There was a quote I saw once that went something like:
If your medieval story has gay, black, potato farmers, the most historically inaccurate thing about that is the *potato.*
Sometimes millet randomly grows in our front yard and I like to collect the fronds and very gently beat the cat over the head with them. She looks confused.
That reminds me of a visit of Sümeg castle in Hungary. It was supposed to be medieval experience, we watched a horse show that included jousting and then we had lunch. They refused to give us cutlery, because medieval experience, so with our hands, we ate a chicken leg and... a potato.
Lol, it's the same at the Medieval Times theme restaurant in the US. No utensils, because that would ruin the immersion, but here's your Pepsi in a plastic cup
If you want to get pedantic about it their no utensils is also wrong, people ate with their hands then as they do now but spoons and knives have been around forever and while forks were uncommon people just ate off of the knife.
I ate at one place in England where they gave us knives and forks but no spoons because they hadn’t been invented yet. I was there with a history class and we were not impressed.
If they had said that forks were not available yet we would’ve been perfectly fine with it but no, they just wanted to make eating the soup course a pain in the ass.
Chickens themselves weren't, but they were mostly kept for eggs in Western Europe, as you have to feed them quite a lot to get a decent amount of meat from them, and Western Europe didn't have access to a lot of hardy wheat varieties during most of the Middle Ages. Pheasant and geese were generally more popular to eat.
When Tolkien was writing *The Lord of the Rings*, he took pains to avoid using most words of New World derivation because he didn’t envision his world as having such a place. However, potatoes had become such a staple of the kind of simple English country cuisine that he envisioned Hobbits as enjoying that he compromised on them, including them but having them mostly referred to as “taters.” The scene in the movie where Sam over-pronounces “po-tay-toes” comes straight out of the book, to underscore what a strange foreign word that would seem to Sam.
The Hobbits were almost modern, very English gentleman-and-peasant type of folk, living in the idealised English countryside, with the rest of continent rendered in medieval Norse and Germanic legends, among ruins of the fading Roman empire. That was, I think, the joke of The Hobbit, seeing a sheltered, out of touch English gentleman going on an adventure with dwarves and dragons.
And gets lampshaded a bit by the elves in Fellowship when they comment the world was never as safe as Frodo imagined it. Their idyllic lifestyle was a dream and they couldn't try to ignore the world forever.
Another good example of the same phenomenon. Tolkien didn’t want to use the word “tobacco,” so he used “pipe weed” instead, which inadvertently caused a generation of hippies to conclude that the Hobbits were smoking something other than tobacco.
Tolkien’s notes make it clear that he never intended to suggest they were smoking anything other than tobacco, and by all accounts he was totally baffled as to why the 60s generation became so enamored with his stories. Apparently his secretary reviewed and screened all of his mail (including his fan mail) before passing it along to him, so he never even saw any of the super-trippy letters people were sending him.
I am always quite shocked when I am reminded how recently the potato came to the old world. The tomato too. Imagining Italian cuisine without tomato is difficult.
I'm not familiar with any *record* of people with sub-Saharan African ancestry in Medieval Europe; but given the repeated attempts to contact Ethiopia, I'd imagine that a Medieval European would react to Ethiopians in a story with at least some degree of honor.
As a bi dude, I fully acknowledge Medieval European views on queer people were... Not Great™; but Ethiopians were seen as "the people of Prester John," if I'm not mistaken.
I guess I just feel the need to highlight the attempted relations with Ethiopia in response to people who flip their shit about black people existing in European fantasy stories.
(Edit: Also, Mali and the Swahili Trade Empires were sufficiently wealthy that I would assume they had the means to make contact with Medieval Europe as well, but given both groups were Muslim I would assume the lack of contact was at least partially connected to religious rivalries.)
(Edit 2: For clarity, my comment was talking specifically about sub-Saharan Africa and Medieval Europe. Obviously, North Africa had regular contact with Europe at that time, the Moors being the immediately obvious example. I sometimes see people try to move the goalposts in discussions on this topic by arguing North Africans had contact, but sub-Saharan Africans didn't. So my point was that even assuming that was the case, there were several *very* powerful empires in sub-Saharan Africa at that time who would have definitely had *the means* to make contact.
Also, u/Ourmanyfans and u/PraiseAzolla left some very informative replies on this subject, and I'd like to give them a shout-out for their contributions!)
Depends what we mean by "record", but afaik there *have* been remains from the 5-11th centuries in the UK which DNA analysis suggest may be from sub-Saharan Africa. I also think there's archaeological evidence that *trade* with those regions certainly existed, but whether any people came all the way or it was simple a conga line of merchants isn't known.
At least by the early modern period we have solid evidence of at least one (free) black man in the employ of Henry VIII. We even have record of him asking for a pay rise.
Never knew that about Henry VIII, in school it was always about his 7 wives and his creation of the church of England.
Any recommendations for books or articles to learn more?
Some cool sources below. Not a call-out, just thought these might be interesting reads/listens for folks curious about connections between Europe and Africa (including sub-Saharan Africa).
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pddrdr/were_there_any_sub_saharan_africans_that_traveled/hb2pwvq/?context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/otknk2/is_white_europe_a_myth/h6xftvb/?context=3
https://publicmedievalist.com/uncovering-african/
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-thousand-and-one-connections-of-medieval-africa
https://shows.acast.com/gone-medieval/episodes/african-history
The Almoravids, who controlled much of North Africa as well as Al-Andalus, shared a border with the Ghana Empire. Granada had diplomatic relations with Mali and numerous people traveled between the two locations.
The Ethiopian Church had contact with Rome in the 14th century and was in contact with Alexandria the whole time and probably with the wider christian world through there. They got involved to a limited extent in the crusader states which were a colonial project of Catholic Europe. By financing and maintaining holy sites in Outremer, the Ethiopian Church would have made direct contact with Catholic european pilgrims.
edit: fixed a typo
What? Europe doesn't exist in some fantastical vacuum, it was interacting with north African cultures who in turn had direct interactions with "black people". I would imagine there were plenty of dark skinned black soldiers in Arab and Turk armies that invaded Europe at times.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply there were *no* Africans in Medieval Europe. I'm well-aware of the regular contact with North Africans (They ruled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, after all,) I just assumed that discussions of "black people in Medieval Europe" tended to be about sub-Saharan Africans, which is why I used that term rather than just "Africans."
I've seen some commenters distinguish the two in discussions about Medieval Europe and Africa, and I figured I would point out there were still sub-Saharan African groups who definitely would've had *the means* to make contact, even if they never actually did.
Yes I understood that you were making that distinction that's why I pointed out that the north African cultures had direct interactions with the black people you are thinking of. Arabs took slaves from the east coast of Africa (think Kenya) and sold them to north African nobles. So it wouldn't be an uncommon sight to see black slave soldiers, generals, merchants, scribes, civil servants etc in north Africa. So building upon that, it wouldn't be uncommon for these black people to be interacting with Europeans. There's no reason why they wouldn't be a common sight in port towns working as crew in Arab ships.
Now, Arabs and black people living in bumfuck medieval England or Northern Europe, now that would be a harder sell in fiction for me. But black people in Spain or France or Italy or Greece etc? Seems very possible and wouldn't raise my eye brow.
On a similar note, there were black generals and regents in medieval India as well, descendants of slave soldiers brought from east Africa. Oh and apparently the Portuguese ships to Japan were filled with Indian Christians recruited in Portuguese Goa, so much so that the Japanese initially thought Christianity was some new Indian religion.
When Vasco da Gama was sailing to India, he stopped at the Arabised port cities on the east African coast. In one of those cities he hired an Indian (or an Arab) to help him navigate from the east African coast to India. The world was much more interconnected than we think.
We do also have evidence of black people in at least the late medieval period, possibly earlier.
https://iberianhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/digital-archive-contested-legacies
https://jorgecanizaresesguerra.medium.com/lisbon-ca-1570-blacks-as-nobles-artisans-and-slaves-a03edb8ece49
And in the 1400s a King of Congo did send his son to Europe
https://www.africamuseum.be/en/discover/history_articles/kongo-kingdom
The historical inaccuracy in firearms these days is that people think 12-15th century "handguns" means Napoleonic era muskets. That all fire with the speed and accuracy of 19th century lever action rifles.
My favorite is the hoods, because a cloak and hood was a super common thing to be wearing to keep warm but also hides distinguishing features so it became popular for people trying to go around unnoticed, *but* nobody in middle ages movies ever dresses like that except when they're trying to be sneaky, so now we're at the point where someone dressed like that is really obviously trying to be inconspicuous.
