fantasy stan @lionheartfantasy - Tumblr Blog

you’re telling me there are people who listen to music and DON’T use it as the soundtrack for the intense cinematic daydream plot they’ve always got playing in the back of their head???

gwydionmisha

As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.

Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.

Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.

Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.

Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?

So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.

A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.

Real life is more complicated than that.

BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.

groake

Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.

(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)

gwydionmisha

I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.

Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.

I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.

I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.

servantofclio

This is great!

Adding that quite a bit of recent research suggests that a significant portion of European women in the Middle Ages never married at all, and they didn’t all become nuns. Plenty of “singlewomen” lived on their own, or in households with a few other women, or as domestic servants in larger households. If they lived on their own, they too might raise some chickens, spin, brew, take in laundry, or do other manual tasks for wages. In some places they could practice specific skilled crafts (often textile-related) and join guilds. Were a good number of these women lesbians, or ace? Quite probably.

There is a lot more to the past than what we think we know from seeing the same canned images in media over and over again.

madamebadger

This is why I tend to jump up and down like I am slightly unhinged and tell people to READ PRIMARY SOURCES. (In translation if you’re not an academic; I’m not nuts.) But even the primary sources from a fairly basic medieval history class will give you a much wider view of history as it was lived than the flat recycled stuff we see filtered through the mesh of (a very specific kind of) nostalgia.

If you want to really stretch your idea of who a medieval/renaissance woman was or what she could do, read Marie de France or Margery Kempe or Christine de Pizan–or any number of Norse sagas (ask me about Hallgerthr and Bergthóra!). But even if you stick to the “mainstream” classics, your Canterbury Tales or your Gawain and the Green Knight or your Two Lives of Charlemagne, if you pay attention, you will notice a lot of women doing a lot of fascinating things that do not boil down to ‘being pretty’ and ‘being assaulted,’ which is what a lot of historical fiction and historical fantasy would like to boil us down to.

Also, let me be honest here, primary sources are just fun. They can be slow going at first, but the thing that really sold me on history when I was in college was not sweeping descriptions of battles. It was this one bit in a history by Notker the Stammerer (and how can you beat that as an author’s name?) where Charlemagne was bitching and moaning about Kids These Days and their inadequate cloaks, which aren’t even long enough to keep you warm when you have to get down off your horse and pee.

History is a million times richer than most of us give it credit for, including in the lives of women, I guess is my point. Also: READ PRIMARY SOURCES. They will upturn a lot of your assumptions about the lives of women, and of people in general–and they’re just a delight.

anghraine

And Jean Froissart’s Chronicles! His gymnastics around Isabelle the She-Wolf are hilarious, but there is a ton of gold there. (There are assaults, but firmly depicted as terrible sinful crimes to be rightly punished.)

Also, I’ve read some interesting research on nuns, who virtually never accepted any dictates about detaching themselves from their birth families, and would negotiate through correspondence with their siblings, parents, cousins etc, with whom they often had incredibly intense bonds. And nuns brought up in convents seem to have been much more willing to be “fuck all y’all” than noblewomen who became nuns—contrary to a lot of (lbr, Protestant propaganda-fueled) ideas about the medieval Church. Like, the wrangling between bishops and abbesses over pilgrimages alone is amazing.

folk-ever-lore

Elide: I'm so useless

Manon: No you're not

Aelin, pointing at Lorcan: He is

nestaenthusiast

If we don’t find out what Cassian threw into the Sidra then I’m throwing ACOSF into a freaking river.

sartorialadventure

Twitter thread

^Photographer: @lillianliuphotography Model: @theresafractale Make-up: @ladyfreakshow Hair: @iamdhair_stylist Designer: @lindafriesen.couture

^Photographer: @topheroriel Model: @micaburton

^Photographer: @agnieszka_lorek Model: @theresafractale Designer: @lorysunartistry

^Photographer: @maria_lipina Model: @normila17

^Photographer: @defotograafsanne Model: @modelsensi Make-up and costume: @candymakeupartist

^Photographer: @anniebertramphoto Model: @theresafractale Dress: @maria.heller.designs Earrings: @vespermoth Crown: @nomenjewelry

