New arrivals

Wow, lots of new people! Didn’t you mention once that there was a scarcity of eligible young women in Lothere?

I can’t wait to see the sims you’re going to make. Moar pretty sims! ^^

Speaking of pretty… Agatha is so cute. It’s almost a shame she will have to balance out Brinstan’s … uhm, unfortunate genes. They look so funny beside each other in the bios. Her eyes make her look like she’s sighing in tragic resignation. I couldn’t help thinking of “Beauty and the Beast”.

But I think I see some resemblance to her cousins Wyn and Mouse. Does she know of them? That would be awkward in case she did come to live at Nothelm. They would know the relationship even if she didn’t.

But her brother just HAS to visit her! He’s way to cute to miss! He’s just the right age too. Who could we hook him up with? Or is he already betrothed? (btw, the “Search for People” link seems broken)

I can’t believe all the details you have mapped out. It’s a shame that Lothere is a Christian kingdom. You’d make one heck of Goddess.

Like this:

Tempted?

One of my reasons for bringing these women (both the ladies-​in-​waiting and the refugees) was lack of eligible ladies of gentle blood. Maybe nothing will come of them, but at least it gives guys like Ralf, Saeward, and Eadred a few options, not to mention other well-​to-​do guys you don’t know, like Sigefrith’s valet or the Master of the Royal Horse. It’s fairly easy for me to bring gentlemen to the valley, to fill roles like these, but ladies are more difficult to move around without having them get married in the first place.

It’s normal that Agatha resembles Mouse and Wyn a tad, since I based her father on the Little Mother’s Sim. (I probably made her Sim-​clone be his mother in CAS or something.) You can definitely see the resemblance between Galan and the Little Mother.

I kind of doubt Agatha knows about the relationship yet, but seeing as Wynflaed is married to Sir Sigefrith and is therefore going to be invited to the same sort of affairs as Agatha, someone will have to take her aside and tell her the old story. Namely that Wynflaed’s Little Mother was Agatha’s father’s illegitimate half-​sister. Naturally it will not do to acknowledge it in public, however.

Agatha’s brother, the future Lord Hamelan, is not yet betrothed. I am sure Sigefrith would love to get some daughter of the valley in as Lady Hamelan. I wonder who would serve? Edris’s eldest girl Ardith would be ideal. There’s also Raegan, and even seven-​year-​old Dora if Sigefrith can convince the Hamelans to wait eight or nine years.

Connie is another possibility, but Connie does not “belong” to Sigefrith, and even if he successfully arranged her marriage, it wouldn’t really gain him a lot.

Anyway, I fixed the search-​for-​people function, so you can have fun matchmaking again.

The computer is running the show for a lot of things by now – I have begun to step back as the goddess and let things run themselves. I just check in and see that so-​and-​so wants to get married, or that they’re looking for another maidservant at the castle and young so-​and-​so would be a good candidate, and so on. And of course people have babies and get old and die without my help. It’s just fun for me to watch what’s going on and spin up stories as a consequence.

Thank you

Ah, that’s what I’d like to have with my sims. I get so tired of how dependant they are. It’s a little better with the Sims 3, but not much. I’d really like to just sit back and watch what they’d do on their own, instead of making them do everything. With the option to intervene of course. But I might as well wish for the stars while I’m at it.

I thought of Reagan, too. But would she really be considered suitable? The Hamelans might not be happy about who her mother is after all.

I think I’d like it if Ardith were the one. Provided they don’t hate each other. But then it’s all so far in the future… There aren’t that many candidates though. Sigefrith will have to push it if he wants things to go his way. And that may not be wise at this early date in their “friendship”.

The more I try not to think about your omious comments at the end, the more worried I get. Mama Gunnie can never bake enough plum pies to provide one for everyone in need. Even if she could reach them all, which of course she can’t.

I had all my worries about Egelric, Gwynn and everyone else neatly pushed into the farthest corner of my mind. I should have known you’d stir them up again. ^^

Sometimes I get a little sick of all the tragedy. Can’t we get a bit of a respite somehow? Some good comic relief or a sweet little romance?

Don’t get me wrong! I love the realism you worked so hard for! But it’s all so profound lately… I miss the lightheartedness of some of your earlier chapters a bit. Although I got to admit that on second read they lose a bit of their lightheartedness. But maybe that’s because I see more of the signs now. Like with Alred…

I really hope that picture is a teaser for a chapter in the near future. Maybe Mama Gunnie can do something about that family. She’s just about the only one who could.

