to be by Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes)

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

A Cat to Keep You Safe at Sea

Erik2 Comments

Cats (or at least most cats) may not like water, but this one might have kept an ancient sailor safe on the waves.

Scaraboid, photograph by The Trustees of the British Museum. Outline illustration and collage by Erik Jensen. (Found Naukratis, currently British Museum; 600-570 BCE; glazed composition)
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The cat is part of the decoration on the underside of a small talisman found at the site of the ancient city of Naukratis in Egypt. Talismans of this type are called scaraboids because they are similar in shape and size to scarabs, but do not have the traditional scarab markings on their domed top.

The cat is a hieroglyph, one of three on the bottom of the object. Reading from right to left, the feather represents the sound i, the cat represents m (from the Egyptian word for cat, miu), and the sun disc represents n (from the word niut, meaning town or city, which the sun disc sometimes stood for). Put together, these hieroglyphs spell imn, a form of the name of the Egyptian god Amun. Many other scarabs and similar talismans from Naukratis contain forms of the name of Amun.

Amun was an important god in ancient Egypt, at times regarded as the king of the gods. Among his other functions, he was worshiped as a god of air and winds who protected sailors and other travelers on the sea. A talisman of Amun was an appropriate thing for an ancient sailor to carry around.

Naukratis is an interesting place to find a talisman like this. Naukratis was a Greek city founded inside Egypt by permission of the Egyptian kings. It was originally built as a home for Greek mercenaries serving in Egypt, but it quickly became a port for Greek and other foreign merchants who wanted to trade in Egypt. Most of the sailors who came through Naukratis were not Egyptians, yet there seems to have been a thriving trade in Egyptian and Egyptian-themed talismans, many produced in local workshops. It is likely that the intended customer for this scaraboid was not an Egyptian but a visiting Greek.

On one hand, the prominence of the cat on this talisman makes it seem like a bit of tourist kitsch designed to appeal to foreigners. Domestic cats were not yet common in most of the ancient Mediterranean, and Greeks associated them with Egypt. Including a cat in the talisman made it extra Egypt-y for a Greek audience. On the other hand, Naukratis amulets include many different hieroglyphic ways of spelling names of Amun, not all of which use cats or other specifically Egyptian symbols. Even if some pieces were made as tourist souvenirs, there also seems to have been a market for talismans referencing the Egyptian sailors’ god, even in a place where most of the sailors were not Egyptian.

This talisman and others like it are an interesting window into the multicultural world of Naukratis, where Greek sailors hoped for protection from an Egyptian god and cats were good protectors against the dangers of the sea.

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

The Colors of Ecbatana

Erik2 Comments

It’s an all too well-known trope that the past is drab. When we picture ancient or medieval buildings, we tend to imagine white marble or gray stone. This assumption of colorlessness spills over into fantasy as well. When we imagine the built environments of made-up lands, we tend to see a lot of white and gray there too, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus gives a fantastical description of the Median city of Ecbatana, modern Hamadan, Iran, featuring a series of concentric walls topped by brightly colored parapets:

This walled city is built in such a way that each wall is higher than the wall encircling it by only the height of its parapet, partly by the fact that it is built on a hill, but largely by design. All together there are seven circles, with the palace and treasury in the innermost one. The largest wall is about as long as the walls of Athens. The parapet of the first wall is white, the second one black, the third red, the fourth dark blue, and the fifth amber. The first five walls had their parapets painted in these bright colors, but the next was covered in silver and the final one in gold.

– Herodotus, Histories 1.98

(My own translation)

Now, Herodotus probably got this description wrong. It does not match up with the archaeological remains on the ground in Hamadan. Herodotus never saw Ecbatana for himself, but relied on second-hand reports, which likely got garbled in the telling. In fact, Herodotus’ description of Ecbatana as a hill covered by concentric rings of walls fits a bit better as a description of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. A ziggurat is a pyramid-like structure made up of a series of terraces built one on top of another, getting smaller as they go up. Seen from ground level, they might well look like a series of concentric walls ascending a hill.

Ruins of the ziggurat of Choga Zanbil, photocollage by Pentocelo via Wikimedia (Khuzestan Province, Iran; c. 1250 BCE; brick)

Ziggurats had been built in Mesopotamia for thousands of years by Herodotus’ day, primarily to serve as temples. While not many new ziggurats were being built in the time of Herodotus, older ones were being restored and rebuilt, so news of a freshly (re)built massive structure with impressive concentric walls may well have reached Greece. The brightly colored walls Herodotus describes are not too far-fetched, either. Ancient Mesopotamians decorated important buildings with colorful glazed tiles, which still retain some of their impressive coloring even today, as can be seen in the Ishtar Gate from Babylon.

