serpolet

e | historical ecology | secretly a tree | here for green things & assorted odd & bookish fandoms tolkien obsession @bombadil-o | icon by @ummmmandy

[wilder-thyme]

thinking about Her again

[and-her-saints]

this could've been an email a prayer

[sexygrammaticalerrors]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

It’s dangerous to go alone; take this:

[aethersea]

it's funny how often, in the queen's thief books, the sad and shocking twist is that the love was there all along. there's the big obvious one, of course, but it comes up again and again: Dite with his hopeless crush, Sejanus with his mocking cruelties, Relius with his abject devotion and Teleus with his stalwart loyalty, Attolia's ladies closing ranks around her, Sophos telling all his tale and bashfully leaving out how often and how wistfully he thought of Eddis. in other cases it grows silently and catches our narrator by surprise: Costis down the well, Pol on the cliffside.

and it doesn't save everyone. love is not always a gentle thing, and it's not always enough. the minister of war nearly strangled his son to death. Sejanus committed treason. Eddis went to war. but it's always there, unobtrusive as a shadow, pervasive as the sunlight.

I think sometimes of a quote from mwt saying she front-loads the trauma: the worst thing that is going to happen to the characters, emotionally, generally happens in the first few chapters. their world ends, their life shatters, they lose everything, they are alone and afraid with no allies and no hope. and then we rebuild. over the course of slow, painstaking pages, they regain their footing in the world, carve out a new self, discover a new perspective and a new strength. further ills befall, of course, and at the great climax everything seems bleak and dire once again, but it's still not the worst thing to happen to them. they face the dire moment bravely, afraid but not alone, certain now in who they are and how they will face the end if it comes.

I'm still mulling this over, I don't have a tidy knot to tie between these points, but they feel connected. something about the compassion woven through these stories, both for the characters and for the readers. something about how they're tales of intrigue and adventure, yes, but they're also stories about building something good, and about seeing the best in people even when their worst is horrific, and about love as an act of courage in a harsh world. love as an act of faith. love as the last thing left that might be able to save you.

[machine-saint]

in an astounding coincidence, the right level of technology happens to be the exact one I was surrounded with growing up

[ewaneneollav]

i love people so much that im trying to be one myself. its a bit crazy, i know…

[hexjulia]

lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.

what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?

[hexjulia]

pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.

[lierdumoa]

I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.

[technologistrevolution]

If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.

[mycatwantstoeatpins]

[Description:

A quote from Mary Shelley's Mathilda: '[...] arrived and quite incapable of taking off my wet clothes that clung about me. In the morning, on her return, [highlighted] my servant [end highlight] found me almost lifeless, while possessed by a high fever I was lying on the floor of my room.

A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: [...] hands for joy and ran down to Clerval. [highlighted] We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; [end highlight] but I was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly.]

[softwaring]

[flowergrenades]

bbc ghosts + tumblr text posts [5/?]

[your-disobedient-servant]

map of travel times from Paris in 18th c France [x]

y'all, this is so cool

[ilostmygh0st]

[rainbowgaez]

evil great lakes

lake inferior

lake normal

lake offtario

lake hurton

lake michigan

[nebmia]

so apparently in 815 CE there was a common belief that sky pirates sailed ships in the clouds and (working in collaberation with frankish weather wizards) stole all the crops that got damaged in storms and took them back to the cloud realm of magonia.

And this was apparently a common enough belief that an archbishop felt the need to write a treatise to debunk it and insist that only god controls the weather, which is the only reason we know about it.

there are three important points to take from this, i think

This is great inspiration for your next dnd game

Tropes that might seem relatively modern (like airship pirates) can often actually go WAY back

The stuff your average medieval christian actually believed in will often have very little resemblance to christianity. And thats before you even get to the proper heretics. EDIT: people keep asking for the source and its now been added multiple times in different reblog chains. I should have put it in the original post but i am a fool: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp

[batcii]

the other day one of my students asked me if i was 'into musicals'. anyway here's a crop of a wip i've had sitting open in photoshop for a year and a half.

[mournfulroses]

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, from a letter featured in The Life & Letters of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

[scottpartridge]

Blue Jay (left), Green Jay (right) and hybrid Grue Jay (center), recently seen for the first time in Texas. Such hybrids may become more common as Green Jays push north into Blue Jay habitat.

[emeraldraccoon478]

Had to look it up