I don’t know how suitable Raegan will be. She is the half-​sister of the Queen, but her parents were not married in the Church. The Hamelans may be stuffy enough to disapprove.

I do think Ardith would be just about perfect. She’s Cenwulf’s eldest daughter, and her family is very close with Sigefrith’s so the tie would remain strong. She’s not so noble that he will aim very high with her (no Ogives of Flanders or Cynans of Gwynedd for her), yet she has good enough blood to please any of the local lords.

On the other hand she is only nine years old. The boy and his father may not want to wait. And perhaps neither will we!

I see what you mean about all the tragedy. I am somewhat in the mood for weighty storylines at the moment – things with enough conflict and drama to be novel-​like in scope – but it also comes from cutting my outline to the bone in order to get time moving faster again. What remained was the heavy stuff, since I had these major storylines already underway and couldn’t let them drop. I am thinking of the Alred+Hetty marriage meltdown, the Egelric+Maire fiasco and its aftermath Egelric-​ward, and the worsening political situation on the Isle of Man.

Plus we are getting into the Vashmalaina storyline again, and that is going to hurt a bit, even if it may (or may not, depending on your perspective) be the kind of thing that has to hurt for a while to make things better afterwards.

Looking at my outline right now, it is a bit of a drag. Lots of heavy stuff. I agree there is a need for something lighter, even if it slows things down just a tad. It would be nice to weave a little Red-​Boots-​like story through the next few months, but I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.

I could do something with Os and Matilda, but due to the circumstances of baby Dunstan’s conception, it would be hard to make that light-​hearted. Matilda is deeply wounded.

Likewise all of the recent arrivals from Man are grieving husbands or children or both. (Which is why I don’t plan on diving into any of their stories right now.)

What would be great is a nice, upbeat, cute little drama-​less romance, like Eadie + Sigefrith back in the day. I might be able to have some fun with Domnall and Gwynn but I am afraid Domnall will start attracting thunderbolts of reader-​hatred if he interferes with Fwynn! too much.

Besides, what we need is a romance that works out. (Unlike Estrid+K, say.) And that works out now, unlike the current crop of young-​teen romances that can’t possibly reach an altar any time soon.

Or maybe I should just say to hell with it and bring Yware back right in the middle of February. Not that I have any useful plans for him this early in the year, but he is bound to shake things up, and probably not in a particularly tragic way.

Yware seems like just the sort to go on a bull-​in-​a-​china-​shop romp through everybody’s tragedies: beating down doors, throwing open windows, letting light into skeleton-​infested closets, and chasing everbody’s demons outside. He just hasn’t been here these past years to get infected with the OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS SO DRAMATIC atmosphere. I think he would at least be good for his sisters, and he has a 16-year-old’s immunity to his father’s existential angst. Hmm…

Yware! Oh my goodness, it would be so fun to see everybody’s reactions to him. I miss that kid.

Are you using Internet Explorer, maria? I haven’t tested it extensively with IE yet. I think Ann was having a problem the other day, which makes me think it’s not just you. (And she was logged in, I believe.)

Or, if you have JavaScript turned off in your browser, it definitely won’t work.

Obviously, I am always open to criticism of how realistic the story is, because I’m writing at nine centuries’ difference from my characters’ lives. But I hadn’t considered that I had anyone unrealistically grieving children in Lothere? Unless that wasn’t a particular criticism, but just an example of where a writer may go wrong.

We haven’t seen Estrid’s grief at all, but from Kuntigern we got what I think is a critical point: it’s the first great grief of her life, the first child she has lost. And with that girl who is “so alone” – she’s a young bride and just lost her home, her husband, and her little baby on the same day, in terrifying, traumatizing circumstances.

I have sometimes read that the death of children was not felt as keenly when child mortality was so high, but laying aside the difficulty of attempting to guess the feelings of people living in different times (whether you are in the “not like us” or the “just like us” camp), I suspect it was more a matter of expectations being different. Everyone knew there was a good chance you would lose at least one child (and that there was a fair chance you would die in childbirth), so there was not the same “How could this possibly happen?” grief that we have when a child dies. Nowadays children are not supposed to die before their parents, ever, and when it happens, it is shocking in itself.

Also, since it happened to so many families, there would have been more of a support network. Other women who had been there before you, and could help you deal with your grief, and help you move on. Nowadays, if you lose a child, you may be the only one in your family or circle of friends to have had that happen… and your friends won’t know what to say to you or how to help you, and that’s hard.