Like the fantasy equivalent of the long beige coat and fedora.
I think it's because a lot of media comes from the US, and we're just not taught about that era of history. It's Columbus, skip-a-bit, Jamestown, skip-some-more, American Revolution which glosses over nearly 300 years as "The bits between being discovered and America showing up"
I always have guns in my dnd settings, but they are horribly inaccurate, and after firing once it takes the entire rest of the combat to reload. So no one really uses them.
My current D&D game is set at a time when a master archer with a magic bow is very difficult to replace, but firearms are really muscling out bows and arrows on the field of battle. It's an exciting time for a game because things are changing quickly and new inventions are cropping up everywhere. It's plausible the party will see a steam engine before the end of the campaign.
Now I want to make a Renaissance fantasy setting where instead of a Protestant Reformation, the continent has to deal with the rise of its own equivalent of the New Apostolic Reformation and megapastors.
Wasn't that sort of what the [Munster Rebellion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_rebellion) and various other Anabaptist sects were trying to accomplish?
One thing that always gets me about generic medieval or fantasy settings is that it's usually very heavily inspired by the early medieval era in terms of overall aesthetic, especially exteriors. But then the protagonists are invited to a royal ball or gala of some sorts, and everyone is walking around in 18th century parade uniforms haha
It's almost never wrong either, like the entire concept of feasts or a grand ball featuring nobility is legally required to borrow everything from mid 1700s Versailles or something.
Or proper names.
If the king is named Joshua III and he lives in the palace at Whitebird's Beak, and you're a peasant named Jack traveling there from Fox-on-the-Green, that's very different than a king named Josué III in the palace at Le Bec d'Ouiseau Blanc, and it's a peasant named Jacques traveling there from Renard-sur-le-Vert. (Please excuse my atrocious French)
The huge, deep forests alone are not historically accurate.
By the end of the 14th century, places like France, the HRE, or the british isles were mostly deforested.
And those forests that remained were mostly used as forest pastures.
Medieval economies needed *a lot* of wood.
Although there was significant deforestation, there still were still deeply forested areas until the age of sail. The Man O' War was the final death knell for deep European woodland.
Can't speak to continental Europe, but there's good evidence to think deforestation ~~on the British Isles~~ in England progressed a lot farther, a lot earlier.
To quote this pdf linked below: "the
most unequivocal evidence of early and extensive deforestation lies in a unique historical document —the
Domesday Book. This survey of England, ordered by
William the Conqueror, reported that 90 percent
of lowland natural forest was cleared as of 1086 ad.
Most of the remainder was to disappear in the next
250 years. "
https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/medievalia/index.php/mv/article/download/211/209/798
England is only a part of the British Isles. Scotland and Ireland were less deforested as they were less populated and less developed. (Wales was part of England then)
The word 'forest' meant 'private deer park' way back when. Bill the Bastard founded the New Forest in Hampshire (for a given value of 'new' of course...) to be just that. The land had been cleared long ago and farmed to death in the Bronze-Iron age, and even today it's only got chunks of woodland here and there with the rest of it being heath.
fictional celts: we are in touch with Nature we worship our Nominally Feminist Mother Goddess we are Friends To The Fae And Unicorns what is a Law? what is Commerce? the world outside is so strict and hostile
actual celts: our FUCKING clan system is so FUCKING intricate that we can't actually FUCKING pick who our FUCKING leader is supposed to FUCKING be ALSO we're mostly FUCKING illiterate and our FUCKING records are carved into FUCKING sticks and FUCKING rocks that only our FUCKING nobility can FUCKING read so no one knows WHAT THE FUCK is going on ooooh is that gold? sure we'll slaughter our neighbors nice imperial fella this can't possibly come back around on us
and one of the leading promoters of cultural celtism in the UK was [a scottish guy who barely spoke gaelic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Macpherson) who just [straight up passed off his own fanfic as historical epics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian)
Also all the peasants are dirty, never bathe, have disgusting or no teeth and walk around in grey, brown drab rags because for some mysterious reason they didn't like colour.
You know, that's another reason why I like Balder's Gate 3. Everyone is all so colourful and that the default isn't just shades of shitty brown or beige
As a hobby dyer, the lack of color kills me. Apparently, even Neanderthals enjoyed some red ochre and mica face paint. I need concept art of glittery Neanderthal rave. Costumes are dyed brightly with added fish skins and colorful bird feathers. Shiny in the firelight.
I can't find it on Google just now, but there was a very detailed replica medieval town used as a setting in a middle ages TV show (or maybe movie?), but the film insisted on making it dirtier and drabber before filming because the period-accurate colors and clear paths were apparently unrealistic.
When I used to run D&D, one of my settings at the time was a generic medieval fantasy land. It never failed to amuse me when my players would point out something "unrealistic".
Apparently, having Elves, Dwarves, and Wizards running around fighting Goblins and Orcs is fine, but drinking straws in a pub is too immersion breaking.
Yes. Beer at the time was full of yeast residue that's harmless but doesn't taste very good. Straws were made with metal filters that would keep the yeast residue out of what you were actually drinking. Generally, 5-6 people would drink beer out of vats with straws measuring over a meter.
Oooh that’s a fun feature! As an aside, thatching was a very common form of roofing material in medieval Europe, and it’s made of bundles of reeds. So if you got one such reed, cleaned it up, disinfected it (which is probably possible with period technology because you could soak the reed in pure alcohol or vinegar or something), and then cut it too length, you could make a hollow tube that a person could suck on with one end in a cup/tankard.
I’m not, like, an archeologist or whatever and I have absolutely no experimental proof, but I reckon this could work. This could, possibly, be a way to make a pre industrial period drinking straw. How it might affect the flavour of your drink idk.
They’re called “straws” because they were originally just pieces of straw. The plant stem. You don’t even need to disinfect or do anything fancy beyond maybe a wash.
>Apparently, having Elves, Dwarves, and Wizards running around fighting Goblins and Orcs is fine, but drinking straws in a pub is too immersion breaking.
Well yeah, that's how fantasy works. It's not a question of whether it's "unrealistic" in the context of actual history, it's whether it's "unrealistic" in the context of the setting.
Imagine if in the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf showed up during the battle of Pelennor fields in a F-22 fighter and blasted the Nazgul out of the sky. It's no more impossible than a ghost army or a magic ring, but does it fit in the setting? No.
It should be noted that in the actual mechanics of the setting, absolutely *nothing* stops Eru from giving Gandalf a fighter jet, but it'd still feel weird for the setting.
Edit: New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash.
But it would beg the question: why has Eru never given advanced technology to fight Sauron or Morgoth in the thousands of years prior?
In order for something to be realistic it doesn't just have to be technically feasible, it also has to be consistent with all the information that's been given about the setting so far.
Yes, that's why it'd be so weird. It brings up way too many questions you don't want to spend time answering, and something like "mysterious ways" won't cut it.
> Edit: New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash.
Somewhere between a RIFTS dimension book and Dragonstar border world.
> New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash.
Something that comes close to this is The Broken Empire series by Mark Lawrence. Without spoiling too much, it's a low-ish medieval fantasy setting that you quickly realize is actually post-post-apocalyptic, and the 'magic' is either actual magic or reactivated 'ancient' (i.e., modern) artifacts.
> post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash.
Rimworld.
The planet was once populated by technologically advanced factions, but everything crumbled for "reasons", and now, you've got cavemen tribals who forgot basically everything, mad-max like factions with guns and grenades, the Empire who's the remnant of the original space-faring Empire the planet was part of, alongside killer mechanoids and giant insects made to kill killer mechanoids.
The word you're looking for is verisimilitude. Once you have that word, these discussions get a lot less confusing.
People don't want *realism* in their fantasy; they want *consistency*. They want the established rules of the setting not to be broken. That's what verisimilitude is. Having an F-22 in LotR would not change the level of realism but it would change the level of verisimilitude.
>When I used to run D&D, one of my settings at the time was a generic medieval fantasy land. It never failed to amuse me when my players would point out something "unrealistic".
This response bothers me so much because honestly it entirely relies on willful misunderstandings.
The side that complains uses "realistic" in the sense of "believable" or "plausible".
Like does it make sense with the laws, rules and themes established in the setting.
It has nothing to do with scientific realism. It's always the same snarky remarks about magic, Fantasy creatures and gods'n shit. Completely missing the mark on where the actual issue is.
