Posted on March 26, 2023, 01:44:52 PM by rbuxton
Three Accidents in Andalucía
Three Accidents in Andalucía
By rbuxton
My brother arrived in Spain in January 2020 and, with one thing and another, it was three years before I managed to visit him. By then he was living in Madrid and I used that as a start point for a three week tour of Andalucía, the southernmost of mainland Spain’s “autonomous communities” (they are very autonomous, by the way). I was partly drawn to this region by its mild winter weather, but mainly by its promise of history, culture and mountains. The title of this article is not entirely honest: my first two stops, and my first “accident”, were actually in the central province of Castilla-La Mancha.
Humans were living permanently in caves in Andalucía from at least 25 000 years ago. The area was then colonised by Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors (Arabs and Berbers) and the Christian Kingdoms which would become modern Spain. In the 1st century AD a Jewish community – the Sephardim – settled in the area and experienced varying degrees of persecution until they were violently expelled in about the 14th century. Although they contain art and architecture from many of these different eras, the cities of the region do not feel like monuments to racial and religious harmony. The dominance of one group would come abruptly to an end and the conquerors would make their own mark on top of the old – quite literally, in places like Granada. Geographically Andalucía is fairly mountainous with several national parks and its dramatic coastline includes the Costa del Sol. There are some fertile river valleys to the west but to the east it borders a desert – the only one in Europe.
Many of Andalucía’s cities have an “old city” area which is clearly defined: on a hill in Toledo, an island in Cádiz. In Cordoba, however, it goes on forever, and the buildings there were noticeably lower and the narrow streets less gloomy as a result. Getting lost in these areas is part of the sightseeing experience, and the main buildings of interest sometimes spring out at you without warning. I saw a number of open-topped tour buses and wondered about their efficacy: a big bus in these places is about as useful as in, say, Venice. “There’s the roof of the cathedral… about a mile away, and the palace next to it… you’ll have to walk that bit.”
Madrid
On my first day in Spain’s capital I saw the cathedral and palace then took the metro to the Buen Retiro Park. I walked through it, past the lake and monument to King Alfonso XII, to the Reina Sofia art gallery. This is home to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a vast black and white painting depicting the 1937 Nazi bombing of the eponymous town. Next I went to the Temple of Debod, an ancient Egyptian temple gifted to Spain in 1968. It was moved piece by piece to a hilltop in the city centre, where it has a commanding view over parks and the distant mountains. My brother took me into those mountains the following day, to Navacerrada, where a ski resort looks down over a reservoir. We followed a river valley up to the remnants of the snowline, where the path got slippery underfoot. Huge vultures wheeled around us, riding the air currents with hardly a beat of their wings.
In between the days out, tapas and live music I tried to plan my next stop. I was dismayed to see that a train journey to Seville would be expensive and take up most of a day. Much better to take a bus for €5 to a city just south of Madrid.
Toledo
Perched on a rock and surrounded on three sides by the Tagus river gorge, Toledo is spectacular. The city is famous – as anyone who’s seen the film Highlander will know – for its steel making, and the souvenir shops are packed with swords. I dragged myself up the slope alongside its 16th century walls towards a hostel with a sunny roof terrace. I visited the complex of the Santa Fe convent, a series of buildings which was variously used as a Moorish palace, Castillian castle, base for a knightly order, nunnery, girls’ school and now eclectic modern art gallery. The following day I took a bus to a viewpoint on the far side of the gorge, walked back across a Roman bridge and took in the synagogue, alcázar (castle) and cathedral. The latter was one of the most incredible buildings I’ve ever been in; a highlight was its three metre high gold and silver monstrance.
Now to my first “accident”: sitting down to a meal of pasta and tomato soup (I’d misread the tin) at the hostel I heard drumming. I was aware that February was carnival month in much of Andalucía and thought my arrival might have coincided with a rehearsal. I was wrong: the main parade was that evening and it wound through the city streets and down, down, down to the river. I felt like the happiest tourist alive as I followed the dancers, musicians, fishermen and weeping clowns/kings/queens. The noise was sometimes deafening and the sense of community contagious. Only the pigeons, startled off distant balconies, seemed perturbed.
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Accident the First- being swept up in Toledo's carnival. Great for your correspondent, less so for the local columbidae.
Granada
A dramatic bus ride through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada took me to Granada, medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty. I had come to see the Alhambra: essentially a city on a hill of its own consisting of palaces, castles and gardens with some of the best preserved buildings of their kind in the world. I spent a lot of time gazing at views of and from it, and had booked a four hour guided tour well in advance. Wandering the labyrinth of beautifully plastered rooms and courtyards was very special. My guide pointed to some interesting features of Islamic architecture: fountains, for example, are always small to provide a peaceful murmur of water, unlike the thundering status symbols of European aristocracy. Islamic buildings are usually plain and unadorned on the exterior so, when the Christians conquered the Alhambra, they slapped their own richly decorated palace in the middle of it. When Sultan Boabdil, weakened by infighting in his own court, surrendered Granada the centuries of Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula were over. This was in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage across the Atlantic.
