Discussing Historical 'Accuracy' and diversity in Fantasy Adaptation with Erikson & Esslemont 

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that series. I will have to look it up.

Loved the Jack Whyte novels.

They are incredibly generous with their time. (And they are both very patient with me 😁). Thanks for watching.

I thought that you might know a bit about this... but *someone* was off on holiday and was unavailable to chat. 😁😁😁 It could be fun to discuss all this once you are back in your routine, my friend.

Can you tell that we have known each other for a long time? Erikson puts up with a lot from me. 🤣🤣

I remember reading The Crystal Cave (or was it the Ice Cave... my memory is awful for titles) when I was a kid. I am fairly sure that was one of her Arthurian stories. I will be dreadfully embarrassed if it was someone else's. But I loved it.

@@ACriticalDragon Your memory is correct! That's the first book of what became a 5 book series, though it started as a trilogy.

Criminally underrated series. There's some absolutely gorgeous prose.

So could I.

You are very welcome. I am glad that you enjoyed it.

I know for a fact that both authors are working away.

@@ACriticalDragonWhen weren’t they ever..

@@thomasley4006 don't let them see that. They might start slacking off. 🤣🤣

I am glad that you enjoyed it. There are always instances and stories in which race, ethnicity, and culture are really important, but when it comes to fantasy stories there can be a lot more flexibility, especially when they are not essential to the character arc or the narrative.

Mac, never fear. History is not my subject and I always love learning more. Thanks for the recommendations.

At the time, they billed it as the 'historical' real Arthur story. A lot of the early texts refer to Arthur as both Roman and Briton. So he could have been a Celt.

You are the second person to mention this series. I will definitely have a look. Thanks.

​​@@ACriticalDragonThirdeded. 😁 There are two distinct, 'sexy time' as Allen would say, scenes in the first two books that were, to me, a bit jarring, but apart from that, it wasa pretty good read. And no magic, more sleight of hand.

I am glad that you found it interesting. There is more than one way to tell a story... even a hiSTORY. 🤣🤣

@@ACriticalDragon good one!

Population movements and developments from the ancient world to today are fascinating. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I knew.

Sherdly not...

Don't call me Sherdly.

Historical accuracy is awesome, but only if the audience is aware that what is being shown is accurate. Even then, when it comes to Historical Fantasy, there is going to be a huge grey area about the fantastical elements and how much leeway that has in relation to 'accuracy '.

@@ACriticalDragon Maybe "authenticity" is a better term than "accuracy." The thing that always gets me is costumes, armor, and set design - getting those things right (or at least putting in some effort to) goes a long way for me. I totally agree about fantasy, of course - with fantasy worlds as long as things are internally consistent, they can be anything (that's in fact part of the allure).

@CatastrophicDisease and then you have something like The Iliad in which Bronze and Iron age weapons are depicted together. Or Arthurian stories in which they wear full plate.

@@ACriticalDragon The Iliad is super interesting because you can clearly see that mix you mentioned, due to Homer living in the iron age and yet the story itself being passed down for centuries prior. It's funny though, if I were to see an Iliad movie I would prefer if they abandoned that and went full bronze age - can't really explain why outside of a personal love of historical recreation.

I am glad that you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.

Yup. Arthurian myth is a massive collection of myths, legends, and complete fabrications and inventions, written and rewritten multiple times over nearly 1000 years. There are megalithic tombs in Ireland that are remarkably similar to tombs found in France that are thousands of years old... but we have the modern notion that Ireland's history is one of rural, parochial Isolation. Stories are told to the modern audience, and there is a looooong history of adapting work to meet the 'modern' audience's views, values, and ideologies.

@@ACriticalDragon you've got legends of giants from the west haven't you? Tuatha Dé Danann?

@@Vinnie2501 and the Fomorions.

Unless the plot cirles arounf a holy war like the Edan series, Second Apocalypse, Lions of Al Rashan, Gunmetal Gods...

I will have to see if I can find a copy. It sounds fascinating.

It was actually caused by some of the reactions to the casting news. The casting itself is certainly something that will have to be handled carefully to avoid the old cliched trope of the PoC magical helper to the White hero, that is something that I think should bear scrutiny. But the disbelief that a person of colour *could* be the character is something that I find fault with. It is entirely possible. There are plenty of stories of captives from raids becoming part of the clan once they have served out their time and accepted/become acculturated. The Last Kingdom books and series are all about that... I wonder why that is never seen as a problem... hmmm

@@ACriticalDragon Even in The Winter King books there is a POC as a heavily influential character. Sagramore is portrayed as a Black North African Cavalryman who joined with Arthur in Western Europe.

People who take fantasy books as history are more to blame than the books themselves. Historical fiction is certainly more culpable in that regard than a genre that is called 'Fantasy'. I mean, it is right there in the name of the genre.

You're right, I should've been more careful with my phrasing. My point was moreso that for a lot of people, the fantasy genre can be the only time they see a setting that is not heavily industrialized and it is easy, consciously or not, to carry over some of the assumptions of the settings of many fantasy books into a (mis)understanding of what the actual past may have looked like. Largely a failure on the part of the consumer and the critics they listen to maybe, but I think there are definitely those on the other side that play into this as well be they authors, producers, marketers, etc.

I agree with you. When we read fantasy ostensibly set in pseudo-medieval Europe, it perpetuates stereotypes... those stereotypes then reinforce the reader's assumptions about the actual history... they go on to become writers... rinse and repeat. We are all guilty of it. A great example of this is the shock that people feel when they see the meme about a samurai being able to fax Abraham Lincoln... our notions of time and geography and technology are suddenly all in conflict.

@@ACriticalDragon Some real-life samurai served as mercenaries for Spain in Mexico in the early 17th century. I've always wished this was mined for a historical drama.

