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There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
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Shakespeare’s also very different when one has a really SOLID sense of his era’s social history - not the disconnected soundbites they occasionally give but SOLID, like knowing eg what the social perceptions around “what age should people get married/have even a political marriage consummated” actually were (spoilers: much older than most people think).
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and am probably going to on the podcast in time to comebut off the top of my head:Among the most clear/simple ones is that in particular the texts that would become The Silmarillion are not a novel, they are a (fictional) history chronicle. They're not supposed to be a novel; they don't work as a novel; they're not trying to be a novel. They're a mediaeval-style chronicle of (supposed) history, which follows an entirely different set of conventions, understandings, assumptions and . . .short-hands, for lack of a better word. There's an entire structure of understanding in terms of how stories are relayed that's quite different.
But even Lord of the Rings, for example, contains in the prologue - in the section entitled "Note On The Shire Records" - a detailed recension history of the supposed text (the Red Book) that the story comes from: how it came to exist, and how it was transmitted down to the translator (supposedly Tolkien).
Recension histories are really important in work with mediaeval texts, because you can have two physical texts that CLAIM to be the same thing (eg: the texts we call the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) even from the same time, but contain literally different words on the pages either great or small because they come from different recension histories.
Which is to say: once upon a time at least two copies were made and ended up in different places and were copied and annotated and added to (or subtracted from) or rewritten or miscopied or otherwise reproduced in different ways by different scribes at varying levels of fidelity depending on circumstance until you have multiple copies of the same text that look like this (to borrow from Wikipedia):
So before you can talk about any text you have to talk about which version of the text it is, tracing it back and explaining how you know it's this version and how it came through its entire recension history to be physically in front of you.
Because some scribe with an Opinion might once upon a time have shifted a line that once said that Earl Aelfgar was exiled for no reason to say that Earl Aelfgar admitted in public to being a dirty traitor. And it's rather important to know where that change came from if it did; it's important to know whose hands were on the document because in a hand-copied world any one of those hands could have made big changes; and whether or not they likely DID is going to be a question of culture, oversight, influence, baseline assumptions and other contexts, and to assess the text you have to know what THOSE are, too.
The thing is that these were the texts and the stories and the context that JRRT spent his entire actual working life deeply immersed in; this was his actual career and he cared deeply enough for it to be fluent in multiple dead languages in order to do it properly. (Those times he really wanted DWJ to stfu and get out of the classroom like all the other students were as likely to be because he wanted to get back to editing Beowulf or reading fourth-century Gothic records as it was to have been about working on the fiction). The fictional material history of the Red Book is - by the time he's finishing LotR - a context and part of the story he's telling. So that's another huge thing.
A third is that he really, truly knows what he's talking about when it comes to how a mediaeval-tech-level world works. There's a reasonably well known GRRM snark that we don't know anything about Aragorn's tax policies, but actually you can accurately assess Denethor's from the information in the book, including the fact that the Pelennor is not just A Big Field Around The Fortress To Have A Battle In - it's the agricultural base that is Minas Tirith's primary immediate day-to-day food support, and if you know what you're looking at, that's right there in the text. Denethor initially resists abandoning it because that's a good way to starve; this is something that consistently was an issue in all the endless (and oh god were they endless, way, way more common and frequent than most people who haven't focused heavily on the era realize) wars and sieges that occupied most of the pre-modern world.
(Denethor, by the by, is sitting as the functional head of what to our understanding is a lot like a federation of semi-independent political entities - municipalities, or states in the sense of how the US has states - which answer to him but aren't intensively controlled by him, which would put significant limits on his powers of taxation and requisition . . . and does, which is actually indicated by a number of factors in Pippin's time in Minas Tirith. This probably wasn't the de jure setup since everyone continually refers to "the realm of Gondor" but DE FACTO it's very clear that there are various areas under the control of some local important person, lord, or even strong-man, who is actually keeping that area running, and has a LOT of independence from whatever Denethor wants).
But one of the striking things is that Tolkien does not, at any point, stop to explain this to the audience; he's just writing in a world with a lot of shit he takes for granted and he's also deeply embedded in his pov characters (because this is supposedly their record) and they are, bluntly, ignorant.
So the logistics of the defense of Minas Tirith - which are actually REALLY solid - pass by in front of the eyes of an extremely oblivious Pippin who is EXPLICITLY not paying attention because he's overtired, overwhelmed and so far out of his depths the fish have lights on their heads. There's no scaffolding to go, "ah yes, hello, modern day reader, here is a bit about How Fortresses Work that I'm telling you" the way that bluntly MOST fantasy writers (myself included) sprinkle these things through, especially if we're coming up on some element that we know is going to be counterintuitive to most of our readership - there's just Pippin being carried along over the agricultural fields and being half-awake as Gandalf stops to talk to people who are doing the things that you'd do.
(His battle tactics are also accurate for the kinds of warfare he describes, including eg the amount of time, in the book, everyone sits around doing nothing very exciting during the siege of Helm's Deep, and likewise later in the Siege of Minas Tirith, because Sieges are . . . a lot of sitting around doing nothing, punctuated by moments of intense terror.)
That's just a start of it, but. Coming back to it after my degree was just . . . an experience of things that had previously been invisible, or that I hadn't understood the meaning of, snapping into focus in a way that really did make the entire thing very different. And it was specifically the social history side of my degree, rather than either the middle English lit or the "kings and dates" type history - it was the time spent in the seminars actually doing my own edition of a 11th century English will from the Chancery court rolls.