Málaga
The warm weather of coastal Málaga was a relief after the time spent in the mountains, and helped me get over a cold. The city’s reputation as a mere party destination for British sunseekers is undeserved – though there’s certainly a large amount of Sangria available. I explored its waterfront and Roman and medieval buildings, many of which are clustered around a steep, pine-covered hill which affords brilliant panoramas of the city. The cathedral (affectionately known as the “One-armed Lady” since the second of its two towers was never finished) was lit up beautifully every evening by the setting sun. From Málaga I did a day trip to the Nerja caves, a huge network of chambers with artwork dating back 42 000 years. Tourists cannot visit these light-sensitive paintings but it’s still worth seeing the extraordinary speleothems (the general term for cave mineral formations) which include a 32-metre high column. There was plenty of information about the area on a “nature walk” above the caves, which I extended towards a beach for a freezing cold 30-second swim.
Andalucía Day was fast approaching and I asked Pedro, the receptionist, if this would affect long distance public transport. “I don’t know,” he said, like everybody else, “But you know you should go to my home town. You will see something very folk, it’s not for the tourists. Do the pilgrimage to Santa Fe, it’s maybe one hour. There will be music. I have to work”. Unsure of what I was letting myself in for I took a train into the Sierra del Gibralmora. Santa Fe turned out to be a sharp rocky outcrop above the town of Pizarra and the four-hour round trip had great views back to the coast. I returned to find the streets of the town had been closed to vehicles and there were horses everywhere. People drinking beer on horseback, chatting on horseback, watching the musicians and Flamenco dancers on horseback. I, meanwhile, was making an ass of myself trying to order street food in my faltering Spanish – it was clear there weren’t many tourists around. I returned to the hostel, grinning at my accidental good fortune, and showed Pedro my videos. “Hey,” he cried, “That’s my house!”
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Accident the Second - an unexpected trip to Santa Fe where your correspondent found himself lacking the apparently obligatory horse.
Sevilla
I only had a day in the fourth largest city in Spain so I spent most of it exploring on foot. It was nice to stand by the river and imagine Columbus setting sail all those years ago. The city is home to the third-largest cathedral in Christendom which, unfortunately, seemed to have the third-largest queue as well, and it was the same with the alcázar. I don’t feel I did Sevilla justice, but I did have some very nice empanadas. It was time to chill for a few days in a laid-back coastal town.
Cádiz
Cádiz is situated on an island connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus just on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians were the first people to spot its potential as a trade post in the 7th Century BC and they walled off the isthmus to create a fortress. The 16th Century Puertas de Tierra still divide the old city from the new; another notable feature is the large number of sea-facing merchant watchtowers dotted around. I climbed a tower, went to the cathedral and had a great time in the extensive fish market, where I bought a big bag of prawns for €4 (they were no longer wriggling, unlike the crabs). Cádiz’s place in history was further cemented when it became the de facto capital of Spain during the Peninsula War. It was here that the liberal constitution of 1812 was proclaimed, and this left-wing attitude has been proudly maintained ever since. It is most evident today, I’m told, in its riotous annual carnival, which I had just missed.
Or so I thought.
I began to suspect something was up when I saw a group of middle-aged men in silly costumes waving inflatable guitars at each other on the Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, crowds had started to gather at the steps of various buildings around town, which served as stages. These were filled up apparently at random by groups of performers in even sillier costumes – the group of large rubber ducks was a personal favourite. The acts divided roughly into two types. The first I would describe as “street pantomime”: two people – friends or a husband-and-wife team – would regale passers by with stories, jokes and songs with the help of kazoos and wooden sticks. Afterwards they would give out badges in exchange for coins and spend the coins on beer and sherry (“Please fund our alcoholism,” read one sign, in English). The second type would be a group of ten or more singers with guitars, drums, cymbals and seriously good four-part harmonies. The words were entirely lost on me which was a shame as the crowd were laughing and joining in with everything, especially the drinking. I’m pretty sure, however, that the nun was inviting the fireman in through her window for some distinctly un-nunnish activities.
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Accident the Third - because why have one accidental carnival stop when you could have three?
Córdoba
My last stop was another former Moorish stronghold with remains of walls dotted around. My first view of the cathedral and alcázar was from the far side of the Guadalquivir river, where there are historical bridges and watermills. The alcázar here was actually built by Christian kings after they conquered the city in 1236. More recently some exquisite Roman mosaics were moved here, but the gardens with their rows of fountains were the highlight for me. I went to the Museum of the Sephardic Jews in an old town house, which was very moving. Many converts to Christianity continued to practise Judaism in secret – an activity the 15th century Inquisition sought to stamp out. Just across the road was a synagogue, forgotten after its conversion to a church but now restored. The city’s famous Mezquita is another example of a religious building changing over time: it’s a cathedral built to completely cover and encapsulate an earlier mosque. The first thing you see on entering is some of the 800 or so columns supporting arches stretching away into the gloom. I finished up with a tour of the churches to the east of the old city, then it was time for a bus back to Madrid and a flight home.