So between the fact that you were prepared for it, a little, and the fact that you were surrounded by people who understood, I would certainly allow that there were differences in the way people handled the death of a child. Perhaps it had a less catastrophic effect in their lives. Perhaps they “got over it” more easily, though I do dislike that expression.

And it is said that nowadays there is a sort of “cult of childhood” wherein parents invest more of their feelings and attention and even their own self-​worth in their children, more so than in the past – this always comes up when people talk about how “kids these days” are spoiled, selfish brats with parents who hover over their every activity, etc. (Though I have read editorials in 19^th century newspapers that say the same thing, so this could, in itself, be another transcendental thing. People were shaking their heads over “kids these days” back in ancient Greece after all.)

Anyway, I don’t think it’s safe to extrapolate from these changes in the social perception of the importance of the life and death of children, and determine that medieval parents didn’t feel much grief when children died, because it ultimately comes down to one individual parent’s attachment to one individual child, and that, I think, is something that transcends time and place. Throughout history, wherever archaeological evidence remains, you can find examples of touching little child burials where it’s evident that the parents truly grieved. And in more recent times, when childhood mortality was still quite high, we have letters and things that express profound grief over the deaths of children as well as wives who died in childbirth, in no way lessened by the fact that it happened more often.

Rape is a poor comparison, in my opinion, because part of the trauma of rape is ongoing and is based on the fact that neither society nor, often, even their own friends and acquaintances are really on the rape victim’s side. The victim is continually victimized by the fact that people will not admit she is a victim. She shouldn’t have worn that short skirt, she shouldn’t have had too many drinks, she should have screamed, etc. Too much of the blame for rape is placed on the victim. So in my opinion, if it is true that women in a war zone are less traumatized by rape (which I am not sure of…), then it is likely because it is (1) so evidently not their fault, because hey, WAR, and (2) it happened to so many other women that society-​at-​large effectively ends up on the side of the victims. There’s not the large-​scale victim-​blaming.

Personally I think that a lot of the women-​against-​rape-​victim blaming that goes on is a self-​defense mechanism, wherein the woman can reassure herself that rape won’t happen to her, because she doesn’t wear the short skirts, and she doesn’t have too much to drink, etc. Thus when you are in a world in turmoil, where rapes happen often and are demonstrably random, there may, paradoxically, be some relief to a woman in knowing that she is not to blame, and that her peers and acquaintances don’t blame her either.

This is getting really off-​topic, but I meant to say that “it hurts less because it happens to lots of people” may be true in both the case of childhood mortality and in wartime rape, but the reasons behind this are probably quite different, and so parallels shouldn’t be drawn.

Back on the topic of the story, I have a lot of characters in a state of turmoil right now, it is true. But I can’t think of anyone who seems to be dealing with a 21^st-​century quantity (or variety) of angst in an 11^th century world. No proto-​feminists, no proto-​gay-​activists, no proto-​psychotherapists encouraging Alred to get help for himself and Hetty. And I certainly do not think that the simple fact that they are in a lot of anguish somehow makes them too modern, because people have always suffered.

Now, obviously, if I thought a particular behavior in a character was anachronistic, I wouldn’t write it, so almost by definition I will be blind to any psychological anachronisms that crop up in my story. I would need people to point them out in order for me to see them.

But my sense of my own characters’ mental states right now is that they are dealing with circumstances that are grave and fraught for them, in their time period. And they tend to be things that are transcendent: things like jealousy, forbidden love, grief over the loss of loved ones, mental illness in a family, the aftermath of rape.

Of course times have changed, but what has changed is mainly things like what a person’s options are, and how society views the situation in terms of what is expected of a person, what is seemly and what is sinful, and so forth. The underlying human experience is the same.

And, maybe this is just one “school of thought” in the matter of historical fiction, but you cannot make me believe that people somehow lived their lives with less emotional intensity in the past. It’s the fallacy of the black-​and-​white photo and the marble effigy: the notion that somehow things were less than what they are now because we only have dim fragments to compare to our brightly-​colored, intensely-​felt present.

This discussion brings to mind something I read once: a bit of an article on CNN​.com or somewhere, wherein an American woman – I believe either a Christian pilgrim or Baptist missionary of some sort – was meeting a Palestinian family and almost tearfully trying to come to terms with this very foreign experience. And the words that came out of her mouth were: “Do you love your children?”