(Relatedly among the notes was discovered Tolkien's sketch of Bilbo's will, which is as follows:
This was clearly written before he'd settled on Frodo's final name form, but. Like. That there is a mediaeval will that is, right down to things that are quite close to the Standard Phrasings I was taught to look for when attempting to transcribe and read this kind of nonsense - I burst out giggling when I read "and all furniture appurtenances goods perishable or imperishable and chattels movable and immovable" because that's ONE OF THEM and in our seminar's group efforts around the [expletive] blurry photocopy of a facsimile of the wills we were transcribing we were in fact always on the look out for the pattern "mevvables and immevvables" (as they would often be written in Middle English) in order to start figuring out how THIS scribe might have varied his godsdamn letter-forms in order to READ the rest of it.
Obviously this will was never in the printed books but just . . . that kind of thing. The lens becomes so different, and so much wider.
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(And GRRM can suck a Domesday Book. He likes to pretend he's all Historical Realism, then sneers at research, acts like basically nobody believes in their religion except a few fanatics, and writes his Dothraki on a solid foundation of racist stereotypes.)
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and discover that Edward the Elder was a ratfink who probably murdered his sister in order to control Mercia and hid all of their conflicts and half her achievements in the version of the Chronicle he controlled via making it seem like he was just randomly out there building/repairing fortresses and she likewise for no reason" to be something that's "fun."But the crucial thing is that this was the context that Tolkien was so steeped in that it was second nature to him and translates directly into how he wrote Arda once he started taking it seriously (ie as of Lord of the Rings getting heavy on him) and in a lot of ways I don't even think it was Conscious - he was not thinking "Ah, yes, I will Make This Story An Accurate Mediaeval Representation" as such - it was just this was where he lived, what he actually lived and breathed in most of his life and what he actually did care deeply about.
There's this tendency to simplify things with "he made up the stories to explain the languages" which is . . . well I mean it's incorrect flat out (he himself firmly sites the inspiration for Eä and Arda in his and his lost friends' drives to develop a non-Normanized shared mythology and there is so much historical complexity in that ALREADY that people are often very dismissive of but like . . . the Norman invasion, long ago as it was, was also a massive colonial-imperial and culture-destroying even on the island so like . . . . but that's another tangent), but also frames "language" and "history" as being separate and that really, really wasn't how he would have experienced it, given the areas of history he was deeply involved in?
Language and language spread and language change and language history in early-Mediaeval (and late Antiquity) Europe and especially on the Isles . . . is social history. It's not SIMPLISTIC social history (the Mercians were Old English speaking from the first point that we know about them, for example, but it's genuinely arguable how Germanic their overall culture was before . . . honestly tenth century or so, especially OUTSIDE of the royal dynasties . . . ) but it's social history and it's all interconnected.
I don't think it's useful to (even given the localization of using Old English as a shorthand to represent Rohirric for example) say like, "the Rohirrim ARE the Old English", but I think it is super relevant to be like: he was actually extremely aware of how population movements and migrations of culture and so on happened across western Eurasia; how cultures defined by one thing (ie a maritime culture) would migrate to a new area and shift that alignment (into an inland/infantry based culture).
AND STUFF.
Which is related to GRRM's misunderstanding because, well. HE'S ACTUALLY SO IGNORANT he . . . doesn't entirely realize all of what he doesn't know, and so says stupidass things in public. It just cracked me up on one of my post-degree rereads that of course we don't know ARAGORN'S tax policies because we don't see any of his reign on the ground . . . but actually I can tell you some really solid things about what the sociopolitical situation Denethor had to deal with was, because of how well things like "the description of Pippin watching the military forces coming in from the various territories" actually align and make sense . . . . if you know about how societies functioning at this tech and combat level work, and so on.
The portrait of a previously very strong and well-ordered federation* that is seriously on the ropes with regions that are definitely hemming and hawing over how much they're willing to support the centralized government vs retaining enough resources to maybe go it alone, is actually really clear and really consistent! The presence of a money economy that is nonetheless clearly also on the ropes given the givens is ALSO really clear and consistent, and from that I can actually make a lot of really grounded assumptions about how Denethor is running this ship. AND STUFF.
But it's all background; it's all based in assumptions he makes in the background and assumes you're making too (or doesn't even bother to think about); assumptions about how fast people can travel, what they need to travel, what risks there are, how armies WORK, all of these things, but he's not then filling anyone in on it. These are just . . . assumptions. Which makes it a very different thing to read AFTER one picks up enough of the background knowledge that he has to actually catch all the times that he's not ACTUALLY handwaving, or ignoring, a factor: he's just assuming you understand how what he's showing you takes that into account.
*how much it counted as a voluntary federation vs an empire is gonna come down to brass tacks we don't quite have and is a long and complex discussion that, hilariously, based on details in the appendices and the Silm I can have! but would make me run out of space in this comment and probably bore everyone, but tl;dr I would argue by DENETHOR's time it's been a pretty voluntary federation for a while just because Minas Tirith/Anórien as a region really can't . . . enforce shit on anyone, they're under way too much pressure from their actual enemy.
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No, please do! (I mean, if Rachel doesn't mind.) Because I have no strong opinion on the matter and am willing to be convinced, especially as I've never read the entirety of the evidence base with this question in mind. So all I've got is what I remember from the last time I did serious Tolkien scholarship on other topics, and that was almost 10 years ago now.
One thing I remember is this passage from the letters:
Also to be Prince of Ithilien, the greatest noble after Dol Amroth in the revived Númenórean state of Gondor, soon to be of imperial power and prestige, was not a ‘market-garden job’ as you term it. Until much had been done by the restored King, the P. of Ithilien would be the resident march-warden of Gondor, in its main eastward outpost – and also would have many duties in rehabilitating the lost territory, and clearing it of outlaws and orc-remnants, not to speak of the dreadful vale of Minas Ithil (Morgul). I did not, naturally, go into details about the way in which Aragorn, as King of Gondor, would govern the realm. But it was made clear that there was much fighting, and in the earlier years of A.’s reign expeditions against enemies in the East. The chief commanders, under the King, would be Faramir and Imrahil; and one of these would normally remain a military commander at home in the King’s absence. A Númenórean King was monarch, with the power of unquestioned decision in debate; but he governed the realm with the frame of ancient law, of which he was administrator (and interpreter) but not the maker. In all debatable matters of importance domestic, or external, however, even Denethor had a Council, and at least listened to what the Lords of the Fiefs and the Captains of the Forces had to say. Aragorn re-established the Great Council of Gondor, and in that Faramir, who remained by inheritance the Steward (or representative of the King during his absence abroad, or sickness, or between his death and the accession of his heir) would [be] the chief counsellor.
The things that strike me as interesting here are "even Denethor," which makes it sound like Denethor was ruling in a *more* centralized fashion than a Numenorean monarch, and "at least listened to what they had to say." In my experience of European polities, a monarch (even what we would call an "absolute" monarch--another one of those fraught terms that historians would like you to know does not mean what you* think it means) has a council and has to listen to what they say, and is the interpreter and administrator of laws but not the maker. A head of a federation (like, say, the Holy Roman Empire), has to do a lot more than listen to what the council says!
Philosophically speaking, Tolkien was a big fan of a hands-off monarchy, and he represents Aragorn as that type, the good kind of monarch, and Denethor (and Boromir) as way too hands-on controlly for his tastes. Denethor is in some ways at the end of a decline, and Aragorn a restoration of The Way It Should Be Done.
Which makes me wonder if that's what Tolkien was getting at with Aragorn re-establishing the Great Council. This kind of thing is done by monarchs ceding power, sometimes to devastating effect (see also the French Revolution). Denethor may be delegating less than a Numenorean monarch, not more.
but tl;dr I would argue by DENETHOR's time it's been a pretty voluntary federation for a while just because Minas Tirith/Anórien as a region really can't . . . enforce shit on anyone, they're under way too much pressure from their actual enemy.
This happens, but it can also go the other way! My period is the period of monarchs using the pressure of external wars precisely to turn loose federations of nobles and strongmen into absolutism and centralization. Making the monarchy stronger was a not infrequent excuse for starting or getting into a war, and if the war was already there, a common way of harnessing it.
And personality-wise, Denethor strikes me as someone who would very much like to turn a federation, if that was what he inherited, into a centralized government, as well as someone who was intelligent and subtle enough to harness a war or the threat of war into getting the control he wanted.
He's also less peripatetic than I would expect of someone of his personality trying to hold an inherited (this part is key) voluntary federation together.
On the other hand, I don't see (or remember seeing, at least) the bureaucracy I would expect of someone with a centralized state or trying to centralize his state. And that's not just my period speaking--Diocletian, for example, tried to pull a crumbling Roman Empire together precisely by instituting/ramping up the bureaucracy.
(Speaking of Roman emperors, Denethor's "Unlike my son, I don't mind being called Steward instead of King, I just want the power" attitude reminds me of Augustus's primus inter pares.)
Granted, the palantir would compensate for some of the bureaucracy as well as some of the need for a peripatetic court, but not all of it in either case.
I would be interested in your counterevidence, since you've obviously read with this question in mind! I'm just pulling things out of my hat at random.
* You the average person, not you, the well-informed
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I have very little doubt that Denethor rules Minas Tirith and Anórien (the region/province that is to Minas Anor [aka Minas Tirith] as Ithilien was to Minas Ithil) extremely autocratically; he may even be making overall decisions that way, and Dol Amroth in particular given Imrahil's specific choices and loyalties (Denethor was his brother-in-law) may hew extremely close to that.
But bluntly by the list of the arriving reinforcements, plus the sheer number of people (and supplies) Aragorn is able to gather up from various places after dealing with the Corsairs/the threat of the Corsairs, outside of Anórien and Dol Amroth, lotta people who are technically enfeoffed to Minas Tirith ain't showing up.
The Lord of Lossarnach brings about two hundred fighters, rather than two thousand, because while he's willing to show up he's Noped out of taking more than two hundred fighters away from the defense of, well, Lossarnach, his actual province. The Lord of Ringló Vale sends three hundred under one of his sons; Morthond at least shows up in person with both his sons, but he's only got a few hundred people; ditto Pennith Galen. The coastal province of Ethir sends "some hundred or more [men], spared from the ships"; Lamedon sends "a few grim hillmen without a captain". Anfalas has a couple hundred, almost none of them with any equipment except "the household" of the lord.
Conversely, after scouring the Pelargirs, Aragorn is able to bring up over four thousand from the provinces he passed through, and that's only a couple of them.
The state of the stores in Minas Tirith pretty solidly indicate that the various provinces have been equally conservative in what supplies they've been sending, at least for the last while.
The fact that they're ABLE to do so indicates at least a generation where Minas Tirith is not commanding a centralized, professional army of any capacity - even by the collapse of the Empire, Roman emperors and pretenders and generals WERE able to command the vast majority of legions to pick up and abandon their long-term stations, because of the systemic and continued centralized discipline. Denethor is not running that kind of political enterprise.
You're totally right: monarchs (and Denethor is absolutely acting as one, regardless of his specific title) throughout history have used The Threat of War to increase their power. And six hundred years ago his great-great grandfather might've done the same. Denethor can't: he's logistically fucked.
The monarchs of your period were able to do that because of the way that warfare worked, and also because of the politics of the era, which were very much those of each state against ALL the other states, and was a warfare of - increasingly - either professional national standing armies, or (at the beginning of it) extremely professional mercenaries.
That meant if Count Such and Such said "actually, your majesty, go fuck yourself", King So and So could (and usually would) be able to take direct military action against them - and indeed had frequently spent the early 16th and late 15th centuries doing exactly that, and teaching the nobility to Not.
That is in no way shape or form the situation that Denethor is in. Denethor is in a flat zero sum conflict against an enemy who wants to (and will) absolutely obliterate him and his entire realm off the face of the planet and who has very explicitly been fighting a war of attrition with Gondor on exactly those terms since before the death of the last king of Anárion's line - and is winning that war at this point.
If Angbor of Lamedon decides - as he did, in fact - to go "fuck it, me and my army are staying here because bluntly I care way less if Denethor and Minas Tirith fall and die than about the threat to my actual province" and as a result only a handful of presumably the most overall-patriotic-yay-Gondor bother going north to the muster, Denethor can . . . do exactly bupkiss. If Angbor is sending less grain because he's making sure the stockpiles for Lamedon come first, Denethor can also do exactly bupkiss.
Because Denethor has no military capacity to enforce anything and hasn't for at least as long as Boromir's been an adult and probably longer ("those who shelter behind give much praise, but little help"); even Ecthelion, his father, is desperate enough that "Thorongil" can wander into the city without family or history and out of pure personal capacity become a major military commander who can go "I'm taking a fleet to go smash Umbar" and . . . do that.
No, the councils involved did not have de jure power, and theoretically Denethor controls the whole realm, by law and by structure; de facto, the reason Denethor listens to what the Lords of the Fiefs have to say is because if they start flipping him off he can't do shit, because he has no way to make them do fuck all: he cannot divert military forces from dealing with Sauron and trying will just mean Gondor is Over. He has no legal requirement to allow them a vote or anything, but he has a pragmatic and logistical absolute need to keep them on-side; if they aren't on-side, Gondor is Over, and relying on the cultural investment in the Idea of Gondor without any military backup to deal with breakaway regions means that you really can't put too much pressure on it without it shattering.
Similarly Denethor does not have the logistical ability to have a heavily centralized administration: the roads aren't good enough, there aren't enough people to man road-guard stations, or to be part of a centralized administrative network. We see that as we follow Gandalf and Pippin riding to Minas Tirith from Rohan. The provincial fiefdoms HAVE to be doing most of that; and as a result, again, all that Denethor has to rely on to make sure they're playing ball at ALL is going to be this idea of Gondor as a united Realm.
As it happens, the Númenórean-accultured-Idea of Gondor was really strong, and really powerful, and was actually enough to keep eg Lamedon and Lossarnach and the other provinces and crucially Dol Amroth at least willing to still participate, so that it seemed more valuable to them at all times to remain "Lord of Lossarnach, Province of Gondor" than it would to just say fuckit and become King of Lossarnach; and culture can in fact have that kind of power, and the IDEA of a Great Realm can have it as well.
But whether Denethor likes it or not (and I'd be willing to bet hard cash he doesn't), de facto, he has to work within a framework where whether or not the Lords of the Fiefs WANT to be part of Gondor is in fact the most important thing because he can't do shit if they decide they don't.
QED Angbor of Lamedon keeping four thousand armed men back because making sure Lamedon wasn't fucked up by the Corsairs was more important to him than making sure Minas Tirith (and thus, you know . . . Gondor . . . ) didn't fall.
And crucially: what's relayed to us by Pippin's POV summary of what he hears in the crowds watching? That was expected. "Ah. Nobody's sending even half their forces, because of the news of that fleet." They take that for granted.
Now to be clear: at multiple points in European history, monarchs with a much more hardcore centralized control over their nobility absolutely did strip areas of their military forces in order to win in the "core" of the kingdom, allowing outer regions to be BADLY raided and destroyed, dealing with the rebuilding and/or running the other raiding forces out AFTER they'd maintained their central hold and control. That absolutely happened.
When they couldn't do that, it was usually a sign that dynasty was on the way out; the ones that had that point of weakness and DIDN'T end up getting punted were usually smart enough not to ASK their vassals to be cool with their own lands being burned while Paris or Rome was saved, but solved the problem some other way, and then . . . worked on increasing their centralized control later.
So when I say I'm pretty sure that's what he's working with by the War of the Ring, what Gondor is dealing with by his era in general, I mean in the de facto world of logistics as evidenced by his actual ability to command forces and supplies - not the de jure world of "they have formal voting rights within a delineated official structure"; I'm looking at things with an interest of "how is the power on the ground actually shaking out", not "what does the cultural rule-book say".
Now on the upside the fact that it DIDN'T occur to anyone to radically change the cultural rulebook means that it's gonna be WAY easier for Aragorn to return a truly centralized function to the area! But.
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Even just having read his own other works, his essays and letters and such, you realize he's encoding arguments (and sometimes agreements) with other scholars into the Hobbit and LOTR! You think that's just a casual remark by Gimli about caves, but actually, Tolkien wrote the same opinion in an essay about how Beowulf scholars were Doing It Wrong.
I burst out giggling when I read "and all furniture appurtenances goods perishable or imperishable and chattels movable and immovable" because that's ONE OF THEM
I had the same experience reading a one-paragraph scrap of paper from his unpublished notes in the HoME: it's line-by-line from Dionysius of Halicarnassus! He just changed the names of the characters and "Rome" to "Rivendell"! I was all, "Omg, I recognize his passage!" He must have had the book open in front of him; either that or he'd made a point of memorizing that passage before. It's one of those things where if the source material weren't in the public domain, it would be plagiarism. (This not a dig at Tolkien, just saying you can see him showing his work.)
This is what I love about Tolkien: you can read his stuff at the surface level, and have "Dragons and heroes and adventures, cool!" experience, and you can spend a lifetime digging beneath the surface to figure out what he was thinking when he wrote something, and it will be incredibly rewarding.
* Probably because the Middle Ages were only a casual interest of mine, and Tolkien wasn't that into the diplomatic schemes of the 1720s-1740s. :P
** Even having my main training in linguistics meant that I could suddenly understand what he was doing with his languages, even without making a special study of it, because conlangs are for some reason boring to me.
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“ because conlangs are for some reason boring to me.”
I mean most conlangs ARE totally divorced from any kind of social history ime: they might be theory of linguistics accurate but they’re generally totally disconnected from “this happened because a mass migration and culture change was driven by-“ etc, let ALONE anything more involved. So I could see that being boring in general.
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Makes sense to me. And for my money they’re usually not even showing inventive imagination or speculation about it because they’re not involved in “so how does this relate to the actual society” etc.
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My perception from my period (late 17th-18th centuries) is that 12-14 was the minimum for consummating a political marriage, with most being consummated later (but many still shocking by our standards), but I'd be interested to know 1) more details, 2) if it was different in Shakespeare's slightly earlier period.
I've definitely seen fantasy commenters go in the other direction and be shocked and horrified that a 14-yo princess is being shipped off to a political marriage, and making bogus arguments about how UNHISTORICAL this is for the European Middle Ages, and I'm like, oh, you sweet summer child. They were still doing it in my period, and with the caveat that when you go back into the Middle Ages, we're less likely to know anyone's exact birth year, you can see 14-yos getting married and having kids in the Middle Ages too.
Hell, my great-grandmother was married at 14 and producing kids at 15 in the early 20th century, and there was one of her near relatives who I forget the exact relationship of, but she was married off by her family at 13.
But if there's a common perception that single-digit age children were having their marriages consummated, then no--they were engaged and sometimes shipped off to their future husband's court as toddlers, but (again, at least in my period), it was considered detrimental to their health to have sex before about 12-14 (depending on gender, location, and time). And that long wait often gave sufficient time for the political winds to shift and the marriage never to go through, so their actual marriage wouldn't be consummated in practice until they were even older.
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12-ish was indeed the LEGAL minimum. It was not the SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE minimum. It happened! But not often, and it was looked down on.
Super bluntly the younger the wife got pregnant, the more likely she was to DIE, and on top of that the baby will also die, and the mediaevals and early-moderns were VERY well aware of this, as they were also well aware that every single act of coitus is risking a pregnancy. You don't actually want to kill off your incredibly-valuable-political-alliance-token (ie: your wife, or your son's wife) via a pregnancy Too Young.
So in the upper ranks, while the wife might actually take off to live in the other dynasty's home at an earlier age, you can track both in writings and in dates of birth, and in social opprobrium for those who broke this norm, that you're still looking at ~18 or older.
Get lower in society and ahhahaha actually our average age of first marriage (ie: this has EXCLUDED the widows and widowers who are remarrying, so no they are NOT skewing the results) is mid-twenties. Sometimes, it's LATE twenties. Only in very specific boom times does it go down below that.
This is because the way that the culture worked, and the demands on a new household, you literally couldn't afford to do it before then. It would take you to that age to be ABLE to AFFORD to be married, because mediaeval and early-modern Western European and especially English society relied heavily on both genders as part of the economic unit that allowed a household to survive, and at that time actually really disapproved of wide age gaps in marriage.
This is a significant departure both from Antiquity (that tended to marry off much younger women to older men, because women really weren't part of the economic unit as much) and quite different from your period (where age gaps between husband and wife were increasing, probably in part because of the increasing industrialization of base-level production - that TENDS to be the thing that correlates, but obviously as you know bob correlation may not be causation**): in the mediaeval and early modern periods, marriages were usually between similar ages and that age was "in their twenties."
Again, the LEGALITIES were not that: it was LEGAL to marry (and consummate) as young as 12-ish (assuming she'd passed menarche) and there was nothing about age differences being a problem. But legality and social acceptability are two different things, and even social ACCEPTABILITY is very different from social NORM.
And socially we have a LOT of evidence that it was considered a really dick move (and one that implied you were a shitty husband and/or in-law) to have a teenage bride get pregnant; that age-gaps especially where the man was significantly older than the woman were Not Cool (and could end up with a rough music harassment - SIGNIFICANT and up to assault sometimes); and that you only BOTHERED with the marriage younger than the 20s if you had significant property you were trying to lock down, and even there sexual consummation was often delayed specifically because of the known risk.
Now note: this is very much Western-by-Northwestern Europe: Germania-Francia-Britannia (to name landmasses instead of countries because hahahaha), and Southern Europe was its own thing and had very different culture influences. This is part of why Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Italy (Those Crazy Italians and their Crazy Thing With Marrying Off Babies), and you are still supposed to think that Paris and Capulet are being gross and creepy to marry off Juliet to an older man that young, it's just expected that Italians Are Weird And Creepy.
Speaking of which: Romeo and Juliet! Totally different play after deep-diving early-modern English culture, except then you come around and realize he literally told you in detail what the play was about in the prologue so it's weird that we miss it so much. (tl;dr: this play is about the Feud and the total failure of anyone to deal with the feud until it killed their babies, because they're Morons. The end.)
ETA: BUT ALSO - fwiw I have also seen the occasional fantasy commentator who has indeed probably been told some of this at some point and has interpreted this as "our age-of-consummation norms are accurate to the mediaevals" which is itself deeply stupid, in much the same way that the same kind of person often takes "actually mediaeval and early modern women were central to the economic unit and operated with a particular kind of significant influence/etc" as "mediaeval and early-modern culture weren't actually virulently misogynistic and anti-woman", which is ALSO not correct!
It's just more complicated and the simplistic formula of "well this was the norm in 1830 and The Past Was Worse so it must've been even worse in 1330" that gets applied is ALSO not going to steer you the right way; the society of 1330 might have hated women plenty, and it did, but it also needed a lot of them doing significant jobs in public to FUNCTION . . .and did, and humans being human most of these women turned around and took what power they could where they could, and so on.
Nobody was going to STOP eg the Duke of whatever from having sex with his twelve year old bride, but they were definitely going to JUDGE him for it, judge his father-in-law for allowing it, and consider it not something they were about to allow happen with their own daughter who definitely wasn't going off to the new ally's house until she was 16 and was going to go with her confessor and a retinue who were to Discourage Nuptial Visits until she'd been there a year or three.
The law wasn't going to STOP Old Man Miller from marrying 16 year old Elizabeth from the village but his house being surrounded by masked, torch-bearing locals chanting about his shame and not-so-subtly threatening to burn his house down might well make him think twice, or make her father think twice and keep her home until she was 20 and married one of the three 20yo men from the village instead.
And so on. And that did in fact change as we moved into the latter half of the 17th and into the early 18th century: women married younger and younger, and were also less and less part of the PUBLIC economic unit, all the more so the further up the ranks of society you went. It became different.
**(nb yes I know you said late 17th century ie 1670s-onward, not late 1700s, but even at that point COMPARED to eg 1450 production in food etc was moving towards a mass organized scale associated with what we call "industrial", which you probably know but I wanted to put here because I know some people might be like "1690 was way before the Industrial Revolution!" and like yes, but it was still increasingly industrialIZED compared to what came before)
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Yeah, that was definitely true of the lower classes in my period: they couldn't afford to get married, so the average age of first marriage for domestic servants was late twenties/early thirties. (As you note, the ages and types of marriages for servants did change significantly between 1670 and 1790, and also there was a gradient from north to south.)
For heads of state? War. War, impending war, avoiding war, recently ended war, dictated who married who when. You can see them holding on their daughters until their 20s in order to drag more concessions out of their neighbors during peacetime, and you can see them shipping off their daughter the moment the war is breaking out and they need an alliance too badly to quibble. [Impressionistic, but I read a lot of diplomatic history.]
You also see royal fathers of my period going "Why isn't my teenage daughter pregnant yet! What's wrong with my son-in-law?!" or "What do you mean, my son let a thirteen-year-old girl tell him she didn't want to have sex? Show her who's boss, son! You've got to get this marriage off on the right foot!"
Compleeetely different considerations from the class whose first question had to be "can I afford to have kids?"
Mind you, even among heads of state, there was also the consideration of "Will I be able to find a husband for all my daughters?" and "Will I have to support them forever?" and "If I support them forever, what happens when I die? Will they have an income of their own?" that led even heads of state with large treasuries to want to get their daughters married off asap.
For readers who might not know this--I'm sure you do!--there was even, at least in France, symbolic marriage consummation for children who were too young or if one party was unwilling and the other wasn't going to force it. They would lie side by side in bed, fully dressed, and the sharing of the bed would be witnessed by courtiers and make it more official than if they hadn't done this, but less official than if sex had taken place. (Sometimes the sex was actually witnessed! as with Henri II and Catherine de' Medici in 1533, both 14 years old.)
If the parties were really not on good terms, the bridegroom might just stand beside the bed and touch his leg to hers without fully getting in the bed. Those marriages were even easier to annull than your average marriage.
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So hilariously through most of my period consummation was actually much less important for the "realness" of the marriage. That was something that became more important again after the Reformation, because the Protestants de-sacralized marriage and even though the Catholics didn't, there was a significant knock-on effect that got more intense as time went on, getting into the stuff you're familiar with.
The theological rule for marriage in my period was: you were married if you said you were married in "words of the present tense" (eg "I marry you" or "I do" in response to the "do you"), or if you said you'd GET married in words of the FUTURE tense and then had sex (so yes: boys who got girls to sleep with them on the basis of "I'll totally marry you later" were absolutely dragged in front of canon courts to discover hahaha ACTUALLY, bro, you ARE married now already).
This was a hard line; your only way out of it in terms of "annulled for non-consummation" was in fact if one party (usually the man) had DECEIVED the other party about whether he was CAPABLE of consummating. So eg if a woman found out that her husband was impotent and he'd KNOWN (or should have known) that he was impotent before they married, then the marriage could be annulled.
There were detailed examinations for this by "knowledgeable women of the village". (So a dude couldn't get OUT of a marriage free and clear by lying ABOUT this just because he didn't want to sleep with his wife.) Which yes does in fact mean that there are court cases where as far as we know two or three village matrons took a guy into another room to determine whether or not he could get it up via a handjob in order to determine whether a marriage could be annulled, because the mediaevals are WONDERFUL like that.
On the other hand if he became impotent after the marriage or didn't know or hadn't known, nope!
Otherwise, if you said "I do" and there was no destructive impediment (ie thing that made marriage theologically impossible regardless of anything else), you were married. End of story. The sacrament had been performed, the union was complete in God's eyes, that's it!
The Church had to work for a few centuries to ESTABLISH this, mind, and as I said it fell apart come the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up, or which should have made the marriage impossible AND other FUTURE marriages impossible, but who cares I'm the King (looking at you Eleanor and Henry . . . )whenever they could! But the other flipside was the obsession with the Witnessed Consummation was a later thing that came back in AFTER the Reformation thanks to the effect that Protestant desacralization of marriage had on the entire affair, and attendant theological confusion, especially when countries were switching back and forth on what they were every ten years or so.
Shakespeare's era would have been at the wobbly point in time for this one, but still solidly erring on the side of, even the nobility were mostly reserving their daughters until at least late teenagerhood if not beyond, or if they surrendered them were doing so with retinues and support staff.
And again: outliers definitely happened! But there's a difference as we know bob between the outliers and the norms. (I have some speculation about the changing role of women OVERALL also having an effect on how willing the bride's family were to have younger women in the diplomatic role - there's also a strong indication a lot of the time in my period that they also tended not to be interested in sending the daughter out to the husband until she was old enough to be a USEFUL driver of their dynasty's interests, which a 14 year old is usually not - and vice versa - in a society where politics was less symbolic and much more rooted on individual personalities and talents than it was moving to be later on, but I don't have the transitional knowledge to back that up as my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)
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This is ringing a bell from translating medieval canon law in Latin, thanks for the reminder!
also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up
"After umpteen years of marriage, we just discovered we're too closely related! I need an annulment so I can go marry someone equally closely related who might not be barren!" One historian I was reading recently got snarky about this. Most of them just report it. :P
One party saying they were forced into the marriage was also valid grounds for annulment, at least in the Renaissance and continuing into my period. Usually (impressionistically speaking, I have no stats) this is the woman speaking, but 15th-century Louis XII comes to mind: he wanted a divorce, so he argued that he was married against his will below the age of consent (they were both about 11-14, of course no one knew exactly), and also claimed he'd never consummated the marriage (something his wife contested).
Women obviously had a stronger case, overall, for being made to do things without their consent.
(Which reminds me, in my period, Protestant King Frederick William I asked his local pastors if filial piety meant he could marry his daughter off against her will. They all agreed marriage was a sacrament and required the consent of both parties. His response? "I don't like your answer, so I'm going to do it anyway.")
my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)
See, I agree with this, which is my focus starts when the Wars of Religion are over and everyone is openly fighting over territory and trade! Hence my period begins with the late 17th century. XD
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Whereas in my period, historians are at pains to tell us modern readers that contemporaries would not have batted an eye at a huge age difference among nobility and royalty, and that when your first wife died, of course you married another 17-yo to raise and/or replace the kids from your first marriage--and that was the nicest husbands!
Uncle/niece marriages, or marrying below your class, were the things that were *done* by nobles and royals, but definitely not the norm and quite scandalous.
ETA: BUT ALSO - fwiw I have also seen the occasional fantasy commentator who has indeed probably been told some of this at some point and has interpreted this as "our age-of-consummation norms are accurate to the mediaevals" which is itself deeply stupid, in much the same way that the same kind of person often takes "actually mediaeval and early modern women were central to the economic unit and operated with a particular kind of significant influence/etc" as "mediaeval and early-modern culture weren't actually virulently misogynistic and anti-woman", which is ALSO not correct!
This and this!
"well this was the norm in 1830 and The Past Was Worse so it must've been even worse in 1330"
I have facepalmed at this very argument!
This is part of why Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Italy (Those Crazy Italians and their Crazy Thing With Marrying Off Babies), and you are still supposed to think that Paris and Capulet are being gross and creepy to marry off Juliet to an older man that young, it's just expected that Italians Are Weird And Creepy.
Huh. Yeah, a number of the examples I can think of off the top of my head, from 1000-1800, have involved Italians, but usually intermarrying with German or French nobles/royals.
As for Italian-internal practices among "normal" people, the only thing I would know well enough to speak to is Renaissance Florence. To copy-paste the stats from John Najemy's History of Florence:
Among all classes, men in the city married in smaller numbers and later in life than did men in the countryside. And while there was less variation in the ages at which women married, the city had many more widows than the contado. In all cities of Florentine Tuscany surveyed by the Catasto, the average age of marriage for women was just under 19, and for men just under 28. In the Florentine contado it was over 19 for women and just under 24 for men. But in Florence the average age of women marrying for the first time was between 17 and 18, and the vast majority of women who married did so by their early twenties; those who did not mostly entered convents. For men in the city, the average age at first marriage was around 30, but 12% of all men never married. The large age difference between husbands and wives (averaging 12 years, and in many cases much more) accounts for the startling number of urban widows: 25% of women over the age of 12 were widows in 1427. Many were widowed in their twenties, and few ever remarried.
You also get stats from the police records in Renaissance Florence (scandalous among contemporaries for its pre-Savonorola laissez-faire attitude toward male same-sex relationships) relating to sodomy, where, say 90+% of the "passive" partners recorded between 1478-1502* are below 18, and 90+% of the "active" partners are above 18. The passive partners start at age 6 and really take off at 13, peaking in the 15-18 range. Which is skeevy as hell by modern standards! But not UNHISTORICAL as some seem to believe.
* Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence.
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I mean to be fair I should have made it clear that this was an area where that was the perception by English people of Italians (which would have been heavily depending on Specific Stories About Rich Folk itself, as well as a hell of exotification and the combination of Italy Is Civilization and Italy Is Horrible Decadence), so; in terms of definites all I know is that I know in Southern Europe things WERE somewhat different, and my social history grounding in those regions is insufficient to be able to make definite statements, other than a general awareness that among the nobility in the city-states, women were much more cloistered/controlled in their movements, and often married off younger and so on.
But English PERCEPTION of Italy was that Shakespeare could set his play there and have it be a Feud with Creepy Nobles Forcibly Marrying Babies . . . .without it appearing to be him actually saying "English nobility sucks" and getting in shit for it. XD Italy was, in terms of the cultural imaginary, familiar enough to be able to set stories that made sense to the audience, while being foreign enough to get away with things he might not otherwise have been able to get away with (and exotic enough to be exciting).
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough that it's just a signal that both Capulet and Paris himself (who is a relative to the prince) are selfish and semi-corrupt and care more about their own benefit than about making good choices for the realm (as Paris is enmeshing his family with Capulet's which is going to make it harder for the Prince to properly adjudicate and manage the feud's detrimental effect on Verona; Mercrutio's behaviour and enmeshment with the Montagues is doing the same on that side; and the Prince is doing exactly fuck all to prevent this; thus spreading the responsibility for "this feud is wrecking Verona" around nice and thick).
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it. Because social norms are different from social approval are different from legality. XD But yeah.
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From what I have read, including those two sources, Renaissance Florence was demographically a lot more like classical Athens in this sense, in that you get the upper class women cloistered, married off at young ages, men having to wait until they were almost 30 to get married, and a lot more homosexuality due to men having far fewer options. The government even came up with state-sponsored prostitution at one point to get the men to stop fucking each other and start fucking lower class women like God meant them to!
Having an ENGLISH noble say things like "younger than [13] are happy mothers made" would revulse the crowd to the point that you'd have to, like, somehow have Paris be VILLAINOUS and probably even somehow not REALLY a noble, or else you're implying that Our Own Nobility is somehow very bad (and they'll get upset with you); having an Italian one makes use of the "oh those weird and crazy Italians" enough
Ah, that makes sense and is not something I would have picked up on! 16th century English perceptions of Italians is too far outside my wheelhouse. I have an idea of who was doing what outside my period (including your points about women as economic actors, the older age of marriage outside the upper classes, individual cases of medieval and Renaissance political marriages, etc.), but what was perceived how by whom outside my period is not something I can speak to. Thank you!
Were a few of those English nobles probably still marrying and consummating with teenagers? Yeah probably but that doesn't mean anyone would TALK about it or publicly APPROVE of it.
From earlier in the century, off the top of my head, Catherine Howard comes to mind (she wasn't a super young teenager, but the age difference was significant), and Mary, Queen of Scots (she was young, but she and her husband were roughly the same age, and the marriage might never have been consummated), and Lady Jane Grey (but she was 16, not 13, and I don't know if it was consummated, and she and her husband were roughly the same age)--was public perception of these marriages (the marriage, not the head-chopping part) that bad? (Oh, lol, I just realized all three were executed. Only one by her husband. :P)
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Okay, so, question that came up a few months later! (If you don't mind.) Does that "Weird Italians" thing also apply to Juliet being the first one to bring up marriage, i.e. propose? What *would* an English marriage proposal look like in those days? (Assuming a marriage of love and not an arranged marriage.)
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And to be clear, Shakespeare is absolutely and deliberately using the exoticism of his Italian location to talk ABOUT things in English society with plausible deniability; he is using his setting as a way to throw things into a sharper more dramatic relief, but without either a) actually saying that his OWN nobility (who could, you know, fuck his life right over) were that bad, or b) making his audience defensive and annoyed at his play (which he needed them to come see in order to make money).
Feuding and violent armed brawls in the streets were absolutely a London Problem, but an Italian setting let him ramp everything up to 11, AND avoid the risk of being seen as critical of the powers that actually had control over his life and/or their partisans.
English women were absolutely seen as more robust (wholesomely so) than their Continental and especially Southern European counterparts. Obviously we lack as MUCH documentary evidence for How These Things Are Done at that point in time than we have in, eg, 1750, let alone 1890, but there's no indication that it was particularly shocking for the woman to be the one declaring love and pushing the marriage. To some extent, particularly in eras where war was not an ever-present constant, if it didn't roll out that way it was because bluntly SHE was a more valuable commodity than he was - he might have more power, but given mortality rates for women in childbirth, unless there was a war on frankly most fertile women would have at least two suitors actively pursuing her.
I will note, however, that Juliet does not actually propose; what she says is this:
Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed.
If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I'll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.
She says if his intent is marriage - if all of his love-pleading is an honourable and morally upright one, seeking a moral and licit outcome, rather than to just exploit her - then tell her where to meet him. And that's absolutely within the bounds of normal.
Now there IS a thing going on with her specific and active and delighted mutual involvement in the love-process, which is a literary one and is Shakespeare basically shit-talking Petrarch (who was at the time a kind of overwhelming Exemplar of Love/Love Poetry/Etc in elite contexts) and saying Petrarchan love (and sonnets) sucked and his own portrayals (and sonnets) were way better. But that's only coincidentally entwined with the "usage of exotic locales to talk shit about local problems without getting called out for it".
(You'd think it would be moreso, given Petrarch is, well, Italian! But no, because Petrarch was Italian of a couple hundred years ago and part of the Intellectual Movement that Defined Elite Everything at that point in time so he wasn't the same KIND of Italian as Those Hotheads of Right Now Brawling in the Streets, because humans are very good at this kind of curly thinking.)
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She says if his intent is marriage - if all of his love-pleading is an honourable dand morally upright one, seeking a moral and licit outcome, rather than to just exploit her - then tell her where to meet him.
Interesting, because to me, a marriage proposal is indicating that you're interested in marrying and asking the other person if they are too, and that seems to be what Juliet is communicating. What nuance am I missing here?
Also, are there any sources you can recommend that would talk about the rituals of marriages and proposals during this period, in some detail?
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