I’m not sure how to wrap this up. It was a brilliant three weeks and I’d recommend it to anyone. The bigger cities could easily be done as a weekend getaway or, for a longer tour, Andalucía could be combined with Portugal, Valencia and Barcelona or even Morocco (an hour away by boat). There may be a few errors in the dates and facts in my account so please let me know if you spot any. Regarding my three accidents, I suppose I was simply in the right place at the right time. If that doesn’t encourage you to put a bag on your back and go somewhere new I don’t know what will. Thanks for reading.
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article and want to read more travel writing by Exilian members, please check out the forum's Travel Writing Index, which includes a range of members' travels and thoughts on places from Tunis to Tbilisi and more besides!
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Posted on March 18, 2023, 01:07:36 PM by Jubal
Thinking Chimerically
Thinking Chimerically
By Jubal
What makes a chimera a chimera? Whilst of course there’s the ‘original model’ with its goat, dragon, and lion heads and snake tail, the term has a more general usage for animals made of bits of other animals. These include the gryphon, the hippocampus, the hippogriff, the owlbear (in its post-Gygaxian/modern incarnations), the wolpertinger, the jackalope, a lot of grotesques in medieval margin images, and so on. We’ve even had the spectacle of a real creature being declared chimerical: the first Europeans to see platypuses assumed they were sewn together fakes, and indeed some aboriginal tales posit them as the offspring of a duck and a rakali, giving them a chimerical ancestry.
We keep coming up with and using chimeras. The gryphon may be ancient, after all, but the owlbear is only about half a century old. The inherent way that animal parts can be recombined is something we will doubtless keep playing with – but what works, and how we can put together a chimera, isn’t something entirely without logic or rules. Those rules depend on what we’re trying to achieve with our chimerical being, and how we feel and think about the particular animals and animal parts being used. For the time being, we’ll start with a basic definition of a chimera as having the characteristics that it has parts that are recognisably from multiple animals, and that it also bears some attribute or connection to those animals.
Within that, I think there are two main purposes of a chimera: a chimera as confusion and a chimera as magnification of the animal’s attributes. The chimera as confusion is exemplified by the original chimera. The purpose of the chimera is that it is wrong: it is unnatural and strange that these familiar images have been reassembled into something unfamiliar. Medieval grotesques also fall into this category, with human faces and dragon’s tails and legs poking out of all sorts of places that, well, they just shouldn’t be.
However, here’s where things can fast get out of control, because creating something that just looks wrong is actually kind of easy: if we create a creature with sixteen limbs alternating octopus tentacles and spider legs, give it an array of eight eyes, the beak of a rooster and a big ol’ fish fin, we definitely have something that is weird as hell but not really something that fulfils a chimera’s function. It’s just too weird, and whilst it might be horrifying, that’s because of the inherent horrors of what we’ve created more than because the bits don’t belong together. Another way of putting this is that a messy chimera can easily just become an alien, where the whole thing is weird rather than having the specific wrongness of relatively familiar elements mismatched together. Insectoid and invertebrate elements transposed into vertebrates, too, are such a staple of horror as a genre that it’s (in my view probably unfortunately) relatively difficult to use them in a chimera-like situation.
So we get the twist in the chimera’s tale: it relies on a weirdness that needs a certain level of familiarity to make it work. The specific horror or discomfort of the chimera is that it takes elements we know and understand, and put them in a combination or situation that breaks that image. In this sense, the especially incongruous goat head might be the most important part of a classical chimera. It’s the familiarity of that image – or that of the human parts in medieval human-dragon grotesques – that combined with the multi-part nature of the creature creates the effect. Especially aspects like its multiplicity of heads manage to provide a clear mix-and-match nature and a clear wrongness while maintaining the clarity of which parts come from where rather than making a simply alien being.
They greymarne - very much not the gryphon you know and love. Author's own work.
To give a good example of just how much this works on feelings, I want to share with you a creature I’ve used in the past, the greymarne, a corruption of Griffinus Marinus (in much the same way that a vormorant is a shortening of Corvus marinus, the sea-crow, this is a sea-gryphon). There is very little mechanical difference between a greymarne and a gryphon – both have bird head, animal body, fly, and so on. But the greymarne has the head of a gull, and that changes everything. The gryphon is a noble steed and soars the peaks: the greymarne squawks in your face and tries to dive-bomb you. The gryphon chases wild ibex in the hills or attacks mighty elephants, while the Greymarne is out to get your lunch and will probably snack on a dead fox if one washes up in its vicinity. Because our feelings about the input animals are so different, two mechanically similar creatures come with wildly different expectation games.
Again, we have an interesting problem that parallels the one we had with our confusions, which is that some combinations that work well don’t function properly as this sort of chimera, either because the respective parts don’t resonate or because, to take a cooking analogy, the combination overpowers the original flavours. Enter Quetzalcoatl, stage left. The winged serpent is a fantastic image and, nominally, chimerical, including bird and serpent parts. But because most people around the world nowadays do not have terribly strong feelings about quetzals, they become a sort of adornment to the core serpent image rather than something we might think of more properly as a chimera. Generally a lot of bird + lizard combinations end up with some issues like this, giving a more dinosaur or lizardman feel than something we perceive as chimerical, perhaps due to our lower familiarity and empathy with a lot of non-mammalian creatures.
