oh no, not another anachronism

[cimorene]

Oh no, not my guy William Morris putting a New World ingredient in Europe 700 years too early!

...came out of the house clad in a green kirtle and a gown of brazil, with a golden-hilted sword girt to her side.

—The Roots of the Mountains (1889), William Morris

brazil (plural brazils)

Noun. (obsolete) A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. [14th–17th c.]

ETA: this might be wrong! Thanks to mildred_of_midgard, I now know the Wiktionary entry quoted above was incomplete 😠 and didn't inform me that brasilwood was a commonly used source of pigment/dye throughout Europe in the high middle ages and came from East Asia, frequently Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). (Brazil, the country, was named for the wood, because a close relative — the plant now known as Brazil wood — was plentiful there before being exploited almost entirely away.) The question remains whether this trade really did go so far back, but it's not so implausible after all. Morris was likely familiar with the dye's usage after 1000 CE and extrapolating backwards, as with the fiddle which was definitely incorrect, but it is possible that the wood was present in the book's setting (probably the 4th - 5th c. CE, somewhere in the a Carpathian region - see Wikipedia Hlöðskviða (also Hlǫðskviða and Hlǫðsqviða), known in English as The Battle of the Goths and Huns and occasionally known by its German name Hunnenschlachtlied for discussion of the possible historical context of the Old Norse heroic poem on the subject).

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Oopsie!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hi! Here via network, and I've been enjoying your William Morris anachronism posts. I've never read Morris, but as a Tolkien scholar, maybe I should!

I just wanted to point out that Brazilian brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata) was named after a tree found in East Asia, which was used to make dyes in Europe in the Middle Ages (Biancaea sappan). Hence the 14th century date, which is too early for a New World ingredient from Brazil.

It was fairly common for Europeans who showed up in the New World to name local flora and fauna after vague similarities with unrelated Eurasian species; hence the American elk and the European elk (aka the moose), and the American robin and the European robin.

One of my Tolkien publications even makes the case that this practice would exactly explain why Shelob has a stinger and compound eyes!

So it's still anachronistic, but I'm quibbling with "New World."

This is speculation, but given the dates, I wouldn't be surprised if brazil made its way to Europe via the Crusades. Part of the driver for the explorations that led to the colonization of the New World was "Hey, we need an easier way to get all that cool stuff we got used to before we lost the Crusades."

Also, as an etymology nerd, I looked up what the OED had to say about "brazil" and got this:

Anglo-Norman bracile, Anglo-Norman and Middle French, brasil, bresil, denoting both the wood and the dye (second half of the 12th cent. in Old French; French brésil) < brase, brese hot charcoal (French braise: see braise v.2; with reference to the colour of the dye)

braise hot charcoal, ember (12th cent. in Old French as brese; further etymology uncertain and disputed).

With the French noun compare Old Occitan braza, Catalan brasa (13th cent.), Spanish brasa (13th cent.), Portuguese brasa (14th cent.), Italian brace (late 13th cent. as bragia).

The wide distribution and early date of the Romance words seem to imply that they go back to a shared, unattested source; the most common suggestion is a borrowing < a Germanic language, although potentially related words are only attested in North Germanic, leaving the history of transmission unclear. Compare Icelandic brasa to solder (17th cent.), Norwegian regional brasa to burn with sparks, Swedish regional brasa to burn (17th cent.), of uncertain origin, perhaps related to a Germanic base denoting crackling noises.

Keep the Morris posts coming! :)

[cimorene]

That's interesting! I couldn't find any of that stuff when I tried to look it up. Of course the OED is paywalled now, so I usually check Wiktionary for etymology and citations and it said that it came from Portuguese for embers. I tried both spellings and there was no mention of the medieval context! I looked at the Wikipedia entries on the plants now and found that the Biancaea sappan page mentions it but the reference on the page for brazilwood is garbled and unclear.

But the page on brazilin says that Sri Lanka was a supplier of brasilwood to Europe in the "early middle ages", which I would not say 14th c. counts as, but there's no source.