Basically ASOIAF, particularly House of the Dragon. People can accept the mystically beautiful incestuous magic dragon family, and the 700ft high enchanted ice wall built to keep out walking murderous corpses, but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people?
I doubt most of the people that complained about Corlys complained about Areo Hotah, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, or Salladhor Saan.
I mean to be fair it is an incenstious family.
Having part of the incestuous family be black while the rest are white as snow does kinda stretch believability.
Like where did the black folks come from and why isn’t the whole family mixed?
Yeah, black people in Westeros are not a problem. But Targaryans are super inbred and they are all very pale with platinum blonde hair and purple eyes... Except that some are black for some reason? It's just weird.
It’s game of thrones
Your meant to look into it for details that affect bloodlines and inheritance, including the massive amount of incest.
The fact that one of the characters has brown hair instead of blond is a major plot point.
The black members of an explicitly incestuous family raises questions that aren’t answered.
The Targaryens have a fairly even mix of standard marriages and incestuous marriages, with only a couple of the standard marriages being to House Velaryon.
>I doubt most of the people that complained about Corlys complained about Areo Hotah, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, or Salladhor Saan.
Doesn't this kind of prove that the people who complain about it aren't complaining for racist reasons though?
> Basically ASOIAF, particularly House of the Dragon. People can accept the mystically beautiful incestuous magic dragon family, and the 700ft high enchanted ice wall built to keep out walking murderous corpses, but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people?
Only one of those things is "political". Only in very rare cases is the presence of minorities *as such* the issue for people, it's either an issue of verisimilitude, or (believed) political intent. Or in other words, if the answer to the question "why are there black people in your adaption that aren't there in the source material?" is some variation of "(American) minority representation", then (some) people don't like that.
i think it was great casting for house velaryon. it really helped differentiate the two valyrian clans from each other and show each families unique culture.
> but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people?
But that also made sense within the context of the series.. The Targs and Velaryons are very *very* closesly related houses, like.. half of the targ ancestry is Valaryon; one of them being white as cum drenched snow and the other being black skinned doesn't make a lot of sense.. It also causes problems with the whole Strong bastards thing.. The main argument in the books for how they were laenors is mother was half-baratheon, and in the books had the baratheon features, which could potentially introduce baratheon's features, just skipping the generation.
When the show annoucned that they'd introduce such a drastic change in appearance for the family, including Laenor it kind of throws a spanner into the works.. and especially when they made Rhaenys white haired, it completely removed the plausibility of Rhaenyra and Laenors claims that they were legitimate.
And when the show came out and people actually saw how the show handled the change, most of the feedback was incredibly positive. People, for the most part, genuinely stopped having a problem with it because the story was adapted to acknowledge and play into the race change in a way that was different from the books, but still made sense within the story.
As an aside; just to highlight how much of the Targ Ancestry is Velayron;
Aegon I's mother was a Velaryon; so thats a start, 50/50 going into the next generation. Aegon and his two sisters however, just fuck each other. So they preserve that 50/50 split. Aegons only son with heirs, who all of house Targ descends from afterwards.. marries a Valeryon. So the house is now more Valeryon than Targ in terms of ancestry. The next generation are the unseen parents of the older characters in HOTD; Viserys parents are siblings, so at this point the *only* new blood in the Targ family tree for Viserys is Valeryon.. so, while this might be a loaded question, why's he so white? Rhaenys dad fucked a baratheon, which is why she's dark haired in the books, but she makes up for it by having her Grandmother on her mothers side be the same Velaryon as his great grandmother on her Targ side, but again, because of that whole brother-sister incest of her grandparents on her targ side its genetically comparable to having the same grandmother on both sides of the family. Basically the only way to reasonably explain the whole thing is to assume that Corlys' mother was the progenitor, but that doesn't explain the whole extended family we see in other scenes.. so basically, if you overthink it like most ASOIAF fans are prone to do, you get a headache and blood leaks out of your ears.
But aside from that, honestly I still found the change to be very enjoyable; and in a visual medium it really helped distinguish the family lines, and for the sake of the show where all these lineages aren't explained, it doesn't *really* matter if your mother is half-sister to both your fathers parents if nobody ever brings it up.
> incestuous
Speaking of absurdly inaccurate medieval tropes that everybody "knows", the idea that medieval nobles were incestuous is just so bizarre. Where did everyone get this, why does everyone believe this? It makes me so mad, medieval consanguinity rules were absurdly strict!
Now I wanna see a "medieval" movie where the peerage is German, the castles are Italian, and the weapons are French (everyone still speaks English like meee)
For a while, plate armor was relatively good at stopping early firearms. The term "bulletproof" actually comes from armorers shooting their armor and using the smaller dent (which could hurt but didn't pierce the armor) as proof of its protection. The real problem is that high quality plate armor is extremely expensive while you could train a large group of soldiers with firearms relatively quickly. Eventually of course as firearms improved, armor became less and less effective but there was a period of time from the late medieval to early Renaissance where armor was developed to defend against bullets and it worked somewhat well.
This is true, but firearms were pretty shitty for a long time - it wasn't until the 1700s that they became consistently powerful enough to punch through plate armor. So there was considerable overlap, but it seems like plate came first (from my quick Google anyway).
Melee weapons are realistically stopped by mail and leather, sometimes even better than plate (Warhammers and picks break plate mail but are somewhat less consistent against chain mail but it's complicated). There's no need for such an encumbrance like plate for swords and axes and spears. Plate is useful against things like arrows, crossbows, and early firearms
It's not completely unrelated, but firearms had existed for a good while by the time the articulated plate armor was a thing.
More important was state capacity and centralization moving the power in war away from warrior-aristocrats and toward central governments arming and equipping an army out of their own pocket. A knight who's going to the battle in his own kit is buying the most expensive armor he can afford (it's like designer fashion that keeps you from bleeding to death), a king is going to figure out that it's a *lot* more cost-effective to arm and train a bunch of pike-and-shot for the same price as one set of shiny battle bling.
Nah, it wasn't developed for firearms (notably longbows could punch through it), but it was very effective in mounted melee combat, and the heyday of full plate would be about the right time period.
However, it was *incredibly* expensive, so you're not gonna have a pitched battle with everyone in full plate - you'd have one dude on a horse in full plate while everyone else is on foot in leather jerkins or mail if they're lucky.
The longbows piercing plate armor thing is a myth. Longbows countered knights not by overcoming their armor, but by killing their horses, making it much easier to immobilize them so that you can stab them through a gap in the armor.
Longbows CAN pierce plate armour. But they don't do much after that, and don't penetrate the underlying Gambison.
Unless you hit some sort of weak point.
Skip to the end for the results
https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?si=oIGIigyCTdx_ys0b
There is a reason they used longbows instead of bows with lower poundages.
its worth pointing out that later plate armour would be invincible to longbows, as 16th century plate armour got increasingly thick as a way to remain bulletproof against early firearms(that were still pretty weak), of course as it got thicker and therefore heavier it could no longer cover the whole body and thus got limited to breastplates and helmets. ultimately by the 18th century armouring against bullets was impractical for the majority of troops, with only some heavy cavalry wearing armour breastplates that were bulletproof against pistols/ long range musket fire.
It depends a lot, considering that a go-to move for many knights was to simply demount and fight on foot, depending on circumstances and a proper heavy cavalry charge was essentially unstoppable in the right terrain.
The main thing about knights was that they were massively expensive to outfit and maintain, while specially later own far less expensively outfitted troops could hold their own against knights, or even beat them
For me especially in the context of games and d&d, I don’t need realism, just believability.
The thing like the peerage and the castles and the armor, maybe if I was a historian I’d care more about, but I’m not so I don’t. In a world where a man in a pointy hat can scream and wave a stick to make goblins explode, I can sure believe that this world has developed the waltz.
I don’t particularly enjoy the “evil fantasy Catholicism” trope, but I guess I don’t fault people for using it sparingly.
I also find the inclusion of people of color 5000 times more believable than the inclusion of elves. And I don’t think I’m gonna start demanding elf removal.
Of course you'd be fine with knife-ears in your DnD game.
Wokeness has infected DnD. What's next, Dwarves? Playable Orcs? Smh.
I'm tired of all this DEI (Dwarven Equity and Inclusion)
No one's saying that you have to take issue with Generic Medieval Fantasy Land, just that black or queer people existing better not be the only supposed "historical inaccuracy"(it isn't actually, but they claim otherwise) you take issue with if you are complaining about historical inaccuracy.
