Month: January 2016

hweanaro:

psychopompious:

simaethae:

emilyenrose:

sathinfection:

magpiescholar:

sathinfection:

*breaks into sweat at people thinking books were common items prior to the dissemination of the printing press*

*sweats harder at people thinking books were valued for their text rather than their labor*

I always just tell myself that when authors say “he had a truly extensive library!” they mean “He had like, ten and a quarter books!” instead of “hundreds of volumes!”  It makes me feel better.

“Her library was so big you had to use two hands to carry it!”

Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. Dragons roaming around, setting things on fire, eating herds of sheep? Yeah. People having actual libraries in stuff that’s ambiguously set in the medieval period? THIS IS UNREALISTIC. 

“Wow, that guy’s so smart, he’s got hundreds of books.”

“What do you mean, smart? You’re implying this dumbass has to actually READ them?”

#i will mutter ‘elves were an oral society’ to myself all alone in my corner (via sathinfection)

IMMORTALITY AND PERFECT MEMORY AND LITERALLY EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST A DECENT SINGING VOICE. of course they were an oral society. 

so as I said to @sathinfection:

step 1: Feanor invents writing

step 2: they’re elves, they invent pretty writing

step 3: Finwe commissions an illuminated manuscript of Feanor’s passive-aggressive monograph on “th” and “s” in Noldorin Quenya to go on his coffee table, blithely ignoring Indis’ facial expressions; shows it to visitors; no-one is sure if Finwe is actually this oblivious or if it’s just really committed trolling

@curufinwefeanaro

I’m so fricking amused by Finwe doing that. It’s probably just really committed trolling. I can’t see Finwe in any another way.

Also, to talk about the other things… elves are an oral society, but not the Ñoldor. Not completely. The Sindar are, but the Ñoldor have a verb that specifically means “to read” and has the same root of Feanor’s letters. This post explains the issue of elven literacy pretty well. Of course all elves deal with oral tradition and oral arts such as singing, but writing, lore, books, (illuminated manuscripts) are clearly alike a craft. And we all know that crafting, in all of its forms, is the quickest way to give a Ñoldo a boner.

There’s more about this in the Ósanwe-kenta, but it’s been too long since I last read it.

OKAY BUT how long do you think Fëanor & Co could actually go before one of them said “THIS IS RIDICULOUS, LET’S INVENT A PRINTING PRESS”?

For that matter, how long do you think it would take the Dwarves to invent a printing press after they developed/acquired a written alphabet? (You can just straight up fight me if you think Khazad didn’t have their own written language before Daeron handed one to them).

I mean printing presses have been around for a long time in one form or another– just not in the West.  

This isn’t my area of historical expertise, so you can take everything I have to say with a grain of salt, btw– but consider what the limitations behind making a printing press would be:
 You need an alphabet; check. You need the idea, which is pretty intuitive; check. You need something to cast your alphabet in– fired clay works! it’s less durable than metal but if you don’t have access to a lot of metal, it’ll do! But for the dwarves this isn’t a problem, and it wouldn’t be a problem for the Noldor living in Aman either. You need something that’s worth the effort of printing in quantity; a certain history of the first age and the “official” story of the Ainulindale, perhaps???

One of the effects you might get from having printing presses available, but only in the hands of those who can afford to make them, and have the technology to make them, is that you get a metric shit ton of whatever texts the dominant culture wants to make. Remember how Morgoth dismisses Hurin’s knowledge of the Ainur out of hand, saying he’d learned a bunch of silly fairy tales by rote? That would make sense if there were easily disseminated versions of Elven history books being passed around to the allied humans– the accepted, dominant narrative, that everyone has seen and passed along, about what happened during the creation of Arda and the sundering of the elves, etc. etc.

Whatever biases, glossed-over-intricacies, embellishments, propaganda, literary fig-leafs replacing some embarrassing anecdote with ~unexplained magical events/eagles~, misinformation, typos,  are in this printed copy are now the well-established canon amongst everyone who was not there to remember what happened. …Which, in the case of the Music of the Ainur, was everyone who was not an Ainu. Dissenting texts and works written by offended
scholars who turn up their nose at the common, printed histories, are probably available, but exist only as individual copies. And WHO KNOWS what the dwarves got in their libraries, because hell if they’re showing that to the goyim. 

ALSO ALSO: What if printed books of common elven songs tho? What if cheap pamphlets tho? What if war propaganda tho? What if Saeros’s Big Book Of Festival Pastries and Other Recipes???? What if some asshole has a big library but no one takes it seriously because it’s just all that printed stuff that anyone over 500 years old has already read?