I’m not trying to make fun of how provincial Americans are; and of course, if she had thought before she spoke, she must have realized Palestinian mothers and fathers love their children too. And naturally that is just what the Palestinian parents said, and there were probably more tears and hugs and whatnot.

But the thing that struck me was this woman speaking from the heart: she was faced with people so very far-​off and foreign and “other” to her that she needed to reassure herself that they were like her in the most fundamental, transcendental, purely human way. And, of course, they were.

The lesson I learned from that story was that I should remember that people everywhere, across the earth, and throughout all time periods, are mostly alike in these fundamental, transcendental, purely human ways. (And there are still plenty of places where childhood mortality, death in childbirth, and wartime rapes are very high.)

It may be a school of thought, but it’s what I believe. And back on my original topic, I think that writing about these themes is what makes great literature, too. I suppose it’s possible to make stories that please a modern audience by taking people and problems of the modern day and dressing them up in medieval costumes and putting them in castles. But really good stories—the ones that outlast their time period—deal with matters that are true throughout all ages. That’s my goal, though I will be the first to admit I am still learning my craft and have a lot of work to do if I am ever to write great literature.

I could also add that I am sometimes accused of excesses in the other direction: namely, people recovering too quickly from grief, tragedy, or trauma. Honestly, I would much rather overdo the grieving than trivialize weighty subjects by making people bounce back too quickly.

I even get push-​back from people who think Sigefrith is “too modern” when in fact he is a pretty good representative of a pre-​Conquest English king… he just doesn’t fit people’s stereotypical ideas of a despotic medieval monarch, which are based on later time periods and sometimes even on different countries.

I am not sure where the “new realism” quote came from – whether it was something I said, or what – but that’s not really how I describe the evolution in the story theme to myself. The only “new realism” I am deliberately injecting is by paying more attention to historical accuracy, at least where previous chapters haven’t exploded any chance of reverting to realism now. (For example, glass windows. ) I mean things like the politics, the way Maire’s and Egelric’s crimes were treated, or how people are arranging marriages right and left, in spite of people’s romantic desires.

And also, yes, a more serious consideration of cause-​and-​effect, which admittedly does lead to more tragic consequences than might have occurred to me in the past.

But I never said “I want this story to be more realistic, therefore I will add lots of drama and tragedy.” In fact, I am a fairly optimistic person and I don’t think real life = tragedy, and I don’t think happy endings are inherently unrealistic. It’s just that I lately I feel like writing some of these weightier storylines… like big political themes, or the kingdom-​spanning consequences of Egelric’s and Maire’s savage acts.

I am trying to grow and learn as a writer, and that means taking on subjects that are difficult to handle. I won’t learn much if I just keep churning out easy little “Red Boots”-style romances. Even though they are fun! But this story isn’t an end in itself: I am using this story to challenge myself, try new things, and change and grow. People who liked the lighter storylines towards the beginning will be disappointed, I guess, and people who like weightier stuff never read this far, so they’ll never know. I reckon eventually my readership will shrink to 0!

Anyway, I need to finish this comment off. I think I agree with your analysis, maria, it’s just that I apply it on a higher level of abstraction. It’s not so much that there is too much drama in these people’s lives, it’s that there is too much drama in this story. It’s not ruining the realism so much as it’s ruining the pacing, and the ability of a reader to keep going through it. By focusing on the tragic things, it may give the impression that it’s not realistic (because life isn’t 100% tragedy), but I don’t think the tragedies themselves are unrealistic, it’s just that there’s just nothing to counterbalance them.

Pleasant things are happening all over the valley – for example, Muirenn just got married off-​stage, and that might have been a fun romance or amusing incident of man-​catching – but I am not writing about them. Even Margaret, Gwynn, Finn, and everybody else (except maybe Alred, who is too depressed to feel joy… I’ve been there) have fun in their lives at times. We just don’t see it.

So the root problem, I think, is that the ratio of fun-​to-​drama has decreased tremendously in the last months. As I said above, it’s partly because I deliberately cut out all the “fluff” in order to move through time more quickly, and partly because I just feel like writing more drama lately. We could have had some cute Brit-​Dunstan scenes, we could have had Diarmait and Sadb finally falling in love, and we could have had “Fun With Murchad, Synne, and Sigi,” but I ruthlessly cut all that out. Lately I am thinking I cut too deeply. It’s not surprising that after I went too far in one direction in December 1085 that I would go too far in the other direction in early 1086. I just need to move the balance back to a more agreeable level for everyone. (Not that I can ever hope to please everyone! *sigh*)

Thanks for your comments anyway, all of you. I don’t want to sound too defensive – or worse, aggressive – but I do put a lot of thought into my writing choices, and I do tend to have a lot of opinions of my own, which I am not shy about sharing. I’m always glad when my readers are the same way.