So we can move from these thoughts to a couple of core guidelines about using chimeras and, perhaps, creating new ones. There are two major ways to create a chimerical creature, either by trying to create something where the combination of parts turns the familiar into the unfamiliar, or by creating a creature where shared ideas and familiar attributes give a reinforcement to both sets of characteristics. In both of these cases, it tends to make sense to have at least one part of the animal be something that is comparatively familiar and about which the audience already has some fairly heavily embedded ideas. Mammals tend to work especially well for these purposes, because we’re more familiar with them and tend to feel less like they’re alien to us.
To give a couple of examples to end with: let’s first make a wrong chimera. We’ll start with something cute and familiar: a small cat, for example. We then need to focus on giving it some things that are incongruous, but also familiar themselves. A good idea for a secondary head might be that of a rat – we get the incongruity of “hey that has a second head” but we also play with the idea that this creature both represents predator and prey, perhaps even with the ‘prey’ side being the more malevolent one. Add some webbed back feet, like you might find on a duck, and we have a creature of damp ditches or sewers from a fantasy city, gnawing on foul meat and frightening the regular stray cats and dogs with its terrifying multi-headed shadow – and yet at the same time, it’s all almost something you could imagine taking in, giving a bath, and letting settle down for a nap by the fire.
To make a type two chimera, we need two animals that we have similar feelings about, unlike our cat, duck, and rat. Let’s once again start with a mammal, this time a badger. We think of badgers – probably not wholly correctly – as grumpy but loveable, stoic and somehow defensive, tenacious creatures. What else do we give those attributes to? Well, a tortoise or a turtle. We’ll go with a more aquatic style of turtle to emphasise the difference: shell and back legs of a turtle, front legs and snout of a badger. The resulting Bortle (or Machvaku, or Tadger, or Bouldersbane, to come up with some names) is a creature of wild waterways, defending burrows it digs into the riverbanks. Slower moving than a badger on land, it moves more quickly by water, and its powerful bite and sharp claws give it a reasonable means of defence. It could easily be given some magical attributes to set it apart too, perhaps its shell having particular properties or it having some ability to sniff out particular other creatures or items that a story character might need.
So there you have it, some chimerical thinking and a couple of examples of how to apply it in your fantasy setting design and games. What did you think? Let us know below!
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Posted on January 29, 2023, 09:28:11 PM by Jubal
Goblin Week: 28 Goblin Concepts To Cause Chaos In Your Stories
Goblin Week: 28 Goblin Concepts To Cause Chaos In Your Stories
By Jubal
By Jubal
Goblins are one of the commonest creatures in modern fantasy, but at the same time can be hard to use well. Since the division between Tolkien's goblins appearing in the Hobbit and then the term Orc being used for the more epic threat in the Lord of the Rings, the idea of a goblin has been increasingly pressed into evoking the chaotic, children's storybook feel of Bilbo's adventure rather than the epic nature of Frodo's. This idea of a small, almost childlike nature can pose problems with game styles where one is simply fighting them in combat encounters, and they can easily lose their sense of mischief and chaos if made into generic enemy cannon fodder.
At the same time, goblins aren't goblins if they're easy to live alongside. Whether due to confusion or malevolence, whether in funny or scary ways, goblins are here to make our lives more difficult, and to sit at best uneasily alongside humans who have jobs to do and mouths to feed and who value a lot of things, like safety, that have never really occurred to goblins.
So that was part of the challenge for these goblins - it being goblin week, the aim certainly was to celebrate goblinkind rather than simply produce malevolent cookie-cutter bearers of evil. But nonetheless it was important to produce goblins that evoke that sense of childlike mischief. The other part of the aim for goblin concepts was to think of goblins as individuals - a goblin horde nees little introduction, but giving goblins an individual existence for story characters to interact with is a different tricky challenge.
So without further ado, here are 28 goblins, four for each day of goblin week, with a few sketch illustrations by the author. Hopefully you'll find some of them interesting, useful, or simply enjoyable - do let us know if you use any in your RPGs or storytelling. And, of course - happy goblin week!
Pritskik is a goblin who values order, and to that end thinks that nothing should move its location ever. Goblins breaking things is a known problem: goblins nailing, bolting and glueing everything to everything they can find is a new challenge.
Mroblaff the goblin is a mage-priest, granted spells by gods who are very absent minded, can't spell well, and don't understand mortal life. Mroblaff's spell list includes Summon Ladybird, Somewhat Ladybird, Moss Depth Word, and Ethereal Beak.
H'thizz meanwhile hunts rabbits with the aid of a pack of stoats. H'thizz has one great rivalry in the world, with an enormous green-eyed housecat called Godfrieda. Neither has yet won.