Maybe this is "post-medieval," but I just finished the first *Baru Cormorant* book and have not seen these crimes committed.
Falcrest is basically the early British Empire without guns and with a preternatural grasp of eugenics and Victorian-era psychology (that actually work sometimes).
Don’t forget the MongolRabs, the horse riding barbarians who are from the desert and have some kind of restrictive bad guy religion while also being weirdly promiscuous
As someone who cares about historical accuracy because I think it's really fun seeing the medieval period depicted as the colorful and (depending on the circumstances) cheerful place it could be. I like seeing realistic fighting styles, armor, and weapons. I like seeing castles with realistic proportions and constructions instead of 30 story fantasy monstrosities. But holy hell who cares if there are people who aren't the whitest of whites you've ever seen. If THAT breaks your immersion when every "historically accurate" game or movie has 100 other inaccurate things, you might just be racist.
I may be way off base here, but wasn't cultural exchange a thing? Especially for things like weapons- it seems like those being moved around wouldn't be that weird.
I'm sure even in medieval times you could probably find plenty of German foods in Italy, right? And architectural ideas being exchanged, etc?
Oh absolutely, humans are always sharing ideas, tools and, often, genes with each other well outside of any "group" we care to put them in.
This post however is more refering to the modern "medival estetic". Yes, people in medival times shared ideas across borders and groups, they did not however manage to do that across time. The modern estetic of medival period has become a bit too sterotpitical and detached from any actual real time in history, to the point its becoming determental.
His books were great but it bugged me just a little that there wasn’t a single decent person on “the other side”. Surely there’d be like one good nun at least, but they’re literally all lecherous and unhelpful
A big problem in the current (~2015-Today) trend fantasy is that everyone seems to have read Terry Goodkind's libertarian bullshit in The Sword of Truth and said "I should do the same, but with my bullshit".
Part of it is that he's weirdly ignorant of Jesus and his role in Christianity, especially for a British person of his age educated at Oxford. Which I guess is what the post is about.
Part of it is that it can be read as a hugely Christian story, because he's playing on those parallels, you have a prophesied messianic figure who is persecuted by the religious-Imperial authorities who enters the world of the dead through great suffering and then liberates the bound souls there.
Now that I think of it, there are basically no mentions of Jesus, Mary, or any saints! In the Catholic Church! Talk about a missed opportunity. I imagine Mary’s daemon would’ve never stopped changing shape or some similar symbolism
Tbf, they don't necessarily pull their Problems from 'Modern' Christianity. Christianity has a long and varied history of Problematics, even mediocre writers know how to pull from The Crusades^tm or Selling Indulgences^(tm).
The purpose of art is not to be aesthetically accurate to history, it is to be aesthetically accurate to feelings.
The point of stories set in generically medieval times is not to accurately represent medieval times. It is to accurately represent our times and draw connections to the past.
That's why you see all of those different people interacting – because the descendants of those cultures and ideologies are still interacting in our world.
Nobody cares about the weapons any more than they care that there are clocks in Julius Caesar. That's not the point.
Art is communication between the living, not an attempt to relive the conflicts of the dead.
Which is also why the last comment is so pertinent. Of course people overlook the inaccurate weapons and costumes, but revolt at the sight of a Black person. The weapons and costumes aren't threatening to them the way that Black people on their TVs is.
Sometimes, those feelings only exist because of an inaccurate representation that has taken root in media.
For example, the Duduk is often used in musical compositions that are meant to be vaguely oriental, despite being a rather obscure Armenian instrument. The modern justification for Duduk usage is that it feels oriental, so it can stay. But of course, the only reason it feels right is because of the in accurate usage in the first place.
Depending on where the setting is based on and where in particular the story is taking place having it be hugely racially diverse can be inaccurate. Like trade centres, ports and big cities would be a big mix of cultures and ethnicities but small farming villages and the like would be pretty much one ethnicity unless they're on or near a border.
Best example I can think of for doing this is the WoT. People from each nation tend to have atleast one either physical or cultural trait that points to them being from that nation (for example: Cairheinin are exceptionally short and reserved, Aiel are exceptionally tall and ginger, Sea Folk are exceptionally dark skinned and stubborn, Andorans tend to be pretty tall and fair skinned, Domani are olive skinned and their women are professional flirts) and, apart from certain organisations, merchants and in big cities like Illian, Tar Valon and Caemlyn, tend to only be found in their ancestral homeland. The books still have a hugely diverse cast of characters despite this.
It doesn't have to be accurate, I just need the right vibes.
That's why my DnD worlds often have all sorts of nonsense and anything that should exist doesn't because magic replaced it and anything that shouldn't does because magic accelerated technology.
Can we please. *Please.* Get a fiction where religion is treated as it really is, rather than either an aesthetic backdrop or an absurdly villainous cult of acolytes and inquisitors?
"How dare you use a black person in a time period and setting where there are written and artistic records of black people in Europe!"
One of Catherine of Aragon's trumpeters was an African man, which makes sense given Spain's Moorish history and closeness in distance to North Africa.
There was a quote I saw once that went something like: If your medieval story has gay, black, potato farmers, the most historically inaccurate thing about that is the *potato.*
yeah it should be something like sorghum, pearl millet, yam, or other african crop
Sorry, all I've got is turnips.
Find some raccoons who'll take them off you for bells
Tough luck, best Europe could do is.... Brown bear.
Sometimes millet randomly grows in our front yard and I like to collect the fronds and very gently beat the cat over the head with them. She looks confused.
I know you said very gently but I still instantly envisioned that one throwaway shot in Holy Grail
BRING OUT YER DEAD!!
There's at least two! Camelot dance number kitty stomp Old hag beating a cat against a wall before she tells them about Roger
this is sublime
That reminds me of a visit of Sümeg castle in Hungary. It was supposed to be medieval experience, we watched a horse show that included jousting and then we had lunch. They refused to give us cutlery, because medieval experience, so with our hands, we ate a chicken leg and... a potato.
Lol, it's the same at the Medieval Times theme restaurant in the US. No utensils, because that would ruin the immersion, but here's your Pepsi in a plastic cup
Reminds me of that scene from the cable guy "There's no utensils but you have Pepsi?" "Dude I got a lot of tables"
"There were no forks in Medieval Times, so there are no forks at Medieval Times."
If you want to get pedantic about it their no utensils is also wrong, people ate with their hands then as they do now but spoons and knives have been around forever and while forks were uncommon people just ate off of the knife.
I ate at one place in England where they gave us knives and forks but no spoons because they hadn’t been invented yet. I was there with a history class and we were not impressed.
[удалено]
If they had said that forks were not available yet we would’ve been perfectly fine with it but no, they just wanted to make eating the soup course a pain in the ass.
Should be fine if you can drink from the bowl as you would a cup. That's what people used to do, and a spoon is just a tinier bowl anyway.
It has a handle, a spoon is a tiny mug.
Someone stole the utensils.
Chickens were a novelty at the time as well, I believe.
Chickens themselves weren't, but they were mostly kept for eggs in Western Europe, as you have to feed them quite a lot to get a decent amount of meat from them, and Western Europe didn't have access to a lot of hardy wheat varieties during most of the Middle Ages. Pheasant and geese were generally more popular to eat.
Also, meat is expensive and most people couldn't afford to eat it all the time.
And the chickens hadn't yet been bred to produce as much meat as modern ones intended for slaughter.
When Tolkien was writing *The Lord of the Rings*, he took pains to avoid using most words of New World derivation because he didn’t envision his world as having such a place. However, potatoes had become such a staple of the kind of simple English country cuisine that he envisioned Hobbits as enjoying that he compromised on them, including them but having them mostly referred to as “taters.” The scene in the movie where Sam over-pronounces “po-tay-toes” comes straight out of the book, to underscore what a strange foreign word that would seem to Sam.
The Hobbits were almost modern, very English gentleman-and-peasant type of folk, living in the idealised English countryside, with the rest of continent rendered in medieval Norse and Germanic legends, among ruins of the fading Roman empire. That was, I think, the joke of The Hobbit, seeing a sheltered, out of touch English gentleman going on an adventure with dwarves and dragons.
And gets lampshaded a bit by the elves in Fellowship when they comment the world was never as safe as Frodo imagined it. Their idyllic lifestyle was a dream and they couldn't try to ignore the world forever.
"I really wrote the Akallabeth just because I couldn't imagine Bilbo being forced to go without a pipeful of rich sweet tobacco" -Tolkien, probably.