I’m beginning to think that whenever I lack the words to say something here, you’ll come along and say it so much more eloquently than I could. Thank you! I was getting a little deperate over here because my comment refused to say what I wanted it too. ^^

And yes, I couldn’t edit my comment. But I think it worked again since then. I’m using Firefox btw., if it helps you to know.

Okay, I can’t edit right now either. And that typo is bugging me so… *grumbles*

Comment-​editing is, apparently, broken on Verso. So I will try to fix that tonight.

Alred is my code-​monkey. *tosses peanuts*

Alred, I love you! Hang in there!

Comment editing is working again.

I will allow that it’s possible – since modern people have more leisure time to ruminate about their problems, and because we have concepts like depression and post-​traumatic stress disorder and the stages of grief to permit us to think about our problems in these terms – that modern people, on average, are more prone to be depressive or even just to feel sorry for themselves. Maybe.

But as I said above, you can’t convince me that people lived with any less emotional intensity than they do now. My theory (which is as uneducated as yours) is that everyone ends up feeling the full spectrum of human love and grief and joy and sorrow, they just have to assign those feelings proportionately based on what they have available to them in their life. For example, a girl who has lived a pampered, sheltered existence might be just as devastated if her boyfriend cheats on her, as a girl in the middle of a civil war might be if her husband is killed.

And I don’t think people were all that more lighthearted in the past, or capable of shrugging off grief and hardship with a smile. I think that is a case of modern day nostalgia for a gentler, simpler time that never was.

The key difference between reading a novel and listening to grandparents telling stories is that the novel is about things that are theoretically happening right now, and grandma’s stories are about things that happened to her sixty years in the past.

Even in our own minds, the distant past gradually becomes sweeter and softer, or at least the snarling anguish fades into a shadowy place we don’t look into very often. And that effect is probably multiplied when you’re telling stories to your grandkids.

I knew a Ukrainian couple who had both been in concentration camps during the war, and they had amusing war stories to tell. But from that I don’t assume that the war was amusing for them, or that concentration camps weren’t so bad after all, or that people were happier then, or that these two lovely people were fundamentally incapable of feeling the anguish I would feel, simply because they grew up in a different time.

From hearing their stories I conclude that the human spirit is a remarkably resilient thing, and that even in the most horrific situations that human brutality has ever invented, sometimes moments of beauty or humor will peek through like a single flower. And that time heals, and that memory is a gentle lens, and that there are probably stories they will never tell, because such knowledge ought to die out from the face of the earth.

Whereas, with a novel, the goal is to make the reader feel emotions based on what is happening to the characters right now. It’s the difference between experiencing things along with the characters, and coming back sixty years later to hear it told. My characters have no sense of perspective, no softening effect of time to help them out at this point. They’re deep down in it, and their emotions are the raw stuff.

But this:

Even her old diaries are lighthearted.

and this:

I think that Lotherians have more tendency to react with depression than they should.

give me something to think about. I leave out the “Especially if we consider that they lived in different times” part, because I don’t necessarily agree with that, but the point in itself stands alone. Maybe my characters’ reactions tend too often to the negative side. Maybe we don’t have enough people who are capable of shouldering their griefs and carrying on. I will think about that.

When I think about it may be just a problem with time. Usually time goes FASTER in the stories I read.

Yes! My pacing problem again. But good pacing in a novel is not only accomplished by spacing out the dates in time. It also depends on relieving moments of doom and gloom with bits of comedy or hope or happiness. It’s true on the level of a single scene or chapter, and it’s true on the level of the bigger story as well. I’ve gotten time moving a wee bit faster lately, but looking at my outline I see we have a big pacing problem ahead. We need some lighthearted stuff to make the sad stuff easier to get through.

Thanks for your input, as always, maria.

Edit: Wow those blockquote colors are ugly. *adds to to-​do list*

I love the group picture Ann. (The worship .gif) And all the fans are thronged around The Goddess Jenny! First row: left to right – kate, Ann, adienaynay, Alicia, Saquina, and bch. Second row: left to right – stacysaurus, Lydia, Devin (next to the ear of the Goddess), Tiffany (thinking the wand is a phallic symbol), Van and Cassie. Now to read the post thoroughly.