Lubgom the goblin has one eye, a stick too big to carry, and a tendency to pick fights with angry chickens for fun. The main surprise is that Lubgom has an eye remaining.
Mujg the alehouse goblin throws salt in the beer, drains the flasks of anyone bringing their own liquor, and switches the mugs of anyone putting potions in someone else's drink. The barkeep is yet to work out why her tavern does so well.
Frottl is a goblin that steals naughty children, on the assumption that they must really be goblins who need better training. They are usually returned within ten days with strict instructions on how to vex their parents yet further.
Stiglit is the goblin who "borrowed" the third day’s post in this series, both out of curiosity and to use as nest lining, which is why it only appeared on day four of Goblin Week.
Jumbrokkle is a goblin who lets deer and moles into people's gardens, because they look horribly tidy and it can't be good for anyone to have things all straight and pruned like that and Jumbrokkle has Concerns.
Dlup the goblin was a legendary hero who went around human weddings across the world, breaking their crockery because the noise sounded pretty. In some cultures breaking crockery became so expected that humans started breaking their own as a tradition. It is perhaps a pity they do not invite a goblin to enjoy doing it.
Sopipt is a very small goblin who makes little holes in feather mattresses and crawls in them to sleep or store shiny things, which has been the cause of a number of back pain problems among the local nobility.
Aaugh just likes yelling. Aaugh has gone looking for a thing called a "void", having been told that it's there for you to yell into, which sounds *perfect*.
Xherb likes rotting smells and carefully sneaks around putting single bad fruit or occasional dead voles into barrels of fresh-picked produce every harvest time, just to make sure everyone else can enjoy them too.
Peppkrik wants to be a lighthouse keeper, but lives next to a mud pond in the fens. The dancing lights of Peppkrik's home in a large bush have caused many a full boot as people head off the path at night. It has been nearly a year since the reed-bed was last set on fire which is probably good going.
Tsmits the goblin grew up without other goblins in the cave of an owlbear, and wears a feather hat and a fur coat because it's just Correct that things are supposed to have feathers at one end and fur at the other. Tsmits is almost a brilliant tracker but makes Very Excited Owl Noises slightly too often upon seeing a quarry go by.
Flimminy lives on a mountain and pretends to be a goat. The lack of difference in attitude means few goatherds ever notice.
Very Goblin Svleck lives in a goblin village in the marshes and actually *is* a small goat. The lack of difference in attitude means few goblins ever notice.
Jlamk is a goblin general in the finest traditions of generalship: wearing Many Shiny Items, making Loud Shouty Noises, and Not Getting Near Actual Scary Fighting. Jlamk is very successful at all of these. Especially the last one.
The goblin called Oorasolb has ears long enough to trail on the ground, a problem resolved by tying them up into a large pointed hat. Most goblins now assume Oorasolb is a wizard, and that any protestations otherwise are sheer modesty.
Rvaich the goblin is an artist who sculpts in mud, straw, and horse dung. Rvaich leaves very kind gifts of modern art outside the doors of less artistically inclined humans in local villages, and assumes their rapid disappearance is because they have been sold so quickly.
Metterflup is confused by humans making themselves work so much, and steals people's work tools in the hope of giving them a hint that they ought to not do so sometimes.
Klab lives in a rockpool and likes eating sand, and quietly makes sure any food people take onto the beach gets a good seasoning of it as well.
Zrand maintains a ruined temple. Humans don't appreciate how much work refurbishing wall art in nouveau mud-and-rat-bones style is. Zrand carefully piles skulls, scatters straw, and places rusted spears that shine in the moonlight, in case someone visits.
And sometimes, in the old chantry, the goblin sings.
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Posted on December 28, 2022, 12:01:47 AM by Jubal
A Juggler of Words: Making False Etymologies
A Juggler of Words: Making False Etymologies
By Jubal
By Jubal
Puns and plays on words are funny, but they tell us more than that about our relationship with words and ideas. People have been fascinated for many centuries with the problem of where words come from, and fun etymology facts, true or not, are a staple of social media clickbaits.
Finding these connections between words, whether true or not, can also be a source of inspiration. Ideas and concepts previously disconnected can click together and create ideas about a setting, story, or imagined past. Whether referring to things around the home, or links between animals and people, or relations between great powers, reimagining our relationships with words can be a route to reimagining how they connect together and how else we can imagine the things themselves. These new connections might generate ideas for creatures, settings, people, or simply alternative ideas for how things might have developed, imagining how processes might have acted differently to nonetheless create familiar results.
So what might some of these ideas look like? Whilst we always encourage true etymological nerdery, we can get a lot from coming up with alternative ideas as well. In that spirit and as examples or inspiration-joggers or simply for the sake of amusement, here are a set of entirely false etymological facts (we want to stress, none of these are true: please do not spread them as misinformation!) Maybe they’ll inspire – or at least amuse…
1. The name of "rum-butter tarts" derives from Islamic prohibitions on alcohol: some Ottoman-era Turks falsely claimed that Orthodox Christian traders spiked their butter with alcohol to corrupt people from the faith, hence "Rumi butter" or "Roman butter" after the Byzantine Greeks. A mid 19th century French chef created the modern dish for a Turkish-themed masquerade, using cointreau: rum itself started being used for the food in the 1910s.