^Photographer: @thewitchinghourphotography Model: @tee.pimentel

^Photographer: @anniebertramphoto Model: @theresafractale Dress: @feuillemorte.costumery Halo: @mywitchery Earrings: @vespermoth

^Photographer: @simplysavannahart Model: @shiennegh Designer: @itisknown

^Photographer: @anniebertramphoto Model: @theresafractale Korset: @royalblack_couture Make-up: @isabellakiefer_makeupandhair

Keep reading

friendlyphantom

Beautiful!

femalegothic

The Queen of Nothing

star-anise

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

quousque

YOU KNOW WHAT BOTHERS ME

when fantasy books describe the cloth of Quant Farmpeople’s clothing as “homespun” or “rough homespun”

“homespun” as opposed to what??? EVERYTHING WAS SPUN AT HOME

they didn’t have fucking spinning factories, your pseudo-medieval farmwife is lucky if she has a fucking spinning wheel, otherwise she’s spinning every single thread her family wears on a drop spindle NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING THE SPINNING unless you go out of your way to establish a certain baseline of industrialization in your fake medieval fantasy land.

and “rough”??? lol just because it’s farm clothes? bitch cloth was valuable as fuck because of the labor involved ain’t no self-respecting woman gonna waste fiber and ALL THAT FUCKING TIME spinning shitty yarn to weave into shitty cloth she’s gonna make GOOD QUALITY SHIT for her family, and considering that women were doing fiber prep/spinning/weaving for like 80% of their waking time up until very recently in world history, literally every woman has the skills necessary to produce some TERRIFYINGLY GOOD QUALITY THREADS

come to think of it i’ve never read a fantasy novel that talks about textile production at all??? like it’s even worse than the “where are all the farms” problem like where are people getting the cloth if no one’s doing the spinning and weaving??? kmart???

systlin

THANK U

rosslynpaladin

pro tip: what do you say instead? I gotcha.

In Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy Dayes, everybody’s layer against skin (shirt tunic or shift) is gonna be linen. it’s almost never wool except stockings or hose (like pant legs). Say “undyed cloth” if you wanna make them sound simple and peasanty. Comment on how you can tell it wasn’t made for them (the fit is off) and has had probably eight owners before.

Outer clothing is gonna be either wool, or a blend called Linsey-woolsey, and again you could say Undyed, but dyes are not only common they are CHEAP and relatively easy. (innerwear is often left undyed or bleached to white because it gets washed to heck- like beaten by a wooden stick on a stone by the river- and dye would just fade out a lot so why bother. Ths is also why innerwear has ties, rarely buttons, unless you are so rich you have people doing your washing delicately because they’re hired to do only that. Buttons would get broken in the washing)

A poorer person is often seen in “russet”, a kind of rusty orange-brown color. Purple was famously reserved for royalty in many times and places, but its also just hard to do. We see a lot more magentas and fuschias for nobles or common middle class folks than we ever see of Purple- and not many of those. Deep blue was more likely on very rich people, but a light blue was common for even poorer folks. Yellow was popular with everyone, and so was green, and many shades of reds, including the color we now call orange (they did not- this is why redheads are called redheads and not orangeheads). Your vision of everyone in very drab brown and mud colors is from Hollywood- most medieval-ren folks have clothing with colors. Sometimes garish colors, to the modern eye. Traffic cone Orange and acid green was a popular combo in the 13th century.

elfwreck

Example medieval dye colors. Lots of yellows and orangey-browns. Woad gave a range of blues that are basically what we think of as “denim colors.” There were purples - royal purple was a specific color from a specific source - but if you mix wine-dye and woad-dye, you get purpleish dye. (Getting the color to stay that way may be more difficult. Everything worn by peasants fades; they couldn’t afford the really good fixatives.)

More examples and explanations here:

Plum, dusty purple, lavender, burgundy, chestnut, blood red

Walnut, chocolate, tan, linen, pale apricot, spice, dark spice

Peasant clothes were often more colorful than the nobility. Nobles could afford bright, clear colors that peasants couldn’t - but one mark of wealth was being able to buy all 4-8 yards of fabric for an outfit at the same time. So nobles would have a full outfit, including hat, stockings, even shoes, of one type of fabric (with ornamentation of a contrasting type, and as many buttons or bits of silver as they could get away with wearing), while peasants would often have a shirt, bodice or jerkin, skirt or pants, stockings, and hat of all different colors.