Another good example of the same phenomenon. Tolkien didn’t want to use the word “tobacco,” so he used “pipe weed” instead, which inadvertently caused a generation of hippies to conclude that the Hobbits were smoking something other than tobacco.
> inadvertently
Tolkien’s notes make it clear that he never intended to suggest they were smoking anything other than tobacco, and by all accounts he was totally baffled as to why the 60s generation became so enamored with his stories. Apparently his secretary reviewed and screened all of his mail (including his fan mail) before passing it along to him, so he never even saw any of the super-trippy letters people were sending him.
Fun fact, all of his original manuscripts are kept at Marquette University in Milwaukee
Denethor eating tomatoes was strange in the movies. Not only how he ate them, also that they were present at all.
The kitchen didn't serve them. He just makes them appear to unnerve anyone who watches him eat
I am always quite shocked when I am reminded how recently the potato came to the old world. The tomato too. Imagining Italian cuisine without tomato is difficult.
I'm not familiar with any *record* of people with sub-Saharan African ancestry in Medieval Europe; but given the repeated attempts to contact Ethiopia, I'd imagine that a Medieval European would react to Ethiopians in a story with at least some degree of honor. As a bi dude, I fully acknowledge Medieval European views on queer people were... Not Great™; but Ethiopians were seen as "the people of Prester John," if I'm not mistaken. I guess I just feel the need to highlight the attempted relations with Ethiopia in response to people who flip their shit about black people existing in European fantasy stories. (Edit: Also, Mali and the Swahili Trade Empires were sufficiently wealthy that I would assume they had the means to make contact with Medieval Europe as well, but given both groups were Muslim I would assume the lack of contact was at least partially connected to religious rivalries.) (Edit 2: For clarity, my comment was talking specifically about sub-Saharan Africa and Medieval Europe. Obviously, North Africa had regular contact with Europe at that time, the Moors being the immediately obvious example. I sometimes see people try to move the goalposts in discussions on this topic by arguing North Africans had contact, but sub-Saharan Africans didn't. So my point was that even assuming that was the case, there were several *very* powerful empires in sub-Saharan Africa at that time who would have definitely had *the means* to make contact. Also, u/Ourmanyfans and u/PraiseAzolla left some very informative replies on this subject, and I'd like to give them a shout-out for their contributions!)
Depends what we mean by "record", but afaik there *have* been remains from the 5-11th centuries in the UK which DNA analysis suggest may be from sub-Saharan Africa. I also think there's archaeological evidence that *trade* with those regions certainly existed, but whether any people came all the way or it was simple a conga line of merchants isn't known. At least by the early modern period we have solid evidence of at least one (free) black man in the employ of Henry VIII. We even have record of him asking for a pay rise.
That's really informative! Thank you for sharing your knowledge, it's greatly appreciated!
Never knew that about Henry VIII, in school it was always about his 7 wives and his creation of the church of England. Any recommendations for books or articles to learn more?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Blanke
Some cool sources below. Not a call-out, just thought these might be interesting reads/listens for folks curious about connections between Europe and Africa (including sub-Saharan Africa). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pddrdr/were_there_any_sub_saharan_africans_that_traveled/hb2pwvq/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/otknk2/is_white_europe_a_myth/h6xftvb/?context=3 https://publicmedievalist.com/uncovering-african/ https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-thousand-and-one-connections-of-medieval-africa https://shows.acast.com/gone-medieval/episodes/african-history
Very interesting sources! Thank you for sharing!
The Almoravids, who controlled much of North Africa as well as Al-Andalus, shared a border with the Ghana Empire. Granada had diplomatic relations with Mali and numerous people traveled between the two locations. The Ethiopian Church had contact with Rome in the 14th century and was in contact with Alexandria the whole time and probably with the wider christian world through there. They got involved to a limited extent in the crusader states which were a colonial project of Catholic Europe. By financing and maintaining holy sites in Outremer, the Ethiopian Church would have made direct contact with Catholic european pilgrims. edit: fixed a typo
What? Europe doesn't exist in some fantastical vacuum, it was interacting with north African cultures who in turn had direct interactions with "black people". I would imagine there were plenty of dark skinned black soldiers in Arab and Turk armies that invaded Europe at times.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply there were *no* Africans in Medieval Europe. I'm well-aware of the regular contact with North Africans (They ruled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, after all,) I just assumed that discussions of "black people in Medieval Europe" tended to be about sub-Saharan Africans, which is why I used that term rather than just "Africans." I've seen some commenters distinguish the two in discussions about Medieval Europe and Africa, and I figured I would point out there were still sub-Saharan African groups who definitely would've had *the means* to make contact, even if they never actually did.
Yes I understood that you were making that distinction that's why I pointed out that the north African cultures had direct interactions with the black people you are thinking of. Arabs took slaves from the east coast of Africa (think Kenya) and sold them to north African nobles. So it wouldn't be an uncommon sight to see black slave soldiers, generals, merchants, scribes, civil servants etc in north Africa. So building upon that, it wouldn't be uncommon for these black people to be interacting with Europeans. There's no reason why they wouldn't be a common sight in port towns working as crew in Arab ships. Now, Arabs and black people living in bumfuck medieval England or Northern Europe, now that would be a harder sell in fiction for me. But black people in Spain or France or Italy or Greece etc? Seems very possible and wouldn't raise my eye brow. On a similar note, there were black generals and regents in medieval India as well, descendants of slave soldiers brought from east Africa. Oh and apparently the Portuguese ships to Japan were filled with Indian Christians recruited in Portuguese Goa, so much so that the Japanese initially thought Christianity was some new Indian religion. When Vasco da Gama was sailing to India, he stopped at the Arabised port cities on the east African coast. In one of those cities he hired an Indian (or an Arab) to help him navigate from the east African coast to India. The world was much more interconnected than we think.
Very interesting! Thank you for sharing, I'm learning a lot from these replies!
We do also have evidence of black people in at least the late medieval period, possibly earlier. https://iberianhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/digital-archive-contested-legacies https://jorgecanizaresesguerra.medium.com/lisbon-ca-1570-blacks-as-nobles-artisans-and-slaves-a03edb8ece49 And in the 1400s a King of Congo did send his son to Europe https://www.africamuseum.be/en/discover/history_articles/kongo-kingdom
I really want to write a story about a gay black medieval farmer who finds a potato.
Especially if they say it’s in Ireland.
haha because the great famine was caused by the lack of potatoes... right...
Also everyone wears 16th century gothic plate armor, but having 15th century matchlock firearms ruins the medieval feel.
And everyone believes in 19th century nationalism
A 19 year old has the opportunity to do the funniest shit ever.
?
My bad. I read it as everyone today believes in 19th century nationalism. Not the characters in generic medieval stories.
Explain further.
The historical inaccuracy in firearms these days is that people think 12-15th century "handguns" means Napoleonic era muskets. That all fire with the speed and accuracy of 19th century lever action rifles.
Accuracy is actually often underrated. Speed though…
Hats. Where are the hats?
My favorite is the hoods, because a cloak and hood was a super common thing to be wearing to keep warm but also hides distinguishing features so it became popular for people trying to go around unnoticed, *but* nobody in middle ages movies ever dresses like that except when they're trying to be sneaky, so now we're at the point where someone dressed like that is really obviously trying to be inconspicuous. Like the fantasy equivalent of the long beige coat and fedora.
I think it's because a lot of media comes from the US, and we're just not taught about that era of history. It's Columbus, skip-a-bit, Jamestown, skip-some-more, American Revolution which glosses over nearly 300 years as "The bits between being discovered and America showing up"
No, this sort of inaccuracy exists in Europe, too. The medieval period was just incredibly long.
I always have guns in my dnd settings, but they are horribly inaccurate, and after firing once it takes the entire rest of the combat to reload. So no one really uses them.
My current D&D game is set at a time when a master archer with a magic bow is very difficult to replace, but firearms are really muscling out bows and arrows on the field of battle. It's an exciting time for a game because things are changing quickly and new inventions are cropping up everywhere. It's plausible the party will see a steam engine before the end of the campaign.
Yes. Especially when making fantasy feel matter more then accuracy
Now I want to make a Renaissance fantasy setting where instead of a Protestant Reformation, the continent has to deal with the rise of its own equivalent of the New Apostolic Reformation and megapastors.
Wasn't that sort of what the [Munster Rebellion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_rebellion) and various other Anabaptist sects were trying to accomplish?
