I haven’t read American Gods and Anansi Boys yet, despite owning them, because I’m often really not in the mood for Neil Gaiman’s writing style. (I tried to read Neverwhere recently. Fuck, but that was a mistake.) Dude has great ideas, and worked great with Pratchett, but his storytelling works MUCH better when it’s combined with a visual medium–which is why you’ll always hear me wax insanely poetic about The Sandman comic series (you can get the whole story in 10 available tpb collections.)
The “Vikings practiced human sacrifice bit” varies. Historically, we know that when great rulers died, they often took a few friends with them into the afterlife with them, like Egyptian Pharaohs. Their wife and kids were left behind to rule in Midgard, but slaves in the household might go with their king, willingly or not. (Yes, they practiced slavery, but much like the ancient Hebrews, slaves that adapted to their way of life were pretty much immediately made part of the household and well-cared for, not treated as sub-human disposable workers like the fucking horrific shitshow that was the African slave trade that supplied the U.S. and the islands. This isn’t an excuse for *any* sort of slavery, just a historical explanation.)
Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been made up wholesale by white mainland Europeans in regards to the Vikings/Norse and the Britons.There are tales of people being stuffed into baskets and burnt over fires in Briton and amongst certain Gaulic peeoples, but it’s often conveniently left out that those were criminal executions, despite that information BEING WRITTEN DOWN by Roman historians. These were not simple thieves or basic misdemenor-committing criminals, either. That sort of execution tended to be reserved for people who had well and truly fucked up.
Vikings didn’t tolerate rape. At all. They valued their women, who were equal to and often more important than men, so rape was absolutely abhorrent–you weren’t even supposed to do that to slaves, no matter their status. A woman could get a man severely fined, castrated, or even DEAD if a man so much as touched her without her permission, though that depended on where the touch took place. (There was weird-ass rating system, but it worked for them.) Criminals, even in the cases of a woman calling out a man on his shit, were tried before the entire group, and despite what the show Vikings suggests, women were part of those trials, too. (Vikings is very pretty and follows history pretty well, but they’re not treating women correctly in Norse culture and it’s fucking annoying.)
Viking/Norse Women were recognized warriors if that was what they wanted to do; women were in charge of all finances, even if they didn’t participate in raiding; women were *historically* recognized as the only ones who were meant to perform magic, and yes, we have dug up magic wands and staffs from volva graves. Wotan (Woden/Odin) had to sacrifice his life (temporarily) and his eye after hanging on the world tree for months to be able to use magic–that’s how verboten magic was for men, and why Wotan was/is so honored. Those men who practiced magic without sacrificing like Wotan had were treated as blaspheming outcasts for going against what the Vikings considered to be the natural order.
Vikings thought of death differently than modern Western thought. What we’d see as casual killing was for them–they firmly believed there was an afterlife for everyone, and since there was an afterlife, someone dying, be they friend or foe, was just that person moving on to the next life, whether they were allowed into Valhalla or not. Valhalla often gets treated as the *only* afterlife in Viking culture, but no; it was merely considered the *best* option for the afterlife, esp. for warriors. A warrior who failed to enter Valhalla had done something to truly fuck up during their life on Midgard. Not everyone was a warrior, though, and to quote S. King from a time when he wasn’t writing like shit: “There are other worlds than these.”
….I think I tangented away from what you were asking, but since people have told me they like the historical ranting, here is more nerditry!
“The rise to power of the imperial harem is one of the most dramatic
developments in the sixteenth-century history of the Ottoman Empire. From
almost the beginning of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, who came to
the throne in 1520, until the mid-seventeenth century, high-ranking women of the Ottoman dynasty enjoyed a degree of political power and public prominence greater than ever before or after. Indeed, this period in the empire’s history is often referred to, in both popular and scholarly literature, as “the sultanate of women.”The women of the imperial harem, especially the mother of the reigning sultan and his leading concubines, were considerably more active than their predecessors in the direct exercise of political power: in creating and manipulating domestic political factions, in negotiating with foreign powers, and in acting as regents for their sons. Furthermore, they played a central role in what we might call the public culture of sovereignty: public rituals of imperial legitimation and royal patronage of monumental building and artistic production.” – Leslie P. Peirce. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.
The women of ‘The Sultanate of Women’ in TIMS’s Magnificent Century & Magnificent Century Kösem
Laura Annie Willson, co-founder of the Women’s Engineering Society, circa 1920. Willson was involved in the suffragette and trade union movements, and was imprisoned twice for her political activities.
On Feb. 20th, 1939, the German-American Bund, an American Nazi party, held a giant rally at Madison Square Garden in NYC
They adopted George Washington as their icon, calling him the “First Fascist.” Check out the “Fight Jewish Domination of Christian America” banner and the advertisement for the “Real Press” the “Free American” propaganda paper.
