Fnord
Troubadour
Economics is my field, and I have spent a good amount of my life reading and re-reading history through that lens on the side (I'll save my rants lamenting the abysmal lack of history in graduate economics curricula for another day) but recently stumbled upon this passage near the beginning of Matt Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist" where he discusses the idyllic vision of the "country cottage" many people hold for life in the past:
As an avid fan of fantasy literature and role-playing games, this was fun to read. Though I've never harbored the idyllic image of "shire-like" villages of simplicity and pastoral life, I thought this quote was sufficiently jarring in that it pushed all those elements together. Sometimes, as an amateur writer and world-builder for my roleplaying game groups, I need to be ripped away from my rosy-tinted vision and be reminded what medieval life was actually like.
Do any of the Mythic Scribers write particularly gritty fantasy like that and if you do, what are your inspirations and challenges (especially since magic can somewhat assuage some of the above conditions)? I'd like to capture more of this atmosphere.
"Oh please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbor’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Father’s jacket cost him a month’s wages but is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy."
As an avid fan of fantasy literature and role-playing games, this was fun to read. Though I've never harbored the idyllic image of "shire-like" villages of simplicity and pastoral life, I thought this quote was sufficiently jarring in that it pushed all those elements together. Sometimes, as an amateur writer and world-builder for my roleplaying game groups, I need to be ripped away from my rosy-tinted vision and be reminded what medieval life was actually like.
Do any of the Mythic Scribers write particularly gritty fantasy like that and if you do, what are your inspirations and challenges (especially since magic can somewhat assuage some of the above conditions)? I'd like to capture more of this atmosphere.