History. Emphasis His.
Aug. 12th, 2015 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just finished reading a book called 'Warlords'. The introduction mentions women, the closing paragraphs mentions that throughout history men (and some women) have been warlords, so I formed some expectation that there would in fact be women at some point in the dratted book.
I wrote down every single mention of a woman throughout the book.
There were six.
Three 'marrieds', one 'daughter of', and two warrior queens, both in the introduction, thus misleading me as to the usefulness of the contents.
You could stretch it to seven if you count women as a group in the paragraph about burials that asserted men were buried with weapons, women with beads. All that did for me though was bring to mind a much reposted article about how archaeologists decide who is in what graves. Historically, the ones with the weapons were men. So of course men were buried with weapons. But then, went this article I haven't looked up today, they actually re-examined the skeletons and found to their great surprise that women also had swords of their very own. Apparently this was news. Because they hadn't in fact been looking at the skeletons when deciding what their gender was.
One can hope that the pop sci re-reporting exaggerated the extent of that particular problem, but, you know, it leaves me skeptical of such sweeping gendered statements, especially when prefaced by 'obviously' and 'of course'.
Also what became amply clear in the course of reading this ... actually dreary and frustrating thing focused mostly on belt buckles and coins, because believing the anglo-saxon chronicle has gone out of fashion... what became really clear is how difficult it is to be sure about anything, when you have three, maaaaybe four sources, all written in later centuries, none of whom could spell. Oh, and who were writing in Latin about people who happened in an assortment of tribal languages. Sometimes there are inscriptions, and coins, adding a handful of words to the evidence. But since none of them could spell, or rather none of them seemed to particularly value standardised spellings, whenever a theoretically historical personage was mentioned, there were a minimum of three different versions of their name, many of them rather wildly different looking to people who don't know how the welsh wrote latin.
Also, I formed the impression historians would kill for a well labelled map. They have accounts with place names in them, but they haven't a clue where those places are, or rather, they have far too many clues.
The chapter on 'Arthur' as an extremely dubious probably not historical figure was notable in this context for making him only slightly harder to find than every other fellow in the books. Like, I was taught Hengist and Horsa on a timeline, as if they were as solid as Caesars. Apparently in the more argumentative sorts of history ie most of them written lately it's rather unclear if Horsa existed at all, since he might be a poorly copied translation of Hengist, which meant horse. In fact it's possible Hengist didn't exist at all. And generally, while we can be pretty sure there were people in the post Roman era, how sure we are a particular one of them existed on any given bit of geography makes Arthur more the far end of a curve than an actual contrast.
History is fanfiction.
Historians push a particular political agenda. (I typed 'early historians' but really...)
Bede got super wound up about the proper date of Easter, and figured that a number of deaths served the other guys right for having the wrong date.
Another guy went off on one about how none of the living warlords would just stay married to their original wife.
And then there's 'sources' that include, amongst other things, talking salmon.
The author of 'Warlords' (I put it in my bag to take back, I've forgot the name already, bad) reckoned that someone writing 120 years after the events was pretty reliable as these things go, and explained that by saying that he could give a pretty good account of his grandparents lives, including the wars, and he could still tell it when he was a grandparent, and of course before television everyone spent more time sitting around listening to their grandparents. Or words to that effect. Which, okay, sort of, but upon this sort of thing the 'history' I was taught in school rests.
Historians get in epic fights about what counts as canon, and apparently recent fashion says that none of it counts. Hence all the bits about bones, burials, and buckles. Apparently you can trace whole material cultures by their dead dude bling.
If I got anything useful about history out of this book (which I skim read because there's only so much about buckles I can take in) it's that the account I was familiar with where 'Anglo Saxons invaded Britons' is waaaaaay too simplified. Britons were a bunch of warring countries/tribes, with very fuzzy borders characterised by earthwork fortifications and buried hordes that nobody came back for. It's likely according to this author that the Anglo Saxons were often invited in, mercs basically, and they just pretty often decided that since they'd done the fighting they'd do the being boss as well. The fights were along old tribal borders and there's stories of people being invited and getting all backstabby, but there's also 'Anglo Saxon' kings with British names and shinies, like the chronicles said their kingdoms were Anglo Saxon but their ancestry probably wasn't. There probably weren't many new dudes, maybe 10%, and they probably didn't kill everyone, they were just the cool boss dudes so fashions changed as people decided to be liek them.
But the evidence for this is some very complaining monks and some bits that archaeologists dug up and some genetic studies that don't much agree. So it's a bit up for grabs.
Also the chapter on Arthur plunked him down in a particular bit of geography mostly on the basis that they don't know anything what happened there, so he might have.
Honestly it's more fun when the map actually says 'here be dragons' and leaves us to it.
