pkmndaisuki:

so i only just started playing final fantasy x and this is pretty much the gist of it, yeah?

star-anise:

behold-the-twilight-of-man:

trustmeimageographer:

whetstonefires:

beatrice-otter:

findingfeather:

wetmeadow:

star-anise:

unrepentantnerdshit:

star-anise:

mihrsuri:

star-anise:

Shutting my brain off to enjoy fantasy novels gets harder and harder all the time.

Stuff the European Middle Ages didn’t have and it distracts me when they show up:

• Potatoes
• Oranges you could peel with your hands and eat
• Sparkly diamonds
• Musical harmony, eg guitar chords being played under a melody
• A colourfast black dye for clothes

WHY DO I HAVE TO KNOW THESE THINGS. NO ONE CARES.

Petition to be able to scrub my brain of overly-detailed knowledge of the past.

(This is part of why I enjoy The Untamed. My brain is not stuffed with facts about Chinese history, so I don’t automatically notice when they put a 15th century sleeve on a 13th century outfit. I realize this will wear off as I learn more about Chinese history, but it’s nice while it lasts.)

Lis I hope you know that every time I watch The Tudors I now giggle helplessly at the black clothing next to the skin thing.

Also now I have to check what sort of oranges they would have had in Tudor England ;).

Moors brought bitter oranges to Spain in the 10th century. The Alcazar palace of Seville in Spain is scented with extensive orange plantings. That’s why in English, they’re often known as “Seville oranges”. The oranges don’t make good eating raw, but pieces appeared in food for their flavour and orange oil was used in perfumes for its scent. Orange marmalade in England is documented back to the late 15th century (and these days, English marmalade is the main use for bitter oranges, everyone else having decided they were too much trouble). Sweet oranges, which go back ages ago in China, only reached England after 1660. 

(Here’s a page about the history of citrus, which includes records of Henry VIII’s citrus purchases)

I was about to say, they definitely had oranges, diamonds, and musical harmony. I’m not sure about potatoes, or the dye

They had diamonds. They did not have sparkly diamonds. Europe didn’t develop the technology to make diamonds that refracted light and glittered until the middle ages had ended.

Medieval diamonds were cut very simply, so in some lights they would appear clear like glass, but they just as easily appeared black.

This is how diamonds were depicted in artwork:

Here are examples we have of diamonds cut using the table or point cuts available:

So all those medieval princesses with diamonds that “glitter like starlight” or give off a “brilliant white fire”… yeah no. You want the 1600s and 1700s for that.

This is all very interesting but can someone please explain the “no musical harmony”-thing in more detail

Short version: what we know today as “harmony” (multiple “parts” or “voices” sung or played at the same time, chords, all that shit) arose out of very specifically the Western Xtian music tradition and is kinda weird and has a very weird history. 

Most human music traditions (that have not, at some point, come into contact with the harmonic tradition) are monophonic. That is, there’s one part or tune. The melody may be very, VERY complex, or the rhythms may be incredibly complex, but every instrument that makes notes (as opposed to just rhythms) and all singing voices are, within one piece, singing the same thing. 

This was also true of the Western music tradition until some of the way into 10th century. 

We don’t know exact reason why, as it happens, monks started adding in a new line following the original at about a fourth or fifth above, or fourth or fifth below. But I tend to like the theory that it started at the very beginning because you suddenly had to do something with the boys whose voices were breaking. 

See, Xtian monks were singing extensive prayers seven times a day. You’ve probably heard these referred to as “Gregorian chant”, but they actually predate Gregory, and the word “chant” can be a bit misleading because these are what modern ears would call “songs”. And there’s an extensive sequence of this that monks are supposed to sing at seven different points of the day. Every day. For their entire monastic career. 

Now when you’ve got all adults that’s not a huge problem: none of these plainchant prayers have a fixed starting pitch, so you just pick a pitch that works best for your group. And even when you have young child oblates (that is, children dedicated to the monastery) it’s not that bit a problem because they can just sing an octave up. 

But AMAB individuals, absent any hormonal intervention, go through this period where the voice radically changes and deepens. (Actually technically AFAB-without-hormone-intervetion voices ALSO change at around the same age, but it’s nowhere near as dramatic so people outside of the actual classical vocal world tend not to know this. But I digress.) But it doesn’t do it all at once. It actually spends quite a bit of time with a very restricted range: neither as high as they used to be able to sing, NOR as low as they will eventually be able to sing. 

