A couple of interesting links:
The British Museum (with help from Microsoft, who did the digitization) has released over a million images from books of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries onto the internet. A few of the highlights are here.
With the end of the year coming up, a lot of people are posting their best-reads of the year list. Science fiction author Fran Wilde has an interesting one, here. Full disclosure: my co-author and I have a story on the list.
Or, cooking outside the present era, this time with a recipe from the 1400s:
Armored Turnips
Parboil the turnips. Drain.
Generously butter a baking dish.
Layer the turnips and the cheese in the baking dish, finishing up with a layer of cheese.
Cook at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until the cheese is bubbly, and serve it forth.
This is the simplest version of this dish, the way that I learned to cook it decades ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism. There are versions of it with sweet spices, and with savory ones, easily found on the internet (just Google “armored turnips”, and Bob’s your uncle), but this is the one that I know. The original version I learned was meant to serve about thirty people, and used five pounds of turnips and one of cheese; it scales upward to a hundred or so if you’ve got the kitchen and the cooking crew for it, and that many mouths to feed.
At least if he or she is working in the fields of the historical or fantastic:
And that’s just for starters. Not all research is done in books.
I’m back in town after a long weekend in Montreal (lovely city, and in fact closer to us than Boston); in lieu of anything more substantive, have a couple of amusing links:
Life Beyond Words, a blog post by Judy Tarr about equine perception and communication. Horses are one of the things aspiring fantasy and historical writers tend to get wrong. Reading all the posts on the horses tag on this blog would go a long way to remedying the matter.
And then there’s Shady Characters, a blog about the history of punctuation marks. It’s a book now, too, and most of the more recent posts are concerned with that, but you can dive into the archives for discussions of pilcrows and interrobangs and octothorpes.
Over at the blog Ex Urbe, there’s a long, chewy post (with pictures) about the historical development of the city of Rome from its first days as a cluster of huts on a hilltop by the Tiber.
Writers dealing with invented worlds (whether past or future), take note: This is how a real city grows up. Your invented cities need to have similar layers to them if you want them to feel real. (This is also, I suspect, why planned cities can have such a flattened feel to them. They haven’t had enough time in place yet to accumulate additional strata, so when you scratch the surface all you get is more surface.)
Even in the midst of fantastic (or historical, or science-fictional) adventures, your characters are going to have to stop sometimes for a bite to eat.
The late Diana Wynne Jones, in her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, speaks eloquently of the Stew that appears to be the only menu item available in so many of the realm’s inns and taverns. There’s a certain logic to the idea — if you’re going to be serving hot food at all hours of the day in pre-industrial conditions, a pot of something that can be kept at a low simmer over a slow fire makes a certain amount of sense. So does going in the opposite direction, with things that can be deep-fried or stir-fried in a hurry when they’re ordered, but it’s not often that you get a party of hungry treasure-seekers settling down at the local tavern for a plate of assorted fried stuff.
(Not chicken, though. Time was, when any chicken that made it to the dining table was likely to be a stewing hen, retired from the egg-producing game because of age and likely to be tough as an old boot unless given the slow-simmer Stew treatment. Fried chicken was a luxury, since it required the sacrifice of a young hen still in her egg-producing years. It’s only in the decades since the middle of the twentieth century that chicken has become cheap and mass-produced.)
But if your characters are going to sit down to a good bowl of Stew, take at least a minute or two to consider exactly what makes that particular stew different from another stew in another place and season.
If it’s a meat stew, what kind of meat is it? Beef, from a superannuated dairy cow? Beef, from cattle raised for meat? Was it purchased from a butcher shop — are they in a town that has a butcher shop, then? — or was the animal raised by the innkeeper and then slaughtered? Or are your characters travelling through wool-producing country, where the common meat is likely to be mutton or lamb? Or are they on the edge of the wilderness, where wild game is the commonest meat?
Are your characters traveling through a dairying region, where butter is the common cooking fat? Or are they in olive oil country? Or do the local cooks use chicken fat, or lard?
And what time of year is it? Is it winter? Before canning (a 19th-century innovation) and before reliable refrigeration (the 20th century), there were no out-of-season vegetables to put into those stews. Wintertime meals would feature the kind of root vegetables that could be kept in cool dark places until spring — turnips, hard squashes, yellow onions, potatoes — or vegetables that could be dried or salted or pickled (sauerkraut, kim chee, parched corn, dried beans.) Fresh greens wouldn’t show up again until the coming of spring.
Research — here I am, beating that drum again! — can help you keep your travelers’ tavern meals from becoming bland and generic.
Today’s entry in the “everything is grist for the writer’s mill” department: a decidedly NSFW illustrated article on a 1680 sex manual that even shocked Samuel Pepys. (But he read it anyway, the horndog.)
For the prurient or dedicated researcher — not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive — the article includes a link to the full version of the text as digitized on Google Books. Because you never can tell what you might need to know someday.
I’ve written before about the issue of buried or implied technology in language.
But there’s another technology-related question that writers–especially writers of created-world fantasy– need to be aware of: What is the general tech level of your story?
A lot of created-world fantasy takes place in a pre-industrial setting. (Steampunk is perhaps the most obvious exception, but only if you consider steampunk to be a species of fantasy rather than a species of science fiction — a question upon which opinion is divided.) “Pre-industrial”, though, covers a lot of ground. Do you mean pre-gunpowder? Pre-clockwork? Pre-mass production and interchangeable parts? Does your society have steam engines or water wheels? Spinning wheels or drop spindles? Is your hero’s sword steel or bronze? Is his armor plate or chain or boiled leather? Does he pay the swordsmith in barter or with coin? Does his banker know about letters of credit and double-entry book-keeping? Has banking even been invented yet?
You need to think about all of these things if you’re not going to have your story taking place in an ersatz-medieval RennFaire fantasyland — and you need to make certain that your tech levels match across the board.
(Yes. This means that you have to do research if you’re going to write fantasy. Books like The Timelines of History and television programs like the old BBC Connections series are a good place to start.)
Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.
It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway. Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”
You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it. These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.
(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)
Nevertheless, you have to try. Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.
For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.
Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.
A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life: contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes. For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.
(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine. Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)
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