2. The verb "to enter" comes from the German Ente, meaning a duck: German traders in the past often were told to "duck" when going into the houses of English merchants due to low lintels over the doorways in England. Asking for the translation of "duck" and finding it was "Ente" (the bird), the Germans assumed this was a quaint English saying whenever someone went into a house and the association of "ente" and going inside gradually made its way into English as well.
3. The term "wallflower" has actually reversed its meaning over time: originally it is a corruption from "whale-flower", that is, the blowout spouting of a whale, and meant someone who spouted or talked far too much. The term, popular in the 18th century, then started to be used in jest or sarcasm for people who were considered too quiet, until it eventually shifted its meaning entirely and people forgot the original maritime associations.
4. The manatee, originally the "man 'o tea" due to a gentle and calming demeanour associated with the imagination around sipping the drink in question, was one of a number of sea creatures named along this format by 18th century sailors, the Portugese Man 'O War jellyfish being the other example that has survived to the present.
5. A "socket" is an Anglo-French mixing, literally a "sock-ette" - too small to be a sock, but still there for fitting something snugly into. Sockettes that just fitted over the toes and toe-joints, leaving the ankles bare, were a fashion piece in the 1610s: the term was adopted by high-class doctors later in the century to find a way to explain the action of ball-and-socket joints to their wealthy clientele, and it stuck.
6. A number of old words for movement involve a thing used or imagined in the movement - among these is waddle, the motion done by people walking on wads of thick cloth strapped to their feet as a treatment for bunions. Paddle, to push oneself along with a pad, is also in this category - a lesser known one being to boatle, which only survives now in the phrase "to bottle it" - actually "to boatle it", i.e. to run away in a boat.
7. Microphone (pronounced "My-Cro-Fon-Ee") was a nymph in ancient Greek myth in variants of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, who was responsible in some version of the tale for reporting the sad fate of the two lovesick beings to the world due to being the only one who remembers everything that Echo says despite all her words being ignored by others as repetition. Johann Philipp Reis adopted her name for his early sound transmission equipment in the 1860s.
8. The word "bully" comes from Malay "bulan" - which means the moon. Mixes of Malay and then English sailors in southeast Asia started using the words to have a deniable discussion of supervisors who pushed them around on the sea - as the moon does with the tides, so any discussion of being "pushed around" that was overheard could easily be explained away as sensible nautical consideration.
9. A probable old word, now lost, is "aff", likely a verb meaning to get involved in things. From this root we "have an affair" where we aff with someone for their fair (beautiful) nature, and "affray", to aff with someone because relations have frayed, and we "affirm" things to firm up our affing with them. Being "affable" now just means pleasant, but this developed from it meaning to be most able to aff and get involved in matters concerning others.
10. A hamlet was originally a settlement so small that in medieval tax assessments it was only noted as having one pig or fewer between all the villagers - hence, just one ham.
11. Vibia, a member of the family of the same name which produced Romans such as the emperor Gaius Vibius Trebonianus Gallus and the author Vibius Sequester, was exiled from Rome in AD 53 on a charge of asking astrologers to foretell the emperor's death. Her cause became totemic for Roman astrology, and her name thus a by-word for trying to work things out through vague or unknowable methods - hence why we look for places with "good vibes" today.
12. One of the less successful endeavours of early seventeenth century explorer Robert Dudley was a natural history treatise in which he tried to classify animals by utility to mankind, and regularise their names and terminologies accordingly. The only two animals to which he gave the highest rank were the dog, for its faithfulness to man, and the butterfly, for its beauty: whilst science has moved on, his regularisation of "pup" or "pupa" for a young stage of either remains.
13. "Paradise" is of German origin, literally a "Parade aus Eis": this stemmed from early medieval Christian depictions of heaven and hell in which there were assumed to be continuities between them as opposite poles of the cosmology. Thus, since hell was assumed to be the hottest possible place so that sinners were burned, heaven was assumed to be the coldest place in creation, a cold made liveable by grace: to see God was to walk the Parade of Ice to heaven itself.
14. Using a carpet for flooring was originally something practiced in marsh and fenland villages of northern Europe, where old or broken fishing nets - literally, carp nets - would be piled on the floor to avoid some of the damp and risk of bare mud floors. Aristocrats from the fifteenth century onwards later referred to piling middle-eastern rugs in similar fashion as "carp-net" in reference, and the modern carpet was born.
15. In the north of England in the 19th century, tools were often loaned or lent to poorer workers, some of whom relied on these tool-loansmen to ply their trades. One part of this practice was that is the worker picked the same tool ten times running, the loansman would keep it reserved for them thereafter: liking a tool enough to give it its tenth use then became known as "tenth-use-ing", which is why we now "enthuse" about things we like.