I don’t know about the phallic symbol, but I do seem to be holding the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in my other hand.

“ONE! TWO! FIVE!”

Oooh, where is this phallic wand we speak of, eh? We could use one of those in Lothere… hehe

I am trying to say that medieval people are more like civil war wives IMHO.

I see what you mean, but I don’t quite agree for most periods. A civil war is an unusual occurrence, and people are under a lot of stress. They find ways to deal with that which may allow them to handle difficulties and griefs that, in normal times, would have crushed them and prevented them from acting and surviving. Call it “survival mode.”

But I don’t think that just because it was medieval times, and childbirth mortality was high, and lifespans were short, and so on, that people lived their daily lives in a day-​to-​day survival mode like they would during a war or other catastrophe. I believe that they considered their level of death and poor hygiene and uncertain crop yields was simply normal for them and not a source of lifelong stress that caused them to act much differently from us, in our easier lifestyles.

As I said, I think people experience approximately the same range of emotions in all places and throughout all time periods. It’s just that the stress and fear of a medieval peasant losing his crop and fearing that his children might starve to death this winter ends up being equivalent to the stress and fear of a modern man who loses his job and fears he won’t be able to support his family… even though in our societies, his kids certainly won’t starve to death even if he has lost his last penny.

It’s a school of thought, as I said.

I am not sure if it’s reasonable to write realistic historical drama. Can we ever truly understand characters like Jane Eyre, or is there too much cultural differences?

This is where we may never agree, and neither of us can come up with evidence to convince the other, unless we make a time machine.  

My axiom is: People are basically the same, all over the world and throughout all time periods, and have the same fundamental human experiences. By tapping into those fundamental, transcendental human experiences, a novelist is able to write a book that happens in a very remote place or time period and still has the power to profoundly move the reader. Also, a really good novelist is able to help a reader understand that different place or time, by building on those common human emotions to immerse the reader in the story, and making her experience the foreign culture through the eyes of the characters.

But these are just my axioms: the unprovable basis for all my reasoning. If they are wrong, then I am wrong, and there is no way to write realistic historical fiction, because it would be too alien to modern people, and they wouldn’t be able to understand.

Indeed, I do see this phenomenon occasionally, and I am sometimes obliged to make my characters do things that are a little less than realistic because my modern readers can’t like a character who does something that was perfectly acceptable in his time period, but shocking in ours.

I mean, just a harmless example: Sigefrith and Malcolm are probably excellent medieval husbands. Maybe even too good. But none of my readers seem to like the idea of being married to them.  So sometimes I do make adjustments to make things palatable for modern readers. If I made Malcolm bend Iylaine over a chair and spank her with his belt, would my readers ever forgive him for that brutality? But to his peers it would not be brutality at all… it would be his duty as a husband to make his wife behave, because she certainly does “deserve” a beating sometimes. Malcolm’s friends probably think he is a weak husband.

Anyway, I do often have to change and omit things that would be too difficult to accept for modern readers. I don’t think there is any way to avoid it. And I am not an established author with decades of historical research behind me, so I don’t have the air of authority that would allow me to force you to accept certain things. I mean, if I make Sigefrith do some utterly 11^th century thing that sounds impossible to a modern reader, I risk hearing “No way, that is so unrealistic!” rather than “Wow… I didn’t know medieval times were like that.” See what I mean?  

That’s OK… my goal is ultimately not to write historical encyclopedias, it’s to write historical fiction, and the people I am trying to serve are my readers, not the imaginary people of a thousand years ago. If I have to bend certain facts to make things fit into a modern mind, that’s OK. But to my mind, it’s more to do with little facts and details than with the “human experience,” so to speak, which I believe hasn’t changed much.

One more thing I want to add before I finish here. I don’t want to allow any confusion between “depression” – that diseased state of mind that Alred is in – with ordinary sadness and grief. Oftentimes true clinical depression cannot be traced to a sad or stressful event at all. Whether you believe it’s a chemical disease of the brain, or a morbid manner of thinking that spirals out of control, it’s not the same thing as simply grieving. People who are simply grieving can indeed still feel joy at times, and the full range of emotions. People who are clinically depressed may lose their ability to feel anything – even sadness and grief!

Are there too many truly depressed people in Lothere? Maybe. The only people I am deliberately trying to write as depressed at the moment are Alred and perhaps Gwynn. Egelric is not depressed exactly, I think, but he dealt with his grief in horrible ways. And now he is going to have other mental problems.