Dying or re-dying any one piece of clothing was within most of their cost limits - dye itself is cheap; fixatives cost. But boiling your shirt for an hour with onion skins in a copper pot would re-color the fading fabric.

lloerwyn-deactivated20201104

And yet more medieval dye colour samples:

woodlandwell

THANK YOU

daniel-oneiroi

it’s almost like… all the colours people wore… in medieval paintings around the world…

might have actually….

existed….

in medieval times….

kyloren

teenage us were braver than any US Marine

fanfictionwriter101

Me: I wanna write. Now to come up with words.

My demon brain: No words, just aesthetics and ideas.

Me: but -

My demon brain: figure it out

charlesoberonn

Now that the world stopped and everybody is stuck at home, writers have no excuse not to write that thing they wanted to for months or years.

charlesoberonn

This is a callout post for myself.

downtroddendeity

I was down at the grocery store earlier and they were totally out of anything resembling disinfectant, so for anybody in the same situation stressing out about COVID-19 here’s a PSA.

I used to work in a microbiology lab that studied the kind of bacteria that can actually kill you, and had the whole rigmarole of “how to not accidentally cause a disease outbreak” training while I worked there. You know what the standard disinfectant is for wiping down a lab bench on which you’ve been working with actual tubes full of live pathogens?

1 part household bleach and 9 parts water in a plastic spray bottle.

If you’re the kind of person who cleans with bleach this is probably barely going to look like anything (because basically everyone who uses bleach to clean uses way more than they need to), but trust me, this is what scientists who make their living handling germs that can kill them consider an adequate amount of bleach to kill absolutely everything.

Just don’t use it immediately before or after other cleaners because bleach loves to react with things to make noxious gas.

P.S.: Plain old soap will also reliably kill coronavirus.

blazing-fireheart

Has this been done yet?

frognonbinary-deactivated202412

i’ve been doing my homework on how to break into a writing career and honestly. there’s a Lot that i didn’t know about thats critical to a writing career in this day and age, and on the one hand, its understandable because we’re experiencing a massive cultural shift, but on the other hand, writers who do not have formal training in school or don’t have the connections to learn more via social osmosis end up extremely out of loop and working at a disadvantage.

frognonbinary-deactivated202412

like, i didnt know about twitter pitch parties!! i didnt know about literary agents and publishers tweeting their manuscript wishlist, in hopes that some poor soul out there has written the book they really want to read and publish!! this isnt some shit you learn about in school! you really need to know the ins and outs of the writing community to be successful!

frognonbinary-deactivated202412

for anyone interested, here’s what i’ve learned so far in my quest for more writing knowledge:

1. Writer’s Market 2019 is a great place to start– it gives you a list of magazines and journals that you can send your work to depending on the genre as well as lists a shit ton of literary agents that specify what genres they represent, how you can get in contact with them and how they accept query letters. this is a book that updates every year and tbh i only bought it this year so i dont know how critical it is to have an updated version

2. do your research. mostly on literary agents because if you listed on your site that you like to represent fluffy YA novels and some asshole sends you a 80k manuscript about like…gritty viking culture, you will be severely pissed off. always go in finding someone who you know will actually like your work because they’re the ones who will try to advocate for you in getting published.

3. learn how to write a query letter. there are slightly varying formulas to how you can write an effective query letter. you’re also going to want to get feedback on your query letter because its the first thing the literary agent will read and based on how well you do it, it could be the difference between them rejecting you outright and giving your manuscript a quick read

4. unfortunately, you’re gonna want to get a twitter. Twitter is where a lot of literary agents are nowadays, and they host things like twitter pitch parties, where you pitch your manuscript in a few sentences and hashtag it with #Pitmad #Pitdark, some version of pit. a lot of literary agents and publishers will ALSO post their manuscript wishlists, which is just the kind of books they’d like to represent/publish, and they hashtag this with #MSWL (it is NOT for writers to use, only for agents/publishers)

5. connect with other writers, literary agents, publishers at book events. you will absolutely need the connections if you want to get ahead as a writer. thats just kind of the state of the world.