Bede’s World, a small museum in Jarrow, Tyne & Wear, Northumbria, dedicated to the Venerable Bede and 7th-century England, shut down its operations in February 2016.
In addition to indoor exhibits, the museum includes several replica wattle and daub buildings, modeled on structures excavated in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria and built with original materials and contemporary methods. On the grounds there is also a herb garden and a working farm with a small collection of rare breed animals resembling those that lived 1,300 years ago.
“It is with great regret that the Trustee Board took the decision for Bedes World [sic] to cease operation from Friday 12 February 2016 due to a lack of funds.
“Steps are being taken to put the company into administration through the appointment of an Insolvency Practitioner.
“The Trustee Board have made arrangements for the immediate care of the farm animals and the security of the site.
“The Board would like thank all staff, volunteers and stakeholders for their hard work and dedication to Bedes World. [sic]”
Fortunately, only a few weeks afterwards better news surfaced: a new operator was found to run the site. At this writing it isn’t clear what their plans for Bede’s World are, though. (Follow this link to read the statement by Groundwork South Tyneside and Newcastle, the new operator.)
I wrote last week about what a fantastic thing it is to have a wealth of primary sources stored in libraries and museums, nowadays increasingly being made available online. For completeness’s sake, it needs to be mentioned that it’s not only library and museum professionals that share quality research or materials online.
Below I list a (very) few linguistic and historical resources put together by dedicated private individuals. They’re all diligent in documenting their steps and sources, and providing info and links for those interested in finding more. Thorough documentation is, again, not a surefire way to avoid mistakes, but it does allow tracking sources and re-creating the research.
Lacus Curtius – classical Greek and Latin texts, three dictionaries, and materials on Roman Britain, Roman military history, and ancient astronomy, to name but a few
Omniglot – alphabets, languages, useful phrases and much more
The Inca empire of South America was connected by a network of roads used by chasqui runners and pack llamas carrying messages and supplies around the empire. The Inca, creating their empire in the Andes mountains, faced challenges unlike those of flat-land and river-valley empires, among which was the problem of crossing numerous steep mountain valleys and rivers that ran dangerously swift in the flood season. Their solution to this problem was: rope bridges.
Suspension rope bridges spanned rivers and valleys, the longest reaching a length of 45 meters. They were made with ropes twisted out of grass and had to be rebuilt every year or two. The rebuilding was dangerous work that was assigned to local villagers as part of their obligation to the empire. Most Inca bridges have long since been replaced with modern structures, but one, the Q’iswa Chaka over the Apurimac River in Peru, is still rebuilt every year by local people as a way of preserving their heritage.
“A Day in Pompeii” is an 8-minute high-definition video on how a series of eruptions wiped out Pompeii over 48 hours, produced by Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum) and Zero One Animation for an exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2009.
It would’ve been more stunning with changes in the POV rather than a static camera, but it was still interesting.
To accompany the exhibit, Melbourne Museum produced a wealth of additional online material.
Unfortunately there’s currently no index page, but articles are still available on the Museum website (do a search for Pompeii). For example, House of the Vine is a nifty virtual recreation of a beautiful Pompeian house. And did you know that Pompeii had running water and lavatories? There is even a replica of a loaf of bread from Pompeii:
After Melbourne, the exhibition traveled to other places. The Western Australian Museum also built a helpful site, still fully available, to go with their 2010 version in Perth.
Complementary views can be found from photos of the current state of the city at Pompeii in Pictures, website by Jackie and Bob Dunn. (Getting to the photos themselves takes a bit of clicking through the menus, but they’re there.)
Images: Box, (c) Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei via Melbourne Museum (House of Julius Polybius, Pompeii; original iron and bronze fittings and wood reconstruction). Loaf of bread via Melbourne Museum (bakery in Pompeii; plaster copy of an original, carbonized loaf)
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?
I really love the Internet for research. It connects us to materials and people around the world. As a visual person, I find the availability of photographs and other visualizations on just about any subject especially gratifying. You can visit places and eras that you physically may not be able to.
