This one’s a little bit hard to talk about on its own, because it’s really the first half of a two-parter. (Also because of Part 2, but we’ll get there when we get there.)
Lemma and Iason return to Castle BrinksmoorIolatopia Castle Brinksmoor, and everything seems to be fine. Which, of course, is the cue for everything to be totally bad: Hragulf from “A Rock and a Hard Place” has arrived in secret, enslaved everyone (except Iola, who escaped*) with his magic rock, and pretty quickly picks off Lemma, too. She manages to warn Iason – she’s really learning to deal with this “magnet for mind control” business – and he escapes too, but she gets to have some sadistic fun from Hragulf. (He’s gotten a lot nastier since he was a petty thief in Mercia.)
Lemma’s changed quite a bit, too, since her first time in the castle. She checks the robes provided for glamours after she takes a bath, and more than that wants to spend time with Brea and Iola, who (reading between the lines) she’s missed a lot. She also refers to Iason as her “old friend”, and clearly means it sincerely by now. The business with the Great Old One has receded into the awkward background, but the two of them are functioning much better as a team.
Reading through this story the first time, I moved from “poor women of castle Brinksmoor” to “man, Iason and Iola had better show back up soon, there’s not much story left” to “oh, this is a cliffhanger, isn’t it”.
And then there was a very unexpected cliffhanger.
*There’s a paywalled story, “Iola Special!”** that covers Hragulf’s takeover and Iola’s escape. There’s a bunch of f/f serial recruitment, as one might imagine, but the contribution to Lemma’s arc specifically could be summed up as “Hragulf takes over and Iola escapes”, so you can read it yourself if you want to know more.
**I assume that’s not going to be the publication name. 😛
When The Fuck Are We? 🤷
We’re back in Kyrno. Rather than flail around trying to tie this into something, I’ll just pick up The Problem of the Lying King Lists from last time.
There is a big problem with, say, medieval records of the Kings of the Picts, and that is, of course, that everyone has an axe to grind. A big chunk of a history degree is learning, in various ways, how to critically examine a source: what is the author trying to prove? What evidence do they marshal towards that, and, perhaps more importantly, what sort of evidence would they ignore or suppress? What kind of things do they feel the need to argue? What do they take for granted? Historical records, for the most part, are made to buttress the reputations of the institutions they’re being made for: and for most historical primary sources that’s usually an uncomplicated “the rulers of _____ are the best.” It sort of taints the joy of studying the carefully dated, meticulously detailed king list you’ve just discovered when you realize that the first three names are unambiguously gods. But everyonedoesit, because what better way to prove the preeminence of the rulers of _____ than to remind everyone of their divine origins?
It comes up in less obvious ways, too, of course. Egyptian hieroglyphs were translated early in the 19th C and kicked off a minor Eygyptian fad in style and decoration, and a very large academic feeding frenzy. Monument after monument was decyphered*, and the history of the preclassical world opened up in a way whose suddenness was kinda inspiring. All of the achievements of the Pharaohs, suddenly known again to the modern world!
Then they decyphered cuneiform a generation later and had to retract quite a few things.
Most of what has survived of Egyptian hierogyphics are, as I said, monuments. Funerary memorials, religious sites, commemorations by the civil authority. Which means, to put it bluntly, that this:
and this:
aren’t so different, in goals or even, really, in content.
Egyptian records aren’t complete fabrications, of course, any more than that list of Swedish kings starting with Odin is – or, for that matter, Battleship Potemkin. But everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and, if at all possible, compared with other viewpoints wherever we can**. Which is fine for the 1905 Revolution; or the Ancient Eastern Med, where, as I mentioned way back, we have (relatively) giant piles of documentation, from all sorts of places and sources, at least up until the Bronze Age Collapse, and we can compare what the Egyptians are saying about their war with the Hittites to what the Hittites are saying about their war with the Egyptians to what the Babylonians are saying about that Egypto-Hittite war going on over there. But what do you do for places like Gododdin, where quite often there are decades or even centuries where everything that’s been written down comes from the narrative in a single document written long after the fact?
*With no small amount of looting, because colonialism.
**This gets pretty darkly political in history closer to the present: is always political, in a sense, but nobody nowadays is deeply invested in the victor of Kadesh, whereas exactly what happened to the Kingdom of Kongo (to sum up: bad things, but known only as they were recorded by white Portuguese) is deeply tied into the ways that the West thinks of Africa and their relations with each other even in the present day. The most important collective historical project of the last half-century has been to try and systematically broaden the viewpoints used for writing and understanding history, especially beyond (usually wealthy) white men. You can describe this as political correctness, if you like, but if you want pragmatism consider it as simply a striving for accuracy: you can’t see anything in depth from only one eye.
~
Next time: *grinds teeth angrily for five minutes*
“You can’t see anything in depth from only one eye” holy shit I love it.