16. Contrary to popular belief, "feeling down" doesn't refer to the direction, but to the soft feathers of baby birds. The phrase was originally "feeling downy", and implies that one is like a baby bird: limited in ability to interact with the world, and frowning all the time (a look that baby birds tend to have due to the "gape" skin structures on either side of the mouth that help the adults feed them).
17. To have "aspirations" comes from the asper, a medieval silver coin type especially used in the late Byzantine world of the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. Someone who wanted "to seek aspers" - that is, to go and find their fortune as a mercenary or trader in the wealth - was seen as implying a willingness to take high risks for potentially great rewards.
18. "Eyaaaa" used to be the standard English way to write a shout of pain or frustration. The modern, more familiar "Aaaagh", derives from British Imperial rule in India and "aag", the Hindi word for fire: it became widely known and popularised after a number of colonial administrators died due to failing to realise that locals were telling them about a fire that had started, which led subsequently to an increased awareness of the term among the colonisers.
19. One North African legend about the hoopoe, upupa epops, was that if you could get it to sit within a circle it would tell you who you were going to marry. People and especially young women thus brought loop-shaped perches to entice the birds and these "hoopoe rings" or "hoops" became a general term for larger ring-shaped loops of metal: the term was carried back to Europe both through trade and through an early 18th century Italian fashion trend for "hoop" earrings.
20. The gazebo tent, with openings on all sides, was originally set up as a way to allow ladies at some more risque and fashionable sixteenth century jousts to get a better view of the knights as they headed out to the lists, rather than just seeing them from the front whilst they fought - hence, a gaze-your-beau tent, and the modern gazebo was born.
Why not come up with your own ideas along these lines? Do comment good ones below, we’d love to see what you come up with. We hope these in some way amused you or poked some thoughts into being that might not have been there otherwise. Happy wordplaying!
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Posted on September 25, 2022, 01:55:10 PM by Jubal
Pasts and Playfulness: Protecting Fantasy from Fascism
Pasts and Playfulness: Protecting Fantasy from Fascism
By Jubal
It’s no great secret that the European and North American far right are very keen on the medieval period and medieval aesthetics. From DEUS VULT emblazoned on flags at the storming of the US Capitol last year, to anti-Islam imagery coming with , to ‘viking’ or ‘pagan’ masculine imagery being used to promote ‘traditional’ family structures, there are many permutations and combinations out there.
This far-right use of medievalism – the correct term for imagined-medieval aesthetics, not all of which come with true medieval pedigrees – comes along a number of lines which are often conflated. There’s crusade imagery, often appropriated within a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative that presents. There are also religious-traditionalist images, often part of narratives around the supposed high or elite culture of medieval polities that is seen as having in some way degenerated (the Byzantine History-Far Right links are often in this area). Then, somewhat in tension with the former images, there’s the sort of ‘grimdark enlightenment’ view that sees a gritty, violent, hyper-masculine and often implicitly or explicitly non-Christian northern European culture with rigidly enforced social roles as an actively good and aspirational outcome. It imagines a past in which individual masculine dignity and a counterpoint submissive, protected femininity are restored by a revival of strength and 'pagan' cultural elements.
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This is a complex area but the above outline will do – what I want to talk about in this article is how those of us engaging in creative pursuits that use medieval ideas and aesthetics can push back and undermine these people through our work. I’m axiomatically assuming that’s a good idea, and that part of it is in the work itself. We obviously can, and should, push back at a meta-level as well by rejecting these people’s claims: but I think it is also good when we can build wider and more interesting medieval worlds that are less simplistically easy for these people to hang their hats on. That both means not providing them with models of the past that chime so easily with the world they want to portray, and it means contesting their claims to aesthetics, imagery, and people as for example “White”, “Nordic”, or “Anglo-Saxon”, all terms that the far-right often use somewhat ahistorically and interchangeably to represent their ethnic and cultural ideals. These cross over both things that purport to represent history and fantasies that are justified by reference to that history – indeed, these things are actually a sliding scale in any creative work or representation.
In any case, I’m mostly going to focus on creative work here, more than about attempts at writing actual history: one can get sucked forever into the minutiae of why particular historical views held up by the right are muddled, wrong, and misread, and I don’t intend to wade into that in this piece. Instead, I’d rather focus on how we build medievalist ideas and aesthetics that are harder to appropriate and which help undermine far-right presentations of the medieval period in different ways.
I think one of the best ways to counter the sort of hyper white "Saxon" imaginary (examples shown in in the image screenshots here) is finding smart ways to play with it. Writers, artists, game developers etc can do a lot to shake and subvert far right claims on & about these imaginaries/aesthetics. We see even for pure fantasy settings many arguments about what is and isn't "realistic": really they're about what feels authentic, not about historical facts, though these relate to each other. But expanding that authenticity space to embrace more of human experience is vital. Essentially, we end up somewhat mentally trained to particular sets of expectations that certain things go together – and we should see those sets of things as arbitrary and malleable, they’re something that we as creators can and should actively work with.
Tales of medieval demon-fighting heroes need not be centred on Europe. British Library Add MS 5600.