But maybe depression-​like symptoms show up too often in some of my other characters. I don’t know. If it happens, it’s probably because I am the person writing it. I went through a terrible depression (several times actually—and not triggered by any sad event in my life) and it’s bound to color how I see the world – and how I imagine other people see the world.

So I will definitely think about that. If nothing else, I should make an effort to show the non-​depressed people having fun on occasion, just to make them seem more normal, and to underline how abnormal Alred’s condition is right now.

Thanks again, maria, this has been a good discussion. Useful for me to get me thinking about how I write my characters.

And about Sigefrith.. IMHO he is sometimes too good to be true in 21^st century. I wish that we would have even one as good, diplomatic and smart politician here.  

I agree with you here, maria. We could really use a politician (or a thousand) like that. But then Sigefrith HAS to rule wisely, because if he sinks his boat he’ll drown too. And it only takes a slung stone to kill a king. ^^ Does that apply for modern politicians too?. Not so much IMO. Most modern politicians have their nests nicely feathered so they can do pretty much everything they can get away with.

But I get a feeling that you are trusting the universality of human reactions too much. For example, here where I live babies sleep most often in a separate bed but in the same room.… If I read a story where a mom kissed the kids and locked their doors every night I would interpret it differently than intended.

That’s true in one sense. I am a White, middle-​class American woman born in the 1970’s so I don’t doubt there is a huge amount of White, middle-​class, late-​20^th-​century American culture that gets expressed in the story… a lot of assumptions about the commonality of some things (like how babies are raised) which are not valid in my time period, or even around the world today.

Sometimes I am aware of this, as in the case of different styles of baby-​raising, or a lot of my slang and folksy expressions. Other times I am probably not aware.

(In fact most of my medieval mothers keep the babies in their rooms until they are a year or two old. The unrealistic part is that the whole family doesn’t sleep in a single, dirty, lightless, windowless room as they did in the 11^th century. With the family cow and goats in a fenced-​off corner of the room, and chickens wandering around.)

And there are tons of anachronisms and things that simply aren’t English, because that becomes a sort of shorthand for me to engage modern readers. For example: Christmas. A Christmas involving kids coming down for lots of presents on Christmas morning is not medieval, but I love Christmas so I use it. Birthday parties: same thing. Even New Years Day is not on January 1^st in my period, but my readers would totally lose their bearings if I respected realism to that point.

I’m not saying it can’t be done in historical fiction – I could write realistic medieval Christmases and include an appendix explaining the medieval calendar if I wanted to – but I don’t want to. I have a story to tell, and I make compromises. Especially since I was so careless in the beginning, and because I am bound to be anachronistic as long as I am using the Sims to take pictures, it’s just not worth being hyper-​realistic now.

However, that’s not what we were discussing originally. I know that human culture has changed dramatically in a thousand years, and that it can differ dramatically between countries and continents and even between social classes.

My idea is that humans themselves haven’t changed all that much… that it’s possible to write about love, grief, jealousy, ambition, joy, cruelty, pride, childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, and so on in a fairly universal way. The job of the novelist is ultimately to make you sympathize with, associate with, and even vicariously live as a person who is not you. That person can be a modern-​day person from the next town over, or a young boy in an Afghan tribal region, or an Anglo-​Saxon queen in the 11^th century.

I think it can be done, and I don’t think the author even needs to change details (like co-​sleeping, or real medieval Christmas, or whatever) to do it. If the writing is strong enough, the reader can learn about other cultures by experiencing them “first-​hand” through the characters in the story.

Of course, the author can also be lazy about the details, as I am a lot of time, and still write a good story, because I also think the story is why we’re all here. That’s why I don’t fret if my Christmases are too modern, or my houses are about 500 years out of date. I do fret if my readers aren’t grasping the characters’ deeper emotions, however, or find them unrealistic.

As I said, I think people experience approximately the same range of emotions in all places and throughout all time periods.…

Yes, I agree. But I also feel that if a catastrophy goes on long enough, it will become normal. Especially if the change is slow.

I think we’re in agreement here, actually. “A catastrophe going on long enough” is another definition of “life.”  

Seriously, I think that when a person is immersed in a certain culture and that culture becomes normal for them, the fact that life in that culture is objectively more dangerous or more difficult than in some other culture is irrelevant. The people living in it don’t know that. Even if they know it intellectually, as modern people are capable of knowing about life in other regions of the world, they don’t know it viscerally or emotionally. The life you’re dealt is the one you live in, and your range of suffering and joy expands or contracts to fill the space available. Unless you are stuck in a truly inhumane situation, you live a human life.