One of the invaluable services libraries and museums provide, especially now that more of their collections are being digitized, is access to historical periods and obscure topics. (Like the Peter Parker collection of 80 paintings of Chinese patients with large tumors or other major deformities – that’s not a joke!)
And that’s only the beginning – using library and museum websites and digital collections to find primary sources for research has other benefits as well:
Copious metadata: the provenance (origins and history) of documents or items, including details like dates, original creators, owners, and chain of custody, are clearly marked when known, and when unknown, that is clearly stated, too.
Materials that physical items were made of are also given, often with information on the techniques involved or links to further reading in connection with museum exhibits.
Many libraries and museums group items in their digital collections into more easily browsable subgroups, for example by era, style, type, or topic.
Copyright information is easily available: any limitations to re-using the materials are clearly given. There are also collections that concentrate on items that are in public domain.
If digital materials are made available for re-using, often there are multiple formats, sizes, or resolutions. That’s great service!
Sets of search results are often smaller than online in general. Finding an answer is faster!
Digital collections are created by professionals. While this doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of errors, online materials at libraries and museums are researched, curated, and checked, which increases the reliability of the information provided.
If additional information or clarification is needed, it’s the job of museums and libraries to at least try to help. That’s literally why they’re there!
Below are just some amazing digital collections from museums and libraries around the world:
Image: The Drawbridge via NYPL (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections; 1748-1751; etching; by Giovanni Battista Piranesi)
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
From the grand howdah-backed elephant to the plodding pack pony, from the solitary stallion to the caravan of a thousand camels, animals are often a part of how our characters get around. In previous entries to the travel series we’ve considered small and large groups traveling on foot. This time we bring animals into the mix.
Animals can be useful for travel, but they also bring their own challenges with them. The first thing we need to consider is what kinds of animals are useful for long-distance travel. Then we’ll look at the three main ways of using animals for travel: riding, pack, and draft. Finally, a word on the care and feeding of transport animals. As usual in this series, we are looking at real-world history: no griffins or dragon-drawn chariots. Take the information here and adjust as necessary for whatever setting you happen to be writing.
So, you’re creating a fantasy religion for a story or game. When your characters need to interact with their gods, where do they go—if anywhere at all? Down the street to the local temple? To the top of a windswept mountain? To a corner of their kitchen? Today we look at religious sites in historical cultures to inspire our imaginations.
We can start by looking at religion in today’s world. Look at the religious life of a modern western community and you will find some people attending their local church, synagogue, or mosque, some people praying quietly in their own homes, some feeling inspired by solitary walks in the woods, some debating points of theology over the internet, some participating in celebrations of religious holidays, and some not involved at all. Many people will do more than one of the above. No culture or religious tradition is monolithic, and this is just as true in the past as the present. The history of religious expression is one of incredible variety both across and within cultures.
In this variety, though, there are some patterns that recur in varying forms. People use different kinds of religious sites for different needs. Many different traditions have used similar kinds of religious sites, and within any given tradition different sites are used for different purposes. Today we will look at four common types of religious site out of the wide variety of possibilities: assemblies, temples, household shrines, and natural spaces.
Assembly
The “assembly” type of religious space will be recognizable to anyone familiar with major variants of the modern monotheistic religions. It is a space where a community of believers gathers to perform collective rituals such as praying, singing hymns, hearing sermons, feasting, and witnessing or participating in ritual enactments.
Grand Mosque, Djenne, photograph by BluesyPete via Wikimedia
Myths, legends, fairy tales, and other stories passed down through the generations are at the root of our storytelling tradition. They are the earliest stories in our literature and some of the first stories we learn as children. It is no wonder that we keep going back to mythology looking for deeper meanings. The drive to find hidden meaning in myth leads to some misguided interpretations. Two common mistakes are Freudian theory and the “forgotten history” theory.