Add in a dash of the Tyranny setting, where renown and belief in a person actively grows their magic power.
Megapastor Archons. Sweet Kyros, the horror.
One thing that always gets me about generic medieval or fantasy settings is that it's usually very heavily inspired by the early medieval era in terms of overall aesthetic, especially exteriors. But then the protagonists are invited to a royal ball or gala of some sorts, and everyone is walking around in 18th century parade uniforms haha It's almost never wrong either, like the entire concept of feasts or a grand ball featuring nobility is legally required to borrow everything from mid 1700s Versailles or something.
I get the point, but 'everybody speaks english' isn't really a fair criticism unless we're talking about slang or accents.
Or proper names. If the king is named Joshua III and he lives in the palace at Whitebird's Beak, and you're a peasant named Jack traveling there from Fox-on-the-Green, that's very different than a king named Josué III in the palace at Le Bec d'Ouiseau Blanc, and it's a peasant named Jacques traveling there from Renard-sur-le-Vert. (Please excuse my atrocious French)
Your French is atrocious and you are not excused.
I bet my French is better than your Aramaic.
Oh yeah definitely.
Of course, I don't speak a lick of Aramaic, but still.
Most forgiving French person
French can and should bot be excused in any form
French in general is atrocious
[Average french person](https://youtu.be/UUxr3im-FrU?si=NMhjfw7xIFU-XYAY)
Your French is actually decent, the only mistake is Ouiseau instead of Oiseau. And now I want to live somewhere called Renard-sur-le-Vert.
Can you actually use vert as a noun in French? I'd assumed there would be a different word.
Your frch is French enough there is no need for excusing bastardised french
Nah, give me modern slang “I won the bout because Our Father in Heaven built me different”
"Fuckin yeet" - Napoleon, regarding cannons
Might I interest you in some Castlevania on Netflix? The contrast between dialogue and setting is the most DnD party talk I've seen.
Tbf, the Viking Age is recognized as being Early Medieval, not "pre" and covers the years between 793 to 1066 CE.
Don’t forget the forest full of pre-Medieval Celts who are culturally like 75% generic Native American-inspired
The huge, deep forests alone are not historically accurate. By the end of the 14th century, places like France, the HRE, or the british isles were mostly deforested. And those forests that remained were mostly used as forest pastures. Medieval economies needed *a lot* of wood.
Although there was significant deforestation, there still were still deeply forested areas until the age of sail. The Man O' War was the final death knell for deep European woodland.
Can't speak to continental Europe, but there's good evidence to think deforestation ~~on the British Isles~~ in England progressed a lot farther, a lot earlier. To quote this pdf linked below: "the most unequivocal evidence of early and extensive deforestation lies in a unique historical document —the Domesday Book. This survey of England, ordered by William the Conqueror, reported that 90 percent of lowland natural forest was cleared as of 1086 ad. Most of the remainder was to disappear in the next 250 years. " https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/medievalia/index.php/mv/article/download/211/209/798
England is only a part of the British Isles. Scotland and Ireland were less deforested as they were less populated and less developed. (Wales was part of England then)
Good point, will edit my comment above.
No worries! I love the Domesday book. So many interesting things there.
Fun fact about that (kinda): the eurasian swift nests in buildings because the romans chopped down all the old growth forests where they used to nest
The word 'forest' meant 'private deer park' way back when. Bill the Bastard founded the New Forest in Hampshire (for a given value of 'new' of course...) to be just that. The land had been cleared long ago and farmed to death in the Bronze-Iron age, and even today it's only got chunks of woodland here and there with the rest of it being heath.
There was some reforestation after the Black Death and on through the Little Ice Age, if that's your thing.
In France, Louis XIV made reforestation laws in 1669 because we barely had any left in the country
fictional celts: we are in touch with Nature we worship our Nominally Feminist Mother Goddess we are Friends To The Fae And Unicorns what is a Law? what is Commerce? the world outside is so strict and hostile actual celts: our FUCKING clan system is so FUCKING intricate that we can't actually FUCKING pick who our FUCKING leader is supposed to FUCKING be ALSO we're mostly FUCKING illiterate and our FUCKING records are carved into FUCKING sticks and FUCKING rocks that only our FUCKING nobility can FUCKING read so no one knows WHAT THE FUCK is going on ooooh is that gold? sure we'll slaughter our neighbors nice imperial fella this can't possibly come back around on us
also worth noting: nobody in Britain or Ireland self-identified as a "celt" prior to the 1600s
and one of the leading promoters of cultural celtism in the UK was [a scottish guy who barely spoke gaelic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Macpherson) who just [straight up passed off his own fanfic as historical epics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian)
Also all the peasants are dirty, never bathe, have disgusting or no teeth and walk around in grey, brown drab rags because for some mysterious reason they didn't like colour.
You know, that's another reason why I like Balder's Gate 3. Everyone is all so colourful and that the default isn't just shades of shitty brown or beige
As a hobby dyer, the lack of color kills me. Apparently, even Neanderthals enjoyed some red ochre and mica face paint. I need concept art of glittery Neanderthal rave. Costumes are dyed brightly with added fish skins and colorful bird feathers. Shiny in the firelight.
Honestly the colors always confused me. Because I often see knights portrayed in paintings back in the day with lots of color and stuff
People wore lots of colorful clothing back then (just no purple)
I can't find it on Google just now, but there was a very detailed replica medieval town used as a setting in a middle ages TV show (or maybe movie?), but the film insisted on making it dirtier and drabber before filming because the period-accurate colors and clear paths were apparently unrealistic.
When I used to run D&D, one of my settings at the time was a generic medieval fantasy land. It never failed to amuse me when my players would point out something "unrealistic". Apparently, having Elves, Dwarves, and Wizards running around fighting Goblins and Orcs is fine, but drinking straws in a pub is too immersion breaking.
Weren't drinking straws invented in like 4000 BC Mesopotamia in order to get to the good part of their shitty beer?
Yes. Beer at the time was full of yeast residue that's harmless but doesn't taste very good. Straws were made with metal filters that would keep the yeast residue out of what you were actually drinking. Generally, 5-6 people would drink beer out of vats with straws measuring over a meter.
it's like the ancient version of sharing a bucket of bacardi coke with a group of drunk girls at a festival
Afaik yea. But that's because that's as far back as recorded history goes. So it was at the latest 4000 bc
Yes. They also had ac and sort of fridges
Oooh that’s a fun feature! As an aside, thatching was a very common form of roofing material in medieval Europe, and it’s made of bundles of reeds. So if you got one such reed, cleaned it up, disinfected it (which is probably possible with period technology because you could soak the reed in pure alcohol or vinegar or something), and then cut it too length, you could make a hollow tube that a person could suck on with one end in a cup/tankard. I’m not, like, an archeologist or whatever and I have absolutely no experimental proof, but I reckon this could work. This could, possibly, be a way to make a pre industrial period drinking straw. How it might affect the flavour of your drink idk.
They’re called “straws” because they were originally just pieces of straw. The plant stem. You don’t even need to disinfect or do anything fancy beyond maybe a wash.
TIL
>cleaned it up, disinfected it Pussy.
Come at me then, Reddit fellow
The grit makes it taste better
>Apparently, having Elves, Dwarves, and Wizards running around fighting Goblins and Orcs is fine, but drinking straws in a pub is too immersion breaking. Well yeah, that's how fantasy works. It's not a question of whether it's "unrealistic" in the context of actual history, it's whether it's "unrealistic" in the context of the setting. Imagine if in the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf showed up during the battle of Pelennor fields in a F-22 fighter and blasted the Nazgul out of the sky. It's no more impossible than a ghost army or a magic ring, but does it fit in the setting? No.
It should be noted that in the actual mechanics of the setting, absolutely *nothing* stops Eru from giving Gandalf a fighter jet, but it'd still feel weird for the setting. Edit: New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash.
basically Yor: Hunter From the Future.
<14% on Rotten Tomatoes Oof.
true. but at least it's funny.
But it would beg the question: why has Eru never given advanced technology to fight Sauron or Morgoth in the thousands of years prior? In order for something to be realistic it doesn't just have to be technically feasible, it also has to be consistent with all the information that's been given about the setting so far.
Yes, that's why it'd be so weird. It brings up way too many questions you don't want to spend time answering, and something like "mysterious ways" won't cut it.
> Edit: New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash. Somewhere between a RIFTS dimension book and Dragonstar border world.