Detail of the Ishtar Gate, with modern reconstruction, photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia (Babylon, currently Pergamon Museum, Berlin; 6th c. BCE; glazed tile and brick)

All of these things put together mean that Herodotus invented (albeit unintentionally) a fantasy version of Ecbatana flavored after a Mesopotamian ziggurat with colorful tiled walls. And if Herodotus could do it, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. Let’s see more fantasy cities with vibrant scarlet walls, turquoise roof tiles, or streets paved with lush green stone!

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

Christie and Tolkien: When the World Ends but You Keep Going

Erik1 Comment

The literary works of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien may not seem to have much in common. One wrote murder mysteries set in genteel English country houses, the other high fantasy in a mythic secondary world. When you look at the themes and ideas of their work, though, interesting parallels appear.

The two authors were close contemporaries; Christie was born in 1890, Tolkien in 1892. They belonged to the generation whose young adulthood was shattered by the First World War. Their experiences were different—Tolkien saw battle firsthand as an officer, Christie its terrible aftereffects as a nurse—but they both reflect the shock of the war in their writing.

One theme that occupies both writers is death. Death was, naturally, a crucial element of Christie’s murder mystery stories. In Tolkien’s legendarium, death and the things people will do out of the fear of it is a running theme. But neither writer’s work is focused on death as a fact; rather, the underlying drive in their work is a search for some way in which death makes sense.

In Christie’s case, this theme is more obvious: she writes about detectives solving crimes. By the time we reach the drawing room summation at the end of the book, we can see clearly how and why the victim or victims died. Order is restored to the world, and reason triumphs over the illogic of death, whether that reason is embodied in a fussy Belgian’s love for methodical neatness or a wise spinster’s deep observation of human nature.

In Tolkien’s work, the drive to make sense of death is subtler. Death often appears pointless in Tolkien. Boromir dies defending Merry and Pippin from Orcs, but after he falls the young Hobbits are captured nonetheless. Denethor dies in despair instead of living to see his city saved. But the larger point of Tolkien’s work is that hopelessness is an illusion. We never know the end of our own story or how profoundly the choices we make will affect the world. In the legendarium as a whole, death is the greatest mystery, but also the greatest hope. The world of Middle Earth had a beginning and will someday end, yet the spirits of mortal beings will not end with the world but transcend it through death.

It is not just the death of individuals that occupied Christie and Tolkien, but also how ways of life come to an end. They both witnessed the end of the world, in a sense. The innocence and hope of the time they grew up in perished on the battlefields of the Great War, but they did not. They kept going and witnessed as the world around them changed.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is about the ending of an age, the Third Age of Middle Earth to be precise. The story takes place during the last days before the Elves either depart into the magical west or dwindle into creatures of fairy tale and folklore, taking their beauty and wisdom with them. Yet the story also carries hope for what is to come after in the ages of Men—hope without guarantees, as Gandalf puts it. The Elf Legolas and Dwarf Gimli reflect on the promise and weaknesses of humans in the streets of Minas Tirith:

“If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”

“And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,” said Gimli. “It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.”

– The Lord of the Rings. Book 5, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate”

Christie reflects the changing world in different ways, but also with hope for what the future will bring. Her early works are set in the interwar world of country estates and garden parties that we typically think of when we think of a Christie mystery, but that world was ending. She kept writing through the fifties and sixties as the life and culture of Britain changed around her.

The traces of this change are all over Christie’s writing. One of the ongoing themes in her mysteries is that it is difficult to know who people really are. Many of her plots hinge on people passing themselves off as or being mistaken for someone else. Such impersonations were possible only because the world of country villages and garden parties where everyone knew one another was ending. Miss Marple speaks of this shift in A Murder is Announced:

Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already.

…

But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.

– A Murder is Announced. Chapter 10, “Pip and Emma”

At the same time, Christie also saw that the fundamentals of human nature that underlay her stories were not changed by the passing of time. People might live differently, but they still had the same jealousies and aspirations, desires and fears as they ever had. Miss Marple, again, reflects on this fact in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side as she explores the new housing development at the edge of her beloved village:

She turned out of Aubrey Close and was presently in Darlington Close. She went slowly and as she went she listened avidly to the snippets of conversation between mothers wheeling prams, to the girls addressing young men, to the sinister-looking Teds (she supposed they were Teds) exchanging dark remarks with each other. Mothers came out on doorsteps calling to their children who, as usual, were busy doing all the things they had been told not to do. Children, Miss Marple reflected gratefully, never changed. And presently she began to smile, and noted down in her mind her usual series of recognitions.