And just like today there was a counter-protest outside, one that was met with heavily armed police
Guess what happened when any of the Nazis so much as dared to step outside the Garden
Yeah, punched in the jaw. Even the “American Fuhrer” Fritz Kuhn was rushed on the stage by a Jewish man who tried to, wait for it, punch him in the face.
And guess what the media called these people? “Rabid anti-Nazis” who “clashed with police.” They made the anti-Nazi side seem crazed and violent and the Nazis sympathetic victims just trying to Exercise Free Speech.
This was 1939. The height of Nazism in Germany, just before the Final Solution. Liberals chose to demonize Nazi punching in the 1930′s, but guess what? It worked then, and it’ll work now.
A 2012 excavation in Turkey revealed
a 2,000-year-old mosaic that features
a super-chill skeleton reclining next to
some wine, bread, and the inscription
‘Be cheerful, live your life.’ SourceSource 2
YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.
in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.
in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.
just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.
as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.
one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.
so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.
Thank you.
Fantasy writing has often forgotten how essential communities are to support that sort of setting.
This post has some good points, but
it’s generalizing them WAY too far.
So, first off: the number of food
producers you need per full time non-food producer is not constant
across all environments and agricultural systems. The Vikings are
probably one of the worst areas to generalize from, because they
lived in an area that was very poorly suited for their agricultural
crops, to the point where their economy was dependent on raiding for
subsistence survival and iirc there was some abandonment of
settlements because the land just wasn’t set up for survival based on
grain crops. You should assume that numbers pulled from them are the absolute highest
end.
Somewhere like Ireland, with a year
round temperate climate that allows multiple growing seasons and has
high rainfall, is going to have a much lower number of food producers
per non-food producer; somewhere like Incan era Peru, with
centralized agricultural planning and spectacularly high producing
plants like the potato, will be lower still. If your food producers
are pastoralists who mainly herd instead of growing, things are again
very different; same with people who subsist mainly off of orchard
crops with wildly different labor requirements; etc.
Side note: I always see people talking
about food production historically, but very rarely cloth production,
which has generally been equally labor intensive and vital. I would
really love it if people paid attention to this.
As for the death is cheap thing –
yeah, warfare at pretty much any time in the ancient past is not
going to be exactly like modern warfare. That said, there were
absolutely periods and places where throwing peasants at the enemy
was a standard approach. To a certain extent, the reason that empires
like Rome and China were so powerful was that their
centralized planning, their vast populations and (at least in Rome, I
know less about China) their slavery-dependent food economies allowed
them to keep throwing more troops at rebellious provinces until they
won.
There have also definitely been
recorded historical incidences of slaughtering huge percentages of a
local population, such as the Mongol conquest of Baghdad or the
Turkish conquest of Constantinople. (These instances also involve
enslaving most or all of the survivors.) On a smaller scale, the
herem institution or rite among nomadic populations in the Bronze and Iron Age Middle East involved the slaughter of entire villages as a
prerequisite to taking them over and settling there.
None of this negates the fact that for
many other times and places, warfare might look more like stealing
cattle and maybe exchanging a couple projectiles, or posturing at
each other for a few hours, or a fist fight between rival families in
the market place.
In general, assume that there isn’t
an “in general,” historically.
Some relevant citations:
[On Viking agricultural economies being
poor]
“Feasting in Viking Age Iceland:
sustaining a chiefly political economy in a marginal environment” –
Davide Zori, Jesse Byock, Egill Erlendsson, Steve Martin, Thomas Wake
& Kevin J Edwards, in Antiquity 87.
“The Midsummer Solstice As It Was, Or
Was Not, Observed in Pagan Germany, Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon
England” – Sandra Billington in Folklore 119.
[discusses Peruvian and general
American agriculture, including some stuff about orchard crop systems
too]
1491: New Revelations of the Americas
Before Columbus – Charles Mann
[discusses the herem
institution mentioned above, as well as some information about
pastoral economies, though neither are a focus of the work]
The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the
Reinscribing of Tradition – Daniel E. Fleming
You can verify the information about the conquests of Constantinople
and Baghdad by checking Wikipedia, so I’m not going to cite those,
and basically any decent book about Roman warfare will include the
vast population advantage; I got that from a Roman history class.
That all gave me immense pleasure.
Just adding that in 1241, the mongolian armies under the rule of Batu khan invaded Hungary with around 90 000 soldiers, while the hungarian army consisted about 50 000. Still middle ages!
Also the invading army killed around 40-50% of the population in the span of a year (around 1.5 million people).
That said, after laying ruin to basically the whole of Eastern Europe, they went home the next year, possibly because the hardships of consolidating their rule (too big expansion in too little time, they couldn’t get the stone castles/cities either) and supporting the army.
This would make some pretty spectacular movie while being totally realistic!
ladies and gentlemen we have officially reached the “in case a nuclear attack happens” phase……. [x]
This shit is wild.