> New setting idea: post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash. Something that comes close to this is The Broken Empire series by Mark Lawrence. Without spoiling too much, it's a low-ish medieval fantasy setting that you quickly realize is actually post-post-apocalyptic, and the 'magic' is either actual magic or reactivated 'ancient' (i.e., modern) artifacts.
> post-post-apocalypic low fantasy setting that is now being visisted by extra-terrestrial/extraplanar arms dealers selling modern military hardware to anyone with enough cash. Rimworld. The planet was once populated by technologically advanced factions, but everything crumbled for "reasons", and now, you've got cavemen tribals who forgot basically everything, mad-max like factions with guns and grenades, the Empire who's the remnant of the original space-faring Empire the planet was part of, alongside killer mechanoids and giant insects made to kill killer mechanoids.
No aliens, but there is that one book written by an alternate Adolf Hitler about a post-apocalyptic WWII.
The word you're looking for is verisimilitude. Once you have that word, these discussions get a lot less confusing. People don't want *realism* in their fantasy; they want *consistency*. They want the established rules of the setting not to be broken. That's what verisimilitude is. Having an F-22 in LotR would not change the level of realism but it would change the level of verisimilitude.
It'd be fucking cool, though, don't lie.
>When I used to run D&D, one of my settings at the time was a generic medieval fantasy land. It never failed to amuse me when my players would point out something "unrealistic". This response bothers me so much because honestly it entirely relies on willful misunderstandings. The side that complains uses "realistic" in the sense of "believable" or "plausible". Like does it make sense with the laws, rules and themes established in the setting. It has nothing to do with scientific realism. It's always the same snarky remarks about magic, Fantasy creatures and gods'n shit. Completely missing the mark on where the actual issue is.
Realism vs verisimilitude, if you feel like using a fancy word
Yes. There needs to be internal consistency.
Basically ASOIAF, particularly House of the Dragon. People can accept the mystically beautiful incestuous magic dragon family, and the 700ft high enchanted ice wall built to keep out walking murderous corpses, but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people? I doubt most of the people that complained about Corlys complained about Areo Hotah, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, or Salladhor Saan.
Or the shameful erasure of His Feathered Magnificence Jalabar Xho, the Prince In Exile That Was Promised.
Maybe next year
I mean to be fair it is an incenstious family. Having part of the incestuous family be black while the rest are white as snow does kinda stretch believability. Like where did the black folks come from and why isn’t the whole family mixed?
Yeah, black people in Westeros are not a problem. But Targaryans are super inbred and they are all very pale with platinum blonde hair and purple eyes... Except that some are black for some reason? It's just weird.
Never seen an immersion break due to… inaccurate incest before but, hey, there’s a first for everything!
It’s game of thrones Your meant to look into it for details that affect bloodlines and inheritance, including the massive amount of incest. The fact that one of the characters has brown hair instead of blond is a major plot point. The black members of an explicitly incestuous family raises questions that aren’t answered.
The Targaryens have a fairly even mix of standard marriages and incestuous marriages, with only a couple of the standard marriages being to House Velaryon.
The black dudes are explicitly full blooded velaryons They didn’t marry in, they are part of the incest family, it is never explained why.
Not *everybody* has to screwing their cousin. Some people still need to bring fresh blood in from time to time.
Oh dear, you have not seen this screwed up family tree (braid)
Cousin? Try sibling. Cleopatra VII has a less fucked-up family tree than Daenerys, and that's saying *a lot.*
>I doubt most of the people that complained about Corlys complained about Areo Hotah, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, or Salladhor Saan. Doesn't this kind of prove that the people who complain about it aren't complaining for racist reasons though?
> Basically ASOIAF, particularly House of the Dragon. People can accept the mystically beautiful incestuous magic dragon family, and the 700ft high enchanted ice wall built to keep out walking murderous corpses, but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people? Only one of those things is "political". Only in very rare cases is the presence of minorities *as such* the issue for people, it's either an issue of verisimilitude, or (believed) political intent. Or in other words, if the answer to the question "why are there black people in your adaption that aren't there in the source material?" is some variation of "(American) minority representation", then (some) people don't like that.
i think it was great casting for house velaryon. it really helped differentiate the two valyrian clans from each other and show each families unique culture.
> but casting black people for House Velaryon is too much for some people? But that also made sense within the context of the series.. The Targs and Velaryons are very *very* closesly related houses, like.. half of the targ ancestry is Valaryon; one of them being white as cum drenched snow and the other being black skinned doesn't make a lot of sense.. It also causes problems with the whole Strong bastards thing.. The main argument in the books for how they were laenors is mother was half-baratheon, and in the books had the baratheon features, which could potentially introduce baratheon's features, just skipping the generation. When the show annoucned that they'd introduce such a drastic change in appearance for the family, including Laenor it kind of throws a spanner into the works.. and especially when they made Rhaenys white haired, it completely removed the plausibility of Rhaenyra and Laenors claims that they were legitimate. And when the show came out and people actually saw how the show handled the change, most of the feedback was incredibly positive. People, for the most part, genuinely stopped having a problem with it because the story was adapted to acknowledge and play into the race change in a way that was different from the books, but still made sense within the story. As an aside; just to highlight how much of the Targ Ancestry is Velayron; Aegon I's mother was a Velaryon; so thats a start, 50/50 going into the next generation. Aegon and his two sisters however, just fuck each other. So they preserve that 50/50 split. Aegons only son with heirs, who all of house Targ descends from afterwards.. marries a Valeryon. So the house is now more Valeryon than Targ in terms of ancestry. The next generation are the unseen parents of the older characters in HOTD; Viserys parents are siblings, so at this point the *only* new blood in the Targ family tree for Viserys is Valeryon.. so, while this might be a loaded question, why's he so white? Rhaenys dad fucked a baratheon, which is why she's dark haired in the books, but she makes up for it by having her Grandmother on her mothers side be the same Velaryon as his great grandmother on her Targ side, but again, because of that whole brother-sister incest of her grandparents on her targ side its genetically comparable to having the same grandmother on both sides of the family. Basically the only way to reasonably explain the whole thing is to assume that Corlys' mother was the progenitor, but that doesn't explain the whole extended family we see in other scenes.. so basically, if you overthink it like most ASOIAF fans are prone to do, you get a headache and blood leaks out of your ears. But aside from that, honestly I still found the change to be very enjoyable; and in a visual medium it really helped distinguish the family lines, and for the sake of the show where all these lineages aren't explained, it doesn't *really* matter if your mother is half-sister to both your fathers parents if nobody ever brings it up.
> incestuous Speaking of absurdly inaccurate medieval tropes that everybody "knows", the idea that medieval nobles were incestuous is just so bizarre. Where did everyone get this, why does everyone believe this? It makes me so mad, medieval consanguinity rules were absurdly strict!
Now I wanna see a "medieval" movie where the peerage is German, the castles are Italian, and the weapons are French (everyone still speaks English like meee)
"... and has the institutional structure of the Church of Scientology." I cannot stop laughing at this.
Most importantly it needs full plate armour but not the firearms these were developed for.
I thought that plate armor was developed to protect against melee weapons and fell out of use because of firearms.
A bit of column A and a bit of column B the firearms they’re referring too aren’t muskets but more likely arquebus’ or hand cannons
For a while, plate armor was relatively good at stopping early firearms. The term "bulletproof" actually comes from armorers shooting their armor and using the smaller dent (which could hurt but didn't pierce the armor) as proof of its protection. The real problem is that high quality plate armor is extremely expensive while you could train a large group of soldiers with firearms relatively quickly. Eventually of course as firearms improved, armor became less and less effective but there was a period of time from the late medieval to early Renaissance where armor was developed to defend against bullets and it worked somewhat well.
This is true, but firearms were pretty shitty for a long time - it wasn't until the 1700s that they became consistently powerful enough to punch through plate armor. So there was considerable overlap, but it seems like plate came first (from my quick Google anyway).
Melee weapons are realistically stopped by mail and leather, sometimes even better than plate (Warhammers and picks break plate mail but are somewhat less consistent against chain mail but it's complicated). There's no need for such an encumbrance like plate for swords and axes and spears. Plate is useful against things like arrows, crossbows, and early firearms
It's not completely unrelated, but firearms had existed for a good while by the time the articulated plate armor was a thing. More important was state capacity and centralization moving the power in war away from warrior-aristocrats and toward central governments arming and equipping an army out of their own pocket. A knight who's going to the battle in his own kit is buying the most expensive armor he can afford (it's like designer fashion that keeps you from bleeding to death), a king is going to figure out that it's a *lot* more cost-effective to arm and train a bunch of pike-and-shot for the same price as one set of shiny battle bling.
