guardians_song (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guardians_song) wrote2013-10-21 02:01 am
guardians_song) wrote2013-10-21 02:01 am
Entry tags:
One must imagine those times were a good deal kinder to dyslexics than the present day.
Wintour told Fawkes of their plan to "doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott",[3]
[...]
On the evening of 26 October, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away, and to "retyre youre self into yowre contee whence yow maye expect the event in safti for ... they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament".[33]
The more I see of writing From Olden Times, the more I grow more kindly in my mind to the misspelling-plagued authors from fanfiction.net. Perhaps we are the perverse deviants, not they.
*grimaces* Also, if you need quick text for any passwords, just grab any bunch of Scots text from the Casket Letters. No one will recognize it.
This is deplorable. Any fool with Google at hand can find half a dozen plaintext copies of bestsellers on blogs of dubious repute within five minutes and half as many search pages, but the only copies of the Casket Letters are in Google Books and Archive.org?
Honestly, one will find nothing more like a tabloid-trashy epic in Renaissance times than the story of Mary Queen of Scots, princess of a savage realm raised amongst the grandest court in the land, then sent back home after the tragic death of her sickly young husband and the sour scheming of his witchy mother, only to find all her romantic ideals frustrated by coarse noblemen and raving priests, soon finding love in her charming second husband but equally soon finding herself betrayed by his shiftiness and depravity, escaping from murderous conspirators on horseback while heavily pregnant, then giving birth, eventually experiencing something ambiguously bodice-ripper-ish with her husband's murderer, marrying him...
...then fleeing the country with yet more murderous conspirators at her heels, cashing in a token of promised aid with her cousin (the queen of the next realm over), and then finding herself imprisoned by said cousin, who wasn't too keen on the family dimwit taking the grand symbol of diplomatic kinship seriously...
...finally suffering bravely through decades of imprisonment, only to be executed when her desperate involvement in a plot to bring down her cousin turns out to have been a set-up for her death all along, and entering forever into the realms of history...
"Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England."
...Okay, mother of all run-on sentences, but you know something? I did not make any of that shit up.
Did I mention that she managed all those shenanigans in Scotland before she was twenty-six?
Historical epics only work so well because the underlying material is so ridiculous and over-dramatic. Historical-fiction writers are really the same as movie-novelizers, or the video-game-novelizers that abound on fanfiction.net. It's just a dang sight harder to get hold of the original canon for that "fandom" than it is for a movie or game in current distribution.
I must admit, I don't like history for the more reasoned and humanistic undercurrents. I like it for the completely trashy and tabloid-like aspects, which are really central to a good deal of historical works which have survived from antiquity (hullo, Tacitus, hullo, Suetonius, hullo, Dio, hullo, Plutarch, hullo, Thucydides...), presumably because the scribes copying them out by hand didn't fall asleep drooling on their copies... and which always seem to be downplayed by the Great Intellectuals reporting on them, rather possibly because the Great Intellectuals dislike admitting to the hoi polloi that they could possibly enjoy anything so common as trashy melodrama writ large. :P
(Incidentally, check out the Song of Roland sometime. A noble and dignified song of war, as written by those infinitely cultured people, the French.
He grasps the oliphant, which he never wanted to lose,
And strikes [a pagan] on his golden helmet, studded with gold and gems.
He shatters the steel, his skull and his bones;
He put both his eyes out of their sockets
And cast him dead down at his feet.
In all fairness, you can tell Roland is still French, because this is his next comment.
Then he says: 'Wretched pagan, how did you dare
Grab hold of me, without thought for right or wrong?
Anyone who hears of this will regard you as mad.
Now my oliphant is split at its broad end;
The crystal and the gold have come away.'
'I mean, by God and all the angels, forget that my entire army has been brutally slaughtered, my brains are literally running out my ears, and I just smashed you so hard over the head that your eyes exploded out of your skull. You made me chip my bling, you craven bastard!'