[mildred_of_midgard]

The OED is paywalled, but I can get it through my local public library! I see that you're in Finland, though, so this may not be an option for you.

But the page on brazilin says that Sri Lanka was a supplier of brasilwood to Europe in the "early middle ages", which I would not say 14th c. counts as, but there's no source.

The pages I was finding were saying Sri Lanka/Ceylon was a major supplier in the Middle Ages, but I didn't see "early" Middle Ages! I also didn't see a source, so I left it out of the discussion.

[mildred_of_midgard]

But the page on brazilin says that Sri Lanka was a supplier of brasilwood to Europe in the "early middle ages", which I would not say 14th c. counts as, but there's no source.

Okay, so the Wikipedia article includes The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting in the bibliography, and that book can be read on archive.org here, and on page 117 I found:

In the Middle Ages Ceylon was a great centre of supply for brazil wood. It seems to have been sent from Ceylon to Alexandria, and imported from Alexandria into Europe in great quantities.

No date (and no source given), but if you're researching trade networks, maybe look into when Alexandria was importing things into Europe in great quantities. Not my period or my area, so I have no idea what the trade networks with Alexandria were like in the 5th and 6th centuries.

[cimorene]

Oh thanks, that's a good clue!

[cimorene]

I'm trying to find more about the medieval history of the trade with Ceylon and brazilwood, because trade networks did stretch from the Vikings through Roman territory to Asia and Africa in the early middle ages to an extent. I'm finding references to manuscripts discussing pigment and dye and the use of brazil in illuminations in the high medieval period, but of course there's much less written evidence about the 6th century Goths and the textile finds from cultures in the period and region are fragmentary at best. So I think actually it might be possible that this dyestuff would be present in the book if it was being traded to Europe at all at the time, but I couldn't find anything yet about it that far back.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I had the same thought! And I did a bit of googling before commenting, but I didn't find anything. My thinking was that the 13th century date is the date for the word "brazil" reaching England and being recorded in English. The operative terms here being "word" and "English": England is kind of far away from Sri Lanka, and the brazil product was evidently known in France before it was known in England (although evidently the word isn't attested much further back in time). The further east and southeast you go, the closer you get to the original source of this dye, and the better the chances it appeared earlier. And the Goths and Huns were from or ended up east and southeast of England! So the product could have been known in Central Europe at a much earlier date than the word appears in Old French, with or without having left evidence behind.

Oh, you know who might know? sollers. I haven't seen her around in a few years, but she knows her Late Antiquity. I'll try DMing her.

[viggorlijah]

I don't know the specifics but I absolutely know there was wood trade from Indonesia and SEA to China and other parts of the world from very early on, and that tree is asian. I've got at least one growing outside in the field nearby - Cæsalpinia sappan. It's really pretty. That's related to the brasil wood one which is South American and has a darker red, but it's not a huge difference in that the dying instructions and resulting red is similar. Wood and stone and metal were traded in linked chains going all the way round so you could easily have wood chips of sappanwood for dye go from Indonesia to India, then India to Alexandria and from there anywhere in Europe. I think we really underestimate how much trade happened pre-European, because Chinese Junks and the dhoby ships can carry a hell of a lot and there were sooo many going around.

[cimorene]

That's good to know! And combined with the fact that the book is probably set somewhere in present-day Germany or Czechia in the vicinity of the Danube, it seems totally possible that the wood was traded there and used as pigment.

Eta: or Crimea or the Carpathians apparently. The more I read the less it narrowed down😂

[cimorene]

That's also a good point! It might be easier to find sources in German, or Latin of course, but I'm not up to that. Crimea or the Carpathian region seem to be likely candidates according to historians placing the Germanic and Norse legends which evidently supplied the loose inspiration for the story, and they have much greater proximity. It might be safe to assume plentiful trade even in the 4th c. even in the western Carpathians, and certainly in Crimea, which was so close to Byzantium.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, I was thinking of Crimea and Byzantium, and so before I posted I looked up "brazil" and "sappan" in my copy of Warren Treadgold's A History of the Byzantine State and Society, as well as Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World (ed. G. W. Bowersock), but no hits in either.