Freudian slips
Freudian theory holds that myths are expressions of universal human drives which we have suppressed in the name of civilization. As the things that we cannot talk about openly come out in our stories, we can hold up mythology as a mirror to our own subconscious in order to see our hidden impulses better. Sigmund Freud’s attempts to explain the human psyche by reference to dreams, myths, and other supposed insights into the unconscious are at the root of this approach, but there are other classic exemplars, such as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which applies the theory to the Grimms’ fairy tales. (Note that I am speaking of Freudian theory as a way of interpreting myth; I am not in any position to judge Freudianism as a psychological theory.)
I have to write a biographical paragraph for a conference. Ugh. I hate writing about myself in the third person.
I’m trying to be all
but feeling more like
Oh well. It goes with the territory, I guess. I like to think that being awkward about your own accomplishments is one of the tests of being a decent person. (But, then, does congratulating myself on being a decent person mean I’m actually not..? Argh! Why is it so hard?!)
Oh well. That’s my dose of self-pity for the day.
Images: Bust of Caesar, photograph by Andrea Wahra via Wikimedia (Naples; 1st c. BCE; marble) and text from Caesar, Gallic War 1.54, collage by Erik Jensen. Harriet Jones via brittaperry
Aerial view of part of the Great Zimbabwe complex, photograph by Janice Bell via Wikimedia
Great Zimbabwe is a ruined city in Zimbabwe (and in fact has given the modern country its name). Built over centuries beginning in the 9th century, the site was a center of power for the medieval Shona (or Kalanga) kingdom and part of the trade networks that spanned the Indian Ocean. It was abandoned in the 15th century and stands in ruins today, but even in its ruined state it is impressive.
Wall of the great enclosure, photograph by Jens Klinzing via Wikimedia
The remains of numerous stone enclosures spread over hundreds of hectares. At its height, Great Zimbabwe may have housed between 15,000 and 20,000 people. The surviving walls reach heights of five meters and are built of stone blocks assembled without mortar. Several different complexes occupy different positions ranging from hills to near the river. The significance of these different complexes remains unclear, but it may indicate that the center of settlement gradually moved over time, away from the more defensible hill sites to the more accessible valley sites, perhaps to better engage with the oceanic trade networks. Ivory and gold were Great Zimbabwe’s major international exports and trade goods from the Arabian peninsula and China have been found at the site.
Interior walkway showing the quality of the stonework via Wikimedia
One noteworthy feature of the enclosures is their shape: neither rectangular nor circular but irregular curved shapes adapted to the forms of the landscape on which they sit.
In the colonial period, popular theories held that the site must have been built by ancient European or Asian colonizers. The biblical Queen of Sheba was often mentioned in connection with the site. Although archaeologists realized as early as the early twentieth century that Great Zimbabwe had been built by Africans, the colonial administration in what was then Rhodesia suppressed any such claim. The assertion that Africans were incapable of building such a complex site and needed European guidance to achieve any level of civilization was key to the justification of imperial domination. Colonial authorities could not tolerate any evidence that Africans were capable of creating sophisticated works of art and architecture on their own.
Part of the hill complex seen from the valley below, photograph by Macvivo via Wikimedia
Thoughts for writers
I have two reasons for sharing a little bit of Great Zimbabwe.
First, it is another example of architecture that does not depend on European examples. When doing our worldbuilding as writers, it is easy to fall back on the things that are familiar: European castles, Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, and the other things we’ve seen before. Let yourself be inspired by the other amazing things people have built. I’d love to see a city inspired by Great Zimbabwe at its height turn up in a fantasy story, even one not set in an explicitly African-inspired world.
Second, this is another example of how politics can screw up good historical scholarship and so why you need to read broadly and get outside familiar frames of reference. Even today, while the Queen of Sheba is generally left out of it, claims that Great Zimbabwe was built by Arabs or Phoenicians still occasionally creep into popular histories.
History for Writers is a weekly feature which looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write. Check out the introduction to History for Writershere.
#/media/File:A_classical_dictionary_of_Greek_and_Roman_biography...revised.._(1894)_(14779978921).jpg){kind=link}