Yes, tell me again how our desensitized, depraved media is the first to EVER popularize and glorify unrealistic levels of gore! *rolls eyes*)
[Also - look! A non-Pokemon-related post! On this journal? Surely it's the End of the World as We Know It! (And I feel fine.) :P]
[...]
On the evening of 26 October, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away, and to "retyre youre self into yowre contee whence yow maye expect the event in safti for ... they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament".[33]
The more I see of writing From Olden Times, the more I grow more kindly in my mind to the misspelling-plagued authors from fanfiction.net. Perhaps we are the perverse deviants, not they.
*grimaces* Also, if you need quick text for any passwords, just grab any bunch of Scots text from the Casket Letters. No one will recognize it.
This is deplorable. Any fool with Google at hand can find half a dozen plaintext copies of bestsellers on blogs of dubious repute within five minutes and half as many search pages, but the only copies of the Casket Letters are in Google Books and Archive.org?
Honestly, one will find nothing more like a tabloid-trashy epic in Renaissance times than the story of Mary Queen of Scots, princess of a savage realm raised amongst the grandest court in the land, then sent back home after the tragic death of her sickly young husband and the sour scheming of his witchy mother, only to find all her romantic ideals frustrated by coarse noblemen and raving priests, soon finding love in her charming second husband but equally soon finding herself betrayed by his shiftiness and depravity, escaping from murderous conspirators on horseback while heavily pregnant, then giving birth, eventually experiencing something ambiguously bodice-ripper-ish with her husband's murderer, marrying him...
...then fleeing the country with yet more murderous conspirators at her heels, cashing in a token of promised aid with her cousin (the queen of the next realm over), and then finding herself imprisoned by said cousin, who wasn't too keen on the family dimwit taking the grand symbol of diplomatic kinship seriously...
...finally suffering bravely through decades of imprisonment, only to be executed when her desperate involvement in a plot to bring down her cousin turns out to have been a set-up for her death all along, and entering forever into the realms of history...
"Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England."
...Okay, mother of all run-on sentences, but you know something? I did not make any of that shit up.
Did I mention that she managed all those shenanigans in Scotland before she was twenty-six?
Historical epics only work so well because the underlying material is so ridiculous and over-dramatic. Historical-fiction writers are really the same as movie-novelizers, or the video-game-novelizers that abound on fanfiction.net. It's just a dang sight harder to get hold of the original canon for that "fandom" than it is for a movie or game in current distribution.
I must admit, I don't like history for the more reasoned and humanistic undercurrents. I like it for the completely trashy and tabloid-like aspects, which are really central to a good deal of historical works which have survived from antiquity (hullo, Tacitus, hullo, Suetonius, hullo, Dio, hullo, Plutarch, hullo, Thucydides...), presumably because the scribes copying them out by hand didn't fall asleep drooling on their copies... and which always seem to be downplayed by the Great Intellectuals reporting on them, rather possibly because the Great Intellectuals dislike admitting to the hoi polloi that they could possibly enjoy anything so common as trashy melodrama writ large. :P
(Incidentally, check out the Song of Roland sometime. A noble and dignified song of war, as written by those infinitely cultured people, the French.
He grasps the oliphant, which he never wanted to lose,
And strikes [a pagan] on his golden helmet, studded with gold and gems.
He shatters the steel, his skull and his bones;
He put both his eyes out of their sockets
And cast him dead down at his feet.
In all fairness, you can tell Roland is still French, because this is his next comment.
Then he says: 'Wretched pagan, how did you dare
Grab hold of me, without thought for right or wrong?
Anyone who hears of this will regard you as mad.
Now my oliphant is split at its broad end;
The crystal and the gold have come away.'
'I mean, by God and all the angels, forget that my entire army has been brutally slaughtered, my brains are literally running out my ears, and I just smashed you so hard over the head that your eyes exploded out of your skull. You made me chip my bling, you craven bastard!'
Yes, tell me again how our desensitized, depraved media is the first to EVER popularize and glorify unrealistic levels of gore! *rolls eyes*)
[Also - look! A non-Pokemon-related post! On this journal? Surely it's the End of the World as We Know It! (And I feel fine.) :P]