It might be easier to find sources in German, or Latin of course

Yeah, I doubt we'd find any earlier instances of the word "brazil" than the OED was able to turn up, but we might find the product being referred to using another term. Byzantine Greek sources might also be helpful here. But I am not up for that either*! (But there might be something relevant in translation.)

* Competent albeit slow in reading German; Latin and Greek too rusty to be of use right now; hoping to fix all of these things in the next few years.

Trade network research might be a good avenue to pursue, though!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Also, related to the Huns, your first post about anachronisms made me think of this thesis, which I read eons ago. Without having read Morris, I wondered if any of the "Vorzeit" concepts in the first 12 or so pages apply. If so, anachronisms would be a feature; if not, they would be a bug. From your description, it sounds like you think it's the latter, but since he's drawing on these older epics, I wondered if his narrative might be drawing on some of the same literary techniques that result in anachronisms. Tolkien definitely employed medieval literary *techniques*, not just events and material culture, and so Morris might be, too.

In particular, your comment "I mean, he literally calls them Huns!" made me think, "But the term 'Hun' literally got applied to many different peoples!" It's why even in WWI (and maybe WWII? I forget), invading Germans were called "Huns" by Brits.

If you look at the Wikipedia article for Huns, it says:

In medieval German legend, the Huns were identified with the Hungarians, with their capital of Etzelburg (Attila-city) being identified with Esztergom or Buda.[298] The Old Norse Thidrekssaga, however, which is based on North German sources, locates Hunaland in northern Germany, with a capital at Soest in Westphalia, [299] while Attila is described as an usurpator from Frisia, who conquered the Hun country after its king Milias died. In other Old Norse sources, the term Hun is sometimes applied indiscriminately to various people, particularly from south of Scandinavia.[300] From the thirteenth-century onward, the Middle High German word for Hun, hiune, became a synonym for giant, and continued to be used in this meaning in the forms Hüne and Heune into the modern era.[301] In this way, various prehistoric megalithic structures, particularly in Northern Germany, came to be identified as Hünengräber (Hun graves) or Hünenbetten (Hun beds).[302]

And while 1) don't trust Wikipedia blindly, obviously, and 2) I am not a medievalist, I did a fair bit of medieval studies in college and grad school, and this phenomenon does jive with my memories of what I learned. It wasn't only the Huns, either; various ethnonyms would get applied in ways that we now consider ahistorical or unhistorical.

So while it's possible that Morris did tie himself down to circa 500 CE in other ways, merely having Hun incursions is not sufficient to prove that. I would be interested to know, from your reading, if there's any reason, other than our modern, sensu stricto conception of what a Hun is, to believe that Morris is tying himself down to a particular chronology, rather than using tropes like "Huns" thematically.

[cimorene]

No, I know it's true that huns didn't literally mean Huns and welsh didn't literally mean Welsh (although maybe in both cases it's a word that means foreign getting later tied to a specific case?).

There are a lot of factors in this story, starting with being apparently a few centuries after the battles with the Roman Empire, the geography, and the descriptions of the invaders, which definitely aren't possible to apply to any human people, as pointed out in the introduction I quoted, but at the same time they are inarguably Asian by physical descriptions (and the inaccurate and fantastical elements seem related to classic medieval orientalism to me, although the writer of the introduction contends that they make it not racist by reason of being fantastic).

The Huns aren't the only historical candidates for setting, but if one were to treat this as a text that CAN be pinned down to a specific historical inspiration, there are still probably limited candidates. But actually, I don't think it's likely that any specific poem or saga, let alone battle or incursion, is behind this. The Hlöðskviða I mentioned in the ETA was certainly familiar to him given his interest in old Norse literature etc, and might have given him an idea, but just reading the article on it makes clear that the content is completely different (although I do find the theories of historians about its historical setting interesting, and potentially valuable).

But still, the novel (all his writing) is very much concerned with the lifestyle and society of his Goths, and Morris was very knowledgeable about and interested in that, especially visually and in terms of all the arts and artisans and related technologies. So a mental anchoring point, or points, to inform my mental images are necessary (and unavoidable)!