Published: July 8-29, 2007
http://mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html
If the prologue set up the main characters and major plot points, the Glamour-ous Life of a Slave* sets up the canonical Lemma story. Lemma gets in trouble through pride and suicidal overconfidence, has lots and lots of mind-controlled sex, the day is saved by Iason murderin’ shit and Lemma burnin’ it up. I don’t mean canonical as a criticism, by the way. It’s a solid enough frame to work for quite a lot of stories in a row, and @midorikonton varies it increasingly as time goes on so it never goes stale. But we’re not there yet, so let’s see how this version goes.
Today’s Lemma-the-Doofus moment is her stripping out of all her magical protection, in a place she already knows is soaking in mind-control magic, just so she can have a bath. Without even thinking about it. Which of course moves the plot forward, but also is a character moment: Lemma is arrogant, damnit, and also… not quite decadent, but very contemptuous of the Tin Islands standard of living. From there we move on to the sex-slave phase, with an absolutely beautiful chapter end cliffhanger/joke to remind us of the geas that’s going to fuck things up for Lemma. (The first time I read this I laughed out loud – I’d forgotten all about it, and it’s just a perfect reminder.) Then the good old hot “pretend to be normal so you can betray your friends” trope with Iason, followed by some f/f, humiliation, more f/f. I’m not sure if Lemma is bi – certainly if she is I don’t recall it ever being explicitly stated – but there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence starting here if you want to argue for that reading. Finally, Lemma’s Geas and Lord Brinksmoor’s glamours collide with each other, Iason comes back, dramatic climax where things explode and people swordfight and Lemma finally breaks free, badguy dies, day is saved.
A couple of characters are introduced that will be important later on: Iason’s missing sister Iola, and the servant girls Brea and Mira. All of them (and the other former slaves) get set up free and independent in the former Brinksmoor castle, which is a nice little new status quo for these women**. Iason and Iola’s reunion is a little insight into their characters, and the culture from which they came (militant, honour-bound, broadly Good in the D&D sense).
Lemma also gets her first real character development, as opposed to character establishing. The geas to find the books is broken, which surprised me on my first read because I assumed it would be the main driver of the story most of the rest of the way through, and it doesn’t even make to the end of the first full vignette. But in retrospect it’s really Lemma’s first step forward. Prologue-Lemma would already be on a boat back to Lemuria to explode every single one of the archmagus’ organs, sequentially, but Lemma has now realized that the books are dangerous, and even without a geas it’s her responsibility to recover them. She’s still not really thinking in terms of helping people as a whole, but the arc is starting.
*Is @midorikonton Commonwealth-ese? Because she spelled “glamour” correctly. 😉 I’ll have to keep an eye out for how she spells “colour”.
** It’s not too much spoilers to note that we’ll coming back here, I think.
When The Fuck Are We? 🤷
Lemma the Librarian takes place around 1200 BCE. I’m not sure the evidence for this is really sturdy and, as I’ll explain next time, we’ve already hit stuff that doesn’t fit this date, but it matches several of the large pieces of evidence and in any case gives us a starting point.
Why 1200 BCE? Well, the technology level in the story is Late Bronze Age*: most metalwork is bronze; iron can be worked but cannot be smelted, refined, or forged, so it (a) comes from meteors exclusively and (b) is spectacularly rare and valuable. Which is to say, Late Bronze Age. But that could be pretty much anywhere in the second millennium BCE.
“The Sea Peoples” gives us the other half of the clue. Between about 1200 and 1150 BCE, the sophisticated, relatively advanced societies of the Eastern Mediterranean/Near East** collapsed pretty comprehensively. We mostly don’t know why, since one of the things that disappeared was literacy, so the records that let us lay out, eg, the history of the Third Dynasty of Ur in such great detail also stop existing. But Egypt, autarkic, isolationist, and inward-looking, managed to survive, and did leave records: starting in the late 13th C and mounting in intensity throughout the following half-century or so, the country was regularly invaded from the north-east by raiders usually translated as “Sea Peoples”. Occam’s razor suggests that the Sea Peoples (or whatever convulsions started them moving) were also the thing that wrecked up the rest of the Eastern Med at exactly the same time****.
So who were the Sea Peoples? Well, we don’t know. The Egyptians, as mentioned, were kinda indifferent to anyone who wasn’t them. It’s possible that the Phoenicians and Philistines, who moved into the Levant coast about this time, were them or their descendants*****; it’s also known that the Mycenaeans were wrecked by Dorian Greek invaders coming down from the north and then moving east. So there is a very tenuous theory that the Bronze Age Collapse had, as cause or symptom, a huge clockwise migration around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, by a group or groups variously called the Dorians, Philistines, or Sea Peoples******. (Presumably the ones that stopped in the Levant assimilated into the local Semitic culture and languages; or alternately, the Dorians dominoed into the Phoenicians who dominoed into, &c &c.)
So Lemma’s Sea Peoples are Dorian Greeks, with names like Iason and Iola, and the story is set around 1200 BCE. Everybody got that? Good. Now we can start moving on to the many, many pieces that don’t fit.
*This is a damn dirty lie. The Tin Islands have nice houses, castles, barrels, chimneys, the feudal system, and so on and so forth. It is straight-up Medieval European Fantasy. But this is mostly in the background of the setting, whereas the metalworking abilities of the locals are carefully explicated, so I’m taking the latter as primary.
**The best known to a non-historian audience would, I guess, be Mycenaean Greece – Agamemnon, Theseus, all that stuff (and, of course, Jason***). But everything except Egypt went down – the Hittites, the Canaanites, Middle Period Babylon, and on, and on.
***Mythological Jason seems likely to have been an inspiration for Lemma’s Iason – his sword even comes from the eastern shore of the Black Sea, where Jason and the Argonauts voyaged for the Golden Fleece. Mythological Jason does not have an older sister, though. However, in the kind of craziness that can only come up when pure, pure coincidence is involved, the shitty 1958 Italian pepla-boom-starting film The Labours of Hercules gives Jason a cousin to serve as a Hercules’ love interest… and names her Iola.
****As with everything in historical periods without good documentation, this idea is bitterly contested. I’ll go with it because simplicity, and also because I’m really not up enough on the historiography to take a side properly.
*****See note 4 above. The collapse of the Canaanite polities that the Philistines caused/took advantage of, incidentally, was also caused/taken advantage of by Semitic peoples moving in from the interior, who then squabbled over the region with the Philistines on the coast. The latter invaders are known as Israelites: you may recognize this as the secular version of the biblical books of Joshua and Judges.
******Again, see note 4. Ancient history is neat but not really a place for ironshod certainty.
~
Next time: a slightly more sympathetic antagonist than usual? And also I finally get around to talking about the Tin Islands.
heh heh heh
I am absolutely loving these “When the Fuck Are We?” segments, they make me feel so validated.