Engaging with people and texts about places and mythos more widely is critical: whilst the European past was considerably more diverse than the desperate imaginaries of a racist minority, it’s also important to recognise that even in that period this was not a disconnected world and that portrayals of the period need not be confined to a region that was rather a backwater in terms of Eurasia at the time. Other people seeing themselves in the past is partly a matter of “hey that guy has a face shape and hair like mine” but it’s also importantly about people finding their stories and their families’ stories in the imaginaries we build. These things help build on one another, too: the stories and names and tropes that make the medieval less European-centred may make it more familiar to some people globally who the Whites-Only Middle Ages types want to exclude, but will also make it less familiar to those versed in the standard medieval and fantasy tropes of the Anglosphere. That unfamiliarity is good! It’s fun, it stops settings becoming moribund, and it arguably presents better a world that had a potential for unfamiliarity greater than our deeply information-connected present. When I write medieval fantasy tales and games a lot of my characters whose pseudo-cultures are not very European are the result of me reading some piece of mythos or medieval text or history book where I thought “you know what – that’s really cool”, and that mix of enthusiasm and authenticity tends to work well.
I think another route which also works with the idea of unfamiliarity is to play more creatively with how weird and playful imagined pasts can be. For example I run early medieval fantasy TTRPG games that often focus on getting players to explore concepts and ideas like guest-rights and their importance. This helps combat the simplistic far-right version of the hypermasculine middle ages, in that it erodes the ideas of masculine authority and strength at the expense of the highly developed social rules and norms that people grappled with in the period. Similarly, portraying vassalage and manorialism and their very real quirks can erode the idea that medieval countries were simple precursors to modern states with their “nations” already formed. Appreciating how political and ethnic identities might not connect as neatly in a world where allegiance is fundamentally to a person not a state makes it harder for people to then accept appeals to ‘national’ moments in the medieval period as directly connected to the struggles of modern countries. Right-wing societal “values” of insular opposition to travel and outsiders, absolutist relationships with religion, and nuclear man-centred households don’t make sense in a medieval world: a complex, human pseudo-past society that needs to talk through its problems doesn't let them take that space.
(As an aside, when talking historical games I often emphasise the "how" as well as "what", society & process as well as the aesthetic, and thus why code, quest design and narrative structure are useful to consider more. The above is one good reason why that massively matters).
"Remember what they took from you!" works a little less well as a caption for this picture.
British Library manuscipt, Royal 10 E IV f. 122.
A final thought on an idea that resonates overmuch in fiction: the connection of blood and soil. This is (perhaps especially in Europe) a very core part of white supremacist ideals, the idea that essentially peoples are inherently connected to places by blood and culture. It's important to actively pull this one up by the roots, but it still appears played-straight in far too much fantasy, especially with the wider fantasy focus on bloodlines and inheritance as a way of passing down various forms of magical power or bond (one of my least favourite parts of Haven & Hearth, a game I generally love, is the fact that the land claims in it are referred to as A Bond Of Blood And Soil).
I think for this we should engage explicitly with ideas of nature and home, what it means to choose a place and expanding spaces of belonging so their claim doesn't land. We can and should make worlds and fey and woods and hills that explicitly reject blood claims upon them. There are any number of ways that things can be fated, and medieval rules of magic are often explicitly bizarre – check out just about any geas in a piece of Irish literature, half of them are rules like “you must never have a drink under a full moon, never eat soup at the same house twice, and never dance when there are more than three dogs in the room” or similar. We don’t need to make things entirely random, either: there’s no reason why someone’s personal, individual connection to a place or site should be derived from blood rather than being a personal characteristic of that person.
I will note that I'm not saying every work has to do all these things, all at once, and I'm definitely not saying there should be some wide shared agenda for what fantasy and medievalism should look like. What I want here is to say exactly the opposite: that taking medievalism in different directions, both digging deeper into the complex humanity of medieval material and thinking explicitly about when and where we use and reject that material, breaks medievalism out of the box and keeps it growing in a way that both offers huge storytelling potential and less fertile ground for people who want to use these symbols for their extreme misinterpretations and ideas. Making it difficult for the far-right to put their roots into medieval ideas generally also creates the space for a lot of the current common tropes and symbols of medievalism to be part of our stories and imaginations without dominating them: a bigger, more human scope for medievalism is good for everyone.
I hope you’ve found this brief discussion interesting – please do feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on this complex and growing area in the comments. Building complex, exciting, messy and human fictional worlds is something where we can all learn from one another: it doesn’t have to mean trashing or abandoning the things we love about pseudo-medieval worlds, indeed it’s the continuation of the process by which they were made. Our love of the quirky, the small, the strange and the ancient – that which cannot be made to conform – has a power, and it’s one that those who want the world to fit into cruel, bland boxes should, very reasonably, fear.
Acknowledgements and thanks for this piece coming together should go to Kat Fox for coming up with the original screenshots, Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm for her discussion of them on Twitter, and to Thaheera Althaf for reading over this piece, extended from an original Twitter thread of mine, before publication..