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The Roots of the Mountains
Reading Morris's fantasy novel with the nomadic descendants of the great House of the Wolf of the Goths, who patrol the borders of a settled agrarian civilization composed of other, distantly related, more modernized Germanic tribes, and was the inspiration for Tolkien's Dunedain.
The thing is that The House of the Wolfings, by pinning itself to the Goths repelling the Roman empire, is pretty definitely in the 1st century CE, and so The Roots of the Mountains, by narrowing itself to within a few hundred years after that,
CANNOT plausibly have a bowed string instrument.
(But they definitely do in the novel.)
Like sure, nobody has a document that says the Goths and other Germanic tribes definitely didn't have bowed string instruments, yet at the same time, the earliest evidence for a bowed string instrument anywhere in the world is in the 10th century. (I went and checked because it sounded so wrong as I was reading along. Like no that's definitely not the kind of instruments I thought these people had! And I'm probably right, which is odd, when it comes to this period and these cultures, because that was Morris's Special Interest.)
Can I just be off by five hundred years in my placing of this setting? No, because the whole central deal of this novel are Hun incursions, which were pretty much over before the year 500 CE. (True, the "Huns" in this novel are apparently supernatural monsters and not human people - I haven't met them yet, but the introduction explained this - but honestly, this defense is even weaker here than in the case of Tolkien. I mean, he literally calls them Huns! So it's definitely racist that they're horrible evil ugly dehumanized monster hordes, even if he then describes them as supernatural beings. I will not tackle this issue until I've read that part, however.)
I guess it's my dude William Morris who is uncharacteristically (given the context of his beloved special interest) mistaken. Had to happen sometime. Really, Who Cares? But I'm finding it distracting.
The thing is that The House of the Wolfings, by pinning itself to the Goths repelling the Roman empire, is pretty definitely in the 1st century CE, and so The Roots of the Mountains, by narrowing itself to within a few hundred years after that,
CANNOT plausibly have a bowed string instrument.
(But they definitely do in the novel.)
Like sure, nobody has a document that says the Goths and other Germanic tribes definitely didn't have bowed string instruments, yet at the same time, the earliest evidence for a bowed string instrument anywhere in the world is in the 10th century. (I went and checked because it sounded so wrong as I was reading along. Like no that's definitely not the kind of instruments I thought these people had! And I'm probably right, which is odd, when it comes to this period and these cultures, because that was Morris's Special Interest.)
Can I just be off by five hundred years in my placing of this setting? No, because the whole central deal of this novel are Hun incursions, which were pretty much over before the year 500 CE. (True, the "Huns" in this novel are apparently supernatural monsters and not human people - I haven't met them yet, but the introduction explained this - but honestly, this defense is even weaker here than in the case of Tolkien. I mean, he literally calls them Huns! So it's definitely racist that they're horrible evil ugly dehumanized monster hordes, even if he then describes them as supernatural beings. I will not tackle this issue until I've read that part, however.)
I guess it's my dude William Morris who is uncharacteristically (given the context of his beloved special interest) mistaken. Had to happen sometime. Really, Who Cares? But I'm finding it distracting.