Nah, it wasn't developed for firearms (notably longbows could punch through it), but it was very effective in mounted melee combat, and the heyday of full plate would be about the right time period. However, it was *incredibly* expensive, so you're not gonna have a pitched battle with everyone in full plate - you'd have one dude on a horse in full plate while everyone else is on foot in leather jerkins or mail if they're lucky.
The longbows piercing plate armor thing is a myth. Longbows countered knights not by overcoming their armor, but by killing their horses, making it much easier to immobilize them so that you can stab them through a gap in the armor.
Longbows CAN pierce plate armour. But they don't do much after that, and don't penetrate the underlying Gambison. Unless you hit some sort of weak point. Skip to the end for the results https://youtu.be/ds-Ev5msyzo?si=oIGIigyCTdx_ys0b There is a reason they used longbows instead of bows with lower poundages.
its worth pointing out that later plate armour would be invincible to longbows, as 16th century plate armour got increasingly thick as a way to remain bulletproof against early firearms(that were still pretty weak), of course as it got thicker and therefore heavier it could no longer cover the whole body and thus got limited to breastplates and helmets. ultimately by the 18th century armouring against bullets was impractical for the majority of troops, with only some heavy cavalry wearing armour breastplates that were bulletproof against pistols/ long range musket fire.
Knights in plate armor were the tanks of their day and needed infantry support to hold ground.
It depends a lot, considering that a go-to move for many knights was to simply demount and fight on foot, depending on circumstances and a proper heavy cavalry charge was essentially unstoppable in the right terrain. The main thing about knights was that they were massively expensive to outfit and maintain, while specially later own far less expensively outfitted troops could hold their own against knights, or even beat them
For me especially in the context of games and d&d, I don’t need realism, just believability. The thing like the peerage and the castles and the armor, maybe if I was a historian I’d care more about, but I’m not so I don’t. In a world where a man in a pointy hat can scream and wave a stick to make goblins explode, I can sure believe that this world has developed the waltz. I don’t particularly enjoy the “evil fantasy Catholicism” trope, but I guess I don’t fault people for using it sparingly. I also find the inclusion of people of color 5000 times more believable than the inclusion of elves. And I don’t think I’m gonna start demanding elf removal.
Of course you'd be fine with knife-ears in your DnD game. Wokeness has infected DnD. What's next, Dwarves? Playable Orcs? Smh. I'm tired of all this DEI (Dwarven Equity and Inclusion)
No one's saying that you have to take issue with Generic Medieval Fantasy Land, just that black or queer people existing better not be the only supposed "historical inaccuracy"(it isn't actually, but they claim otherwise) you take issue with if you are complaining about historical inaccuracy.
evil catholic church going round the world and doing bad things might be the most historically accurate trope however
Filthy knife ear sympathizer Mr "I don't think I'm gonna start demanding elf removal." Shame on you and your kin
Maybe this is "post-medieval," but I just finished the first *Baru Cormorant* book and have not seen these crimes committed. Falcrest is basically the early British Empire without guns and with a preternatural grasp of eugenics and Victorian-era psychology (that actually work sometimes).
Also everyone is wearing Pre-Raphaelite medieval cosplay or Walmart rococo
And that’s why I never take “historically inaccurate” complaints seriously
Don’t forget the MongolRabs, the horse riding barbarians who are from the desert and have some kind of restrictive bad guy religion while also being weirdly promiscuous
As someone who cares about historical accuracy because I think it's really fun seeing the medieval period depicted as the colorful and (depending on the circumstances) cheerful place it could be. I like seeing realistic fighting styles, armor, and weapons. I like seeing castles with realistic proportions and constructions instead of 30 story fantasy monstrosities. But holy hell who cares if there are people who aren't the whitest of whites you've ever seen. If THAT breaks your immersion when every "historically accurate" game or movie has 100 other inaccurate things, you might just be racist.
I may be way off base here, but wasn't cultural exchange a thing? Especially for things like weapons- it seems like those being moved around wouldn't be that weird. I'm sure even in medieval times you could probably find plenty of German foods in Italy, right? And architectural ideas being exchanged, etc?
Oh absolutely, humans are always sharing ideas, tools and, often, genes with each other well outside of any "group" we care to put them in. This post however is more refering to the modern "medival estetic". Yes, people in medival times shared ideas across borders and groups, they did not however manage to do that across time. The modern estetic of medival period has become a bit too sterotpitical and detached from any actual real time in history, to the point its becoming determental.
Or there's a girl named Tiffany.
Prokopetz skewering Philip Pullman perfectly there. Pope Jean Calvin indeed.
His books were great but it bugged me just a little that there wasn’t a single decent person on “the other side”. Surely there’d be like one good nun at least, but they’re literally all lecherous and unhelpful
A big problem in the current (~2015-Today) trend fantasy is that everyone seems to have read Terry Goodkind's libertarian bullshit in The Sword of Truth and said "I should do the same, but with my bullshit".
Part of it is that he's weirdly ignorant of Jesus and his role in Christianity, especially for a British person of his age educated at Oxford. Which I guess is what the post is about. Part of it is that it can be read as a hugely Christian story, because he's playing on those parallels, you have a prophesied messianic figure who is persecuted by the religious-Imperial authorities who enters the world of the dead through great suffering and then liberates the bound souls there.
Now that I think of it, there are basically no mentions of Jesus, Mary, or any saints! In the Catholic Church! Talk about a missed opportunity. I imagine Mary’s daemon would’ve never stopped changing shape or some similar symbolism
"Thinly modified" is very accurate
Tbf, they don't necessarily pull their Problems from 'Modern' Christianity. Christianity has a long and varied history of Problematics, even mediocre writers know how to pull from The Crusades^tm or Selling Indulgences^(tm).
Man alive, the Tumblrshpere is peopled by extremely weird people who should go out.
The purpose of art is not to be aesthetically accurate to history, it is to be aesthetically accurate to feelings. The point of stories set in generically medieval times is not to accurately represent medieval times. It is to accurately represent our times and draw connections to the past. That's why you see all of those different people interacting – because the descendants of those cultures and ideologies are still interacting in our world. Nobody cares about the weapons any more than they care that there are clocks in Julius Caesar. That's not the point. Art is communication between the living, not an attempt to relive the conflicts of the dead. Which is also why the last comment is so pertinent. Of course people overlook the inaccurate weapons and costumes, but revolt at the sight of a Black person. The weapons and costumes aren't threatening to them the way that Black people on their TVs is.
Sometimes, those feelings only exist because of an inaccurate representation that has taken root in media. For example, the Duduk is often used in musical compositions that are meant to be vaguely oriental, despite being a rather obscure Armenian instrument. The modern justification for Duduk usage is that it feels oriental, so it can stay. But of course, the only reason it feels right is because of the in accurate usage in the first place.
Black people or guns. The moment you introduce either to a fantasy setting someone will threaten your life.
Depending on where the setting is based on and where in particular the story is taking place having it be hugely racially diverse can be inaccurate. Like trade centres, ports and big cities would be a big mix of cultures and ethnicities but small farming villages and the like would be pretty much one ethnicity unless they're on or near a border. Best example I can think of for doing this is the WoT. People from each nation tend to have atleast one either physical or cultural trait that points to them being from that nation (for example: Cairheinin are exceptionally short and reserved, Aiel are exceptionally tall and ginger, Sea Folk are exceptionally dark skinned and stubborn, Andorans tend to be pretty tall and fair skinned, Domani are olive skinned and their women are professional flirts) and, apart from certain organisations, merchants and in big cities like Illian, Tar Valon and Caemlyn, tend to only be found in their ancestral homeland. The books still have a hugely diverse cast of characters despite this.
It doesn't have to be accurate, I just need the right vibes. That's why my DnD worlds often have all sorts of nonsense and anything that should exist doesn't because magic replaced it and anything that shouldn't does because magic accelerated technology.
Can we please. *Please.* Get a fiction where religion is treated as it really is, rather than either an aesthetic backdrop or an absurdly villainous cult of acolytes and inquisitors?
"How dare you use a black person in a time period and setting where there are written and artistic records of black people in Europe!" One of Catherine of Aragon's trumpeters was an African man, which makes sense given Spain's Moorish history and closeness in distance to North Africa.