That woman is just like Carry Edwards—and the dark one is just like that Hooper girl—she’ll make a mess of her marriage just like Mary Hooper did. Those boys—the dark one is just like Edward Leeke, a lot of wild talk but no harm in him—a nice boy really—the fair one is Mrs Bedwell’s Josh all over again. Nice boys, both of them. The one like Gregory Bins won’t do very well, I’m afraid. I expect he’s got the same sort of mother…

She turned a corner into Walsingham Close and her spirits rose every moment.

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they had always been.

– The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Chapter 1

Some days now it feels like we are living through the end of the world we knew, and none of us knows what will come next. In these times, there is comfort in going back to writers who lived through the end of one world and saw that there was hope in the next.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 855.

Christie, Agatha. A Murder is Announced. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 132-133.

Christie, Agatha. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. London: HarperCollins, 2023, pp. 13-14.

Image: Photo collage of Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien by Erik Jensen. Photograph of Christie via Wikimedia; photograph of Tolkien via Wikimedia

Post edited to correct formatting errors

Story Time is all about story-telling and how stories work, and what makes us love our favorites.

A Name for an Amazon

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Amazons, the bold warrior women who figure in Greek myths, are imaginary, but the myths about them likely had their origin in Greek experiences with actual fighting women in the cultures around the shores of the Black Sea. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence shows that women who trained with weapons and fought in battle were known in many of the cultures in the region, and the association of mythic Greek Amazons with horses and bows also matches the realities of life on the Black Sea steppes.

Greek literature and art records numerous Amazon names. Most of these names are Greek, and they are descriptive of relevant Amazon traits, such as Hippolyta (“She who sets the horses loose”), Melanippe (“Black horse”) or Antiope (“She who confronts”). These names may have been simply invented by Greek writers in the same way that fantasy authors today concoct suitable names for their characters. There is evidence, however, that some of the Amazon names recorded in Greek art might be actual names from languages spoken around the Black Sea.


Greek vase fragment via the J. Paul Getty Museum (made Athens, currently Getty Museum, Malibu; c. 510 BCE; glazed pottery; painted by Oltos)

This Greek pottery fragment shows Amazons riding into battle against the Greek hero Heracles (who appears accompanied by the god Hermes on the other side of the cup). We can recognize the riders as Amazons from their clothing and the bowcases they carry. Text in Greek letters surrounds them, although it is painted in a dark color that is difficult to see. Most of the text is fragmentary and hard to reconstruct, but one word seems to be a complete name. The text PKPUPES can be read by the head of the leftmost rider, evidently her name.

“Pkpupes,” at first glance, may look like mere gibberish. It certainly isn’t Greek. Many scholars in the past dismissed this and similar texts as nonsense words written by semi-literate vase painters. Maybe “pkupupes” was just an attempt at an onomatopoeic for the pounding of a horse’s hooves. It may, however, be something more significant.

Dense clusters of hard consonants like “pkp” are a common feature of languages spoken today in the Caucasus Mountains east of the Black Sea. “Pkpupes” is, in fact, fairly easy to read as an attempt to render a name in Circassian, a cluster of closely related languages of the northwestern Caucasus, with the letters of ancient Greek, which did not perfectly match up to the sounds of the original language. English doesn’t have all the right letters to easily represent the sounds of Circassian either, but a reconstructed Circassian name that would be rendered in English something like “Pqp’upush” is perfectly intelligible. This name is composed of several elements, the first referring to the body, the next to covering, and the final one connoting worthiness. Altogether, the name would mean “Worthy to wear armor,” a suitable name for a warrior woman.

Greeks had extensive contact with peoples around the Black Sea. Many Greeks migrated to the region, and people from the area also settled in Greece. The painter of this vase signed his name “Oltos,” which is not a typical Greek name, and he may have been an immigrant himself. He and other ancient vase painters may well have known people who spoke foreign languages or had ancestors from the Black Sea region who could recommend appropriately authentic names for Amazon characters. It may even be that some of the obviously Greek Amazon names like Hippolyta or Antiope were not invented by Greeks but are Greek translations of authentic names, in the same way that the names of many indigenous Americans in recent history have been translated into English, like Sitting Bull or Red Cloud.

The Amazons of Greek myth remain mythical, but we have evidence for some history behind that myth, maybe even the names of some real warrior women from the edges of the world known to the Greeks.

Source

Adrienne Mayor, John Colarusso, and David Saunders, “Making Sense of Nonsense Inscriptions Associated with Amazons and Scythians on Athenian Vases,” Hesperia 83, no. 3 (July-September 2014): 447-93.

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