The history of histories is a fascinating look at how different trends, philosophies, and norms can radically alter our understanding of events. The things we view as important, and what history proves to be important can be radically different.

That is a great point. Interestingly though, with so much of our lives documented online and electronically, how much of that will survive? Videos, photos, email, social media, even news and scholarship, are increasingly electronic only. That creates a very real problem... what happens when the technology changes?

@ACriticalDragon I print out all of your RU-vid videos! 😂 In all seriousness, this is something I've been thinking about. As nice as it is to have terabytes of digital artifacts, I worry about losing it. So I need a backup plan. Nowadays, all these digital services are supposed to let the user download their data. So I could have my own little farm of servers and store all my stuff there. Kind of have my own little wayback machine. 😄

Stop motion Critical Dragon videos... genius. We could make educational flick books, and make MILLIONS!!!!! 😂😂😂

@@ACriticalDragon sign me up!

It is fascinating how modern perceptions of race, culture, society etc. shape our perception of past societies. Even today there are 'pure' Irish people with darker skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. Standing in a crowd you could easily mistake them for Mediterranean or Moroccan despite them being of Irish descent for untold generations. In the early 20th Century, Irish, Italian, Spanish, even Portuguese were not considered properly 'white' in America. in 19th Century England, my pale self would not have been considered fully white. But it can be incredibly difficult to reimagine past societies having completely different cultural values and perceptions of race given how ubiquitous the discourse today is.

@@ACriticalDragon That's not entirely what I meant. For one, my world is very different from yours, and I can see how someone who has lived in a multiracial society would like to imagine the past in the same colors. And perhaps, to a point, Western Europe was different. But my country (and geographical region for that matter) is, despite being immensely diverse ethnically and culturally, very much white. My husband is Indian and white for his kind, yet people in my grandmother's village still stare at him as if he was an escaped monkey from the zoo, even though we have been married for 20 years now. Because nobody, in their racial memory, remembers having ever seen in real life someone who isn't white. And speaking English definitely doesn't help. People here are used to a multitude of languages, but throw one they never heard before in the mix, and it puzzles them. True enough, we consider gypsies, which have always been among us, as white, even though they are a darker shade. As a matter of fact, our understanding of "white" includes a variety of shades, not only the paper white skins, some of which are dark enough. Perhaps that is one significant difference I never considered. I have no doubt that there were darker skinned people in the Roman army. After all, we too were conquered, and they stayed here for about 150 years, then they left. But I very much doubt that there would have been sufficiently many living on this territory as to make an impact big enough to call the society even diverse, forget about very diverse. Racially. Ethnically and culturally is another thing entirely. Populations did move on our territory, but they were all white populations. Or at least that's what it would seem based on our population now. Unlike the rest of the world, we have had our borders closed for many decades, and before communism and the closing of the borders, poverty and logistics made immigration over great distances too difficult for people from Africa to migrate here. Which is why, by looking at my country today, I can imagine how our past looked like. And it looked pretty much as it does today. We say that eternity was born in the village, and change is the last thing to come to Romanian villages. Hell, we still have villages that have no running water or electricity. And I base my opinion on present the present day situation not only as far as racial mixing goes, but also where literacy is involved. Obviously, I can't speak for Britain. But here, to this day, we probably have a rate of literacy of 70%, out of which at the very least half are what we call functional illiterates. That is people who have the ability to read and write but who have never read a book in their entire life. And this high rate of literacy is due to the world renowned tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. He too was an illiterate and he made it his life's mission to bring education to Romania. Despite his evil, he built schools in every village and he made laws to force teachers to work in the rural areas. Before him, we probably had a rate of 10% literacy at the most. Based on this, how could it have possibly been better before? Our nation, at least, has never been literate. As for soldiers, finding one letter that uses sophisticated language is no proof that the average soldier wrote like this. What background do we have on who the author of that letter was? Can we discard that he was one of the few soldiers that had a good education? Perhaps an officer. Finding even a hundred letter doesn't mean that. I have had boyfriends who had to do their one year mandatory military service, average Romanian young men, who never read a thing in their life. And I used to write letters to them. They would call me back because they hated having to write. People who don't have the exercise of writing and reading don't like to write letters. Better yet, one could think that owning paper and ink and a quill, especially in times of war, would have been a luxury that most soldiers wouldn't have been able to afford. So the common soldier probably didn't send letters home unless it was something urgent and he asked an officer to write it for him. Such a letter would not have used sophisticated language and it would have been on point. Which is why I think that the existence of such letters is no proof that the average soldier thought and wrote that way. Then again, I can't speak for USA or Britain. Maybe things were different there.

@@ACriticalDragon And we never had this crazy obsession with purity either. My area of Romania is known as little Switzerland. This is in part because of our geography, but mostly because we have the most ethnically diverse society in Romania and it is also the only region where none of the ethnicities have conflicts with each other. And we haven't had issues neither with the few Chinese and Arabs that came here during the past two decades (and that applies almost exclusively to big cities; the countryside is still unchanged), no with the wave of Africans and Sri Lankans that arrived since the pandemic. I guess you could say that ours is an exemplary society when it comes to tolerance of diversity. But that doesn't change that we are a white society. A one or two percent of population that isn't white, that too only in the handful of large cities and only as a consequence of globalization, doesn't warrant the "racially diverse" description. Perhaps one day our country will look like the western countries too. But it doesn't. Not yet.

Orcs should be orcs. How a writer creates orcs, what analogues they use, how they construct orcish society, are all factors because 'orcs' don't exist. Even Tolkien struggled with the 'orcish question' because they were at once damned and evil beyond salvation, but also possessed free will, intelligence, and individual desires. So he never resolved that contradiction.

@@ACriