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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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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
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:
But as I mentioned, absolute monarchs in my period also have to listen to their lords. I think I would summarize the difference like so:
- Can you make any given noble do what you want, but if you piss off too many of them you're looking at a coup, so you have to listen to them as a group? You might be an absolute monarch.
- Can you not make any given noble do shit, and you have to beg and/or bargain with each one for anything they give you? You might be the head of a federation.
was a warfare of - increasingly - either professional national standing armies, or (at the beginning of it) extremely professional mercenaries.
But sometimes this is how you got the standing army: by convincing your powerful subjects that the national emergency demanded troops, and then hanging onto them tooth and nail once you had them, and using them to your own advantage.
Your description of Gondor's internal situation actually reminds me a fair bit of Savoy when Victor Amadeus II came to power (1684): several distinct adjacent provinces that I think were possibly even more linguistically and ethnically different than Gondor's, powerful enfeoffed nobles running the show, poor communications even by the standards of the time in much of the area in question (we're talking about the Alps here), a fortified capital city (Turin) in a strategic location, powerful neighbors (esp. France) who want to conquer your state, nobles (like the Governor of Milan) who don't send the amount of requested troops to the head of state's aid during wartime, causing the head of state to complain, famine and general logistical difficulties.
And Victor Amadeus, who of all the rulers I've studied during my period has the personality most like Denethor, used this situation to turn his collection of provinces into an early modern centralized absolutist state*. When Louis XIV's France was threatening to invade and/or invading almost as soon as VA came to power (which I think was a much more immediate threat than Denethor faced--I seem to recall he had more lead time before the occupation of his capital), he used that situation to dramatically increase the size of the army, impose centralized taxation on rebellious subjects, build up a modern bureaucracy, etc.
You've made a convincing case that by the time Pippin shows up, Denethor hasn't managed to do this, but if he had, it wouldn't have been without precedent.
VA had one big advantage that Denethor didn't, which you alluded to: the foreign policy scene. Tolkien's wars are fought for principle. VA's wars were fought for land and wealth. Denethor didn't have the option of switching sides every few years to try to play Mordor and, say, the Corsairs of Umbar off against each other while he bought himself time to build up his army and consolidate his state. Saruman tried that, and we know how that ended.
But Denethor had the advantage of this "Númenórean-accultured-Idea of Gondor" that VA did not. His state was cobbled together over the centuries via inheritance and conquest, and his family didn't even have strong ties in some of the provinces, who were like "Who the fuck do you think you are?" He was actually trying to trade off some of his existing, more remote and less culturally bound, provinces for territory that would be easier to administer.
This has been an awesomely fun discussion, thank you!
* It's a continuum; "centralized" and "absolutist" usually mean "making sure the nobles retain enough power to want to go along with this program," "being smart enough not to ask your nobles to do anything they're not going to do," etc., not "one person has all the power."
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
“who want to occupy your state”
I think there’s some crucial difference in stakes here that to my mind is a central factor: Sauron does not want to “occupy” Gondor in the way that rival states in the 18th century occupied or conquered one another, which was usually a matter of back and forth territorial control that often left huge parts of the local power structure intact, and were operating from very similar structures and understanding of power and how society was structured.
When the most likely result of a conquest is your exile or your own enfeoffment to a new overlord that just isn’t that much different than operating as you were now - when even where divided by language your neighbours shared a very similar basic structure of life, society and expectations - the stakes are seriously reduced both for you AND for your vassals as they weigh what course of action is most beneficial. Ironically this makes the increase in centralized power much more feasible if you’re ballsy enough to try it.
Sauron is not doing that. The threat here both for Denethor and for his vassals is existential: it is mass murder and enslavenent to the point of genocide, and the obliteration of realm, culture, way of life, all of it.
This results in very different calculus and available power pressures. (If you want to see equivalent you don’t want to look at Europe in your era; you want to look at people facing down the height of Roman, Persian, Mongol, Arabic, or Turkish juggernaut expansion at the strong point of their empires.)
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
That said...not having an existential threat in my period can make local provinces *more* willing to deny their supposedly centralized head of state aid in favor of negotiating better terms with the invading enemy and sometimes just outright surrendering to them.
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
I'm a systems librarian at a university so I can ILL just about anything.
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
So Christopher Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720, talks the most about the centralization. (You will see that the actual picture is necessarily more complicated and also more debated by scholars than my superficial summary above.) Also Geoffrey Symcox's Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the Savoyard State, which is a biography that contained more material of interest to me and was a better starting point.
Warning: both works are quite dry, and I don't know how readable they are without background knowledge of the period. But if you're more interested in the internal affairs (of less interest to me) than the foreign policy (my main interest), the material in the book may be more self-contained.
There are colored maps in my foreign-policy-focused summary here that may be of assistance (the summary itself I'm not sure how helpful it will be; it assumes you've been in my friends' and my Frederick the Great salon for two years, and doesn't talk much about centralization).
I'm definitely happy to chat more on the subject if you end up wanting to!
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
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Re: reposting to avoid Rogue Strikeout!
Visiting our salon will be even better than DMing me or emailing me, because
I think Selena's traveling internationally right now, so she may not be immediately available, but we definitely plot fiction in salon, so I know she'll pitch in when she's free again.
The currently active salon post is here (the old posts are in the tag). Feel free to pop right in and reply with a description of your fantasy situation and what you're looking for.
Welcome!
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Also, just so you know, salon came about in large part because I know basically ZERO history, and
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