But they’re still SUPPOSED to be able to SING THE DAMN LITURGY WITH EVERYONE ELSE. 

So one theory is that some bright monk or abbot thought, hey, when you sing the exact same pattern but a fourth or fifth up from the original, it still sounds pretty good! And that suddenly puts it in the range that most of our voice-breaking-boys can sing. 

(Why fourth or fifth? Within that music tradition, fourths, fifths and octaves are “perfect” intervals. Why that is involves diving way more into musical theory than is useful right now.)

It might’ve been some other reason; they might just have gotten, you know, bored. After singing the same thing (at minimum) seven times a day every day for four hundred years. 

But once that started, people started running with it, and you developed “polyphany” for the first time we know of. Now, polyphany is not technically harmony: harmony is actually a very specific branch and development of multi-part singing that wouldn’t happen for another five hundred years or so. But in terms of what MOST people think of as “harmony” - that is, multiple “parts” to any given song, singing in intervals with each other, etc, yeah, polyphany is the first time we’re singing in those multiple parts. 

Or - somewhat later - playing instruments in multiple parts. But it took even longer to COMBINE the idea of a VOICE singing particular parts OVER a harmonizing instrument underneath. 

While there’s a strumming instrument underneath there you’ll note that it just strums literally the same thing all the way thru. The bowed instrument and the finger-picking instruments can and will both themselves play highly intricate melodies, alone! But it WON’T be like you’re used to hearing with a guitar now. That’s not how that music conceptualization works. 

Polyphany eventually got HELLA COMPLEX to the point where someone wrote a Mass for 40 Voices. Note that this does not mean “mass for forty people singing” but “mass for forty totally separate parts”. Eventually people got bored, and invented “harmony”, which is a shift in the conception of how musical notes relate to one another, and that’s when the Early Baroque started. 

tl;dr: If you’re early enough or working outside something vaguely analogous to the Catholic Xtian mediaeval musical tradition (or making something up to invent it with a different lineage) then no, you DON’T have harmony; even once you have multi-part stuff it’s not actually harmony (it’s polyphany) and doesn’t work the way most people think harmony works. 

If you’re working in a fantasy world there are, of course, ways around this. There is for example no reason not to imagine that the Teleri, music-obsessed as they are, came up with polyphany and later on with harmony; and if you want to imagine that your made up world has potatoes you can! It will COMPLETELY CHANGE the food realities of your culture and you should look up the impact of the introduction of the potato (once they convinced people to use it) on various food economies, but in a world that doesn’t have a Europe and Americas situation, there’s no reason potatoes can’t be in your fantasy world, although I will almost certainly be able to tell whether or not a fantasy author has decided they’re gonna have their fictional society have potatoes, or whether they’ve just not bothered or not known they should go look at what potatoes would do. 

It’s a lot trickier when it comes to actual historical fiction. 

(pssst. Sub-Saharan Africa had polyphony before Europe did, although as far as we can tell there is no cross-polinization between the two musical traditions.)

“Harmony” happened because the Catholic church didn’t like what polyphony was doing to the ability of people listening to understand what was going on.

It’s the middle ages, Latin has turned into Italian and French and Spanish and whatnot, and the common people don’t really understand Latin anymore, and the mass (worship service) is still in Latin, so the common people don’t know what’s going on every Sunday at church. But at least in theory, everybody needs to be able to understand the words.

With polyphony, you’ve got what are essentially however many parts (anywhere between two and forty) singing what are basically different songs at the same time.  The words overlap, by which I mean they’re singing the same phrases at the same time, but because the rhythms are so different, the phonemes are distorted and you can’t understand the words.  It’s gorgeous!  God, it is gorgeous.  But you can’t understand the words, and so however aesthetically pleasing it was, it is not very spiritually edifying.  There were all kinds of edicts about what kind of music you could have in church, and for a while it looked like they were going to ban every form of music other than a single unaccompanied vocal line sung in unison.

This is where harmony comes in.  If everyone is singing the same words at the same time, you can have different notes and still understand what is being sung.

This is not the only reason for the transition from polyphony to harmony, but it was one of the major factors.

ty on the African polyphony. I have jackshit formal education in musical theory or history but I was like ‘huh i could swear that i read on wikipedia while researching the mbira that…’

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

Yes, we want potato facts

Here are potato facts!

star-anise:

blueelectricangels:

star-anise:

akhmenos:

touchmycoat:

star-anise:

@trustmeimageographerreblogged your post and added:

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage. 

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.