This is much more boring than I'd thought it would be when I decided to read history books.
I need better history books that want to be stories.
I wrote down every single mention of a woman throughout the book.
There were six.
Three 'marrieds', one 'daughter of', and two warrior queens, both in the introduction, thus misleading me as to the usefulness of the contents.
You could stretch it to seven if you count women as a group in the paragraph about burials that asserted men were buried with weapons, women with beads. All that did for me though was bring to mind a much reposted article about how archaeologists decide who is in what graves. Historically, the ones with the weapons were men. So of course men were buried with weapons. But then, went this article I haven't looked up today, they actually re-examined the skeletons and found to their great surprise that women also had swords of their very own. Apparently this was news. Because they hadn't in fact been looking at the skeletons when deciding what their gender was.
One can hope that the pop sci re-reporting exaggerated the extent of that particular problem, but, you know, it leaves me skeptical of such sweeping gendered statements, especially when prefaced by 'obviously' and 'of course'.
Also what became amply clear in the course of reading this ... actually dreary and frustrating thing focused mostly on belt buckles and coins, because believing the anglo-saxon chronicle has gone out of fashion... what became really clear is how difficult it is to be sure about anything, when you have three, maaaaybe four sources, all written in later centuries, none of whom could spell. Oh, and who were writing in Latin about people who happened in an assortment of tribal languages. Sometimes there are inscriptions, and coins, adding a handful of words to the evidence. But since none of them could spell, or rather none of them seemed to particularly value standardised spellings, whenever a theoretically historical personage was mentioned, there were a minimum of three different versions of their name, many of them rather wildly different looking to people who don't know how the welsh wrote latin.
Also, I formed the impression historians would kill for a well labelled map. They have accounts with place names in them, but they haven't a clue where those places are, or rather, they have far too many clues.
The chapter on 'Arthur' as an extremely dubious probably not historical figure was notable in this context for making him only slightly harder to find than every other fellow in the books. Like, I was taught Hengist and Horsa on a timeline, as if they were as solid as Caesars. Apparently in the more argumentative sorts of history ie most of them written lately it's rather unclear if Horsa existed at all, since he might be a poorly copied translation of Hengist, which meant horse. In fact it's possible Hengist didn't exist at all. And generally, while we can be pretty sure there were people in the post Roman era, how sure we are a particular one of them existed on any given bit of geography makes Arthur more the far end of a curve than an actual contrast.
History is fanfiction.
Historians push a particular political agenda. (I typed 'early historians' but really...)
Bede got super wound up about the proper date of Easter, and figured that a number of deaths served the other guys right for having the wrong date.
Another guy went off on one about how none of the living warlords would just stay married to their original wife.
And then there's 'sources' that include, amongst other things, talking salmon.
The author of 'Warlords' (I put it in my bag to take back, I've forgot the name already, bad) reckoned that someone writing 120 years after the events was pretty reliable as these things go, and explained that by saying that he could give a pretty good account of his grandparents lives, including the wars, and he could still tell it when he was a grandparent, and of course before television everyone spent more time sitting around listening to their grandparents. Or words to that effect. Which, okay, sort of, but upon this sort of thing the 'history' I was taught in school rests.
Historians get in epic fights about what counts as canon, and apparently recent fashion says that none of it counts. Hence all the bits about bones, burials, and buckles. Apparently you can trace whole material cultures by their dead dude bling.
If I got anything useful about history out of this book (which I skim read because there's only so much about buckles I can take in) it's that the account I was familiar with where 'Anglo Saxons invaded Britons' is waaaaaay too simplified. Britons were a bunch of warring countries/tribes, with very fuzzy borders characterised by earthwork fortifications and buried hordes that nobody came back for. It's likely according to this author that the Anglo Saxons were often invited in, mercs basically, and they just pretty often decided that since they'd done the fighting they'd do the being boss as well. The fights were along old tribal borders and there's stories of people being invited and getting all backstabby, but there's also 'Anglo Saxon' kings with British names and shinies, like the chronicles said their kingdoms were Anglo Saxon but their ancestry probably wasn't. There probably weren't many new dudes, maybe 10%, and they probably didn't kill everyone, they were just the cool boss dudes so fashions changed as people decided to be liek them.
But the evidence for this is some very complaining monks and some bits that archaeologists dug up and some genetic studies that don't much agree. So it's a bit up for grabs.
Also the chapter on Arthur plunked him down in a particular bit of geography mostly on the basis that they don't know anything what happened there, so he might have.
Honestly it's more fun when the map actually says 'here be dragons' and leaves us to it.
This is much more boring than I'd thought it would be when I decided to read history books.
I need better history books that want to be stories.