Wtf a table finna do for anybody?? There’s basically nothing you can do but die
they’re doing this to give people a sense of safety , even though we full well know this won’t work at all.
ALRIGHT KIDDOS LISTEN UP! I did emergency management for the air force which involves this fun thing called Plume Modelling (aka chart the path of death for a given bomb based on its payload, distance, type of detonation, etc) and let me tell you some actual LEGIT™ methods of minimizing damage to your life.
Unless you are within the vaporization zone (where you turn into a fucking shadow because of your proximity to the blast) there is a specific order of events nuke blasts cause and there are ways to protect against these things.
1. There is this thing called a flash to bang ratio. It is really freaking important. The first wave from a nuke is a blinding flash of light that can literally FRY YOUR RETINAS. If you believe that a nuke has just dropped on your city, HIDE AND DONT LOOK AT IT. @shesheistyy a good solid table is good for this but you’re way less likely to go blind if you get to an internal room with no windows, especially one below ground.
2. After the flash there will be the bang. If the time between the flash and the bang, counted in Mississippi seconds, is more than 10 seconds you MIGHT survive and just die of cancer later. If it’s between five and 10 buckle up kiddos because the worst is yet to come. And well if it’s less than 3 you won’t live long enough to remember this. These are loose estimates only.
3. The “bang” usually announces the arrival of the fire ball. Yes. A massive heat shock will erupt from the core of the bomb and light pretty much every thing it comes into contact with, including your flesh, on fire. Back to that whole “metal buildings underground” thing. There’s really no getting around the whole getting lit on fire if you’re too close thing.
4. Fallout. When the bomb goes off it sucks all of the shit it just vaporized up into the air with it and as the blast cools, it begins to rain down the radioactive fucked molten wreckage onto everyone in a huge radius. Just because the fallout you can see has stopped doesn’t mean the molecular radiation has stopped.
The survival factors for nuclear blasts are time, distance and shielding. The longer it takes for it to get to you the less of it there is. The further away from the source the less dead you are. Want to survive? Put 6 feet of concrete and/or 2 feet of lead between you and everything else. Yes. Those loons with their bunkers actually got something right.
NOW! About radiation! If you are so fortunate as to survive one of these blasts and not be vaporized or burnt to a crisp or die of radiation poisoning within hours, you need to understand the types of radiation.
Gamma radiation is the most “severe” in that it can penetrate your flesh through your clothes and house, causing severe illness. Gamma radiation fucks with your cell walls and disrupts your DNA. It kills you in hours, months or years. Some people survive decades. Think of gamma like the sun. Too much exposure gives you cancer.
Now Beta, on the other hand, think of Beta particles like sand on the beach. Its in the air. Its in your clothes, in the creases of your fingers. But beta particles can burn through your flesh or get into your blood stream through open wounds. Luckily they can be stopped with nonporous materials, like rubber, or foil. Make that two points for the loony conspiracy theorists. Aluminum foil does protect from beta radiation.
And finally, Alpha radiation. Think of alpha Radiation like dust motes. It takes a high density filter to prevent you from breathing them in and if you’re surrounded by rubble they’re probably everywhere. Alpha particles do the same thing as beta particles in terms of getting into your system and wrecking your shit.
So! Survival? Most likely based on dumb luck. But! If you think you’re being nuked,
1. get under ground or at least to an internal room of the building if no other options are available.
2. CLOSE YOUR EYES. Curl into the fetal position to protect your orifices and vital organs from gamma radiation and get low to the ground to reduce damage from the blast and potential ceiling collapse.
3.You will still feel the flash pass over you. Count. One, two, three… If you aren’t vaporized yet keep counting. Pray to every god ever imagined that you get to 10 before you hear the bang.
4. Bang. Try not to shit yourself. The fireball will follow almost instantly if you’re in range. range. Be prepared to start rolling to put yourself out.
5. Fallout rains down. Do not open your eyes. Do not stop praying. As hard as it is because time will feel as if it has slowed to a crawl, try not to leave your position for at least 30 minutes, although 60 minutes is better. At 30 minutes, only 60% of the potential fall out has fallen but by 60 minutes, up to 90% may have come down.
6. Remember, Alpha and beta radiation are particles. Do not put anything in your body that has not been thoroughly washed, dusted of or came from a sealed package. Point 3 for the conspiracy theorists, hot pockets and canned food are probably still safe. Do not leave shelter without goggles, and try to wrap yourself in a minimum of those weird space blankets but rubber and metal lined suits (like hazmat suits) are best for the job.
Good luck in the future apocalypse!
Basically, Duck and Cover and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye, and Remember the Fuckups Who Caused It Are Probably In A Bunker Somewhere Prepared To Be The Survival of the Human Race.
Welcome to the new Cold War. Go watch Protect And Survive. Cross your fingers.
Steel Phoenix Studios 