And about Sigefrith.. IMHO he is sometimes too good to be true in 21^st century. I wish that we would have even one as good, diplomatic and smart politician here.

Same here!  

About Sigefrith… that’s the novelist’s prerogative I guess. The story is about Sigefrith and his kingdom, so it’s normal that Sigefrith is remarkable in some ways. This story would not have happened if Sigefrith had been weak or stupid, therefore Sigefrith must be strong and bold and clever. Politics didn’t work the same way back then. As Ann said, it only takes one stone.  

My premise with Sigefrith is that he truly is a Great Man. The sort of fellow that modern day professors in tweed suits write three-​volume biographies about. Unfortunately, Great Men are extreme outliers, and it’s not something that can be inherited or even taught, necessarily. What will become of Lothere when Sigefrith is gone?

But it’s relevant for my argument that reactions (aka which universal feeling is felt) are based on culture -> culture and feelings can’t be totally separated.

Well… true. I can think of an interesting example: I have read that women who live in cultures where childbirth is expected to be horrendously painful actually experience more pain when they give birth. Women who are expected to just deal with it… do deal with it rather well, and report less pain. Even though they’re all human beings in roughly the same body.

So if it is true for physical pain, how much more true must it be for emotional pain? Culture matters, to be sure. I wouldn’t claim it’s entirely irrelevant.

For example if you combine medieval child death rate and modern reactions for child death there will be troubles.

I agree with that too, as I said above, though I don’t think I have any examples of people who lost children in the normal, medieval way grieving “excessively.” (And even if I did, surely it happened sometimes that people never got over the death of a child.) There was Elfleda, but her life was pretty messed up. She only carried one baby to term, and he was kidnapped from her only weeks after his birth.

I just wonder, though, if people supposedly “cared less” about their kids because they were likely to die, and supposedly “grieved less” when they died because they were expecting it… at what point in a human life did a person feel deep love and deep grief?

As you can probably tell by my quotes and italics, I believe that they felt those emotions in roughly the same way we do. But their reactions – which includes their actions – might have been different from a modern person’s, due to the reasons I gave above. (Support network, the sense that it was not an unthinkable event, etc.)

Same thing with arranged marriages. Take a modern, American teen girl and tell her she has to marry some old guy (or some old guy’s son) because the old guy is offering her dad a lot of money… she flips out. But if it happens to Britamund, she has to accept that, and she knows she has to accept that, and she and everyone else will think she is cowardly and selfish and difficult if she does not cooperate.

And yet Britamund still has the capability to fall in love with a man – the sort of thing we think marriages must be based on. She can feel all those emotions, and at some point in her life she is bound to feel attraction to someone, even if her culture and upbringing absolutely prevents her from doing anything but dreaming about it. (Fortunately for us she seems to like Dunstan very well by now.)

Anyway, my point is that there is all the raw material available for writing emotionally fraught novels with medieval characters. The writer just has to find a way to map those universal emotions onto a particular scenario in a different culture, with sensitivity to the fact that things were experienced differently back then. It wasn’t just modern men and women wearing colored hose and princess dresses. I think we are in agreement there.

The thing that troubles me in your argument is the sense – maybe I am misunderstanding – that people were somehow immune to certain depths of emotion because life was harder back then. I don’t agree with that.

I believe it’s a modern fallacy, actually: we look back on olden times, and see how much more difficult they were than ours, and we try to put ourselves in their place and realize we could never cope with that much trouble. And we conclude that therefore people were much more stoic and hard-​hearted than we are.

I think this is also the root of that woman’s query: “Do you love your children?” because children regularly get killed in Palestine, and she had a hard time imagining loving one’s children while living in such a cruel world. But they do!

Thank you for your criticism, and for this whole discussion, really. I love speaking with someone who doesn’t change her mind so easily, just because I make a lengthy argument or she doesn’t want to cause a conflict.  You make a lot of good points and I have been thinking over some things in relation to my characters. If you want to make points about certain characters in particular, it would be helpful to name them, because by definition I am blind about my own mistakes, or I wouldn’t write them.

And I know how it is arguing in a foreign language, since my entire marriage is transacted in French. (Including arguments!) So I applaud you for your English.

“A catastrophe going on long enough” is another definition of “life.”

This sounds like something Mouse would say to Wyn. (She might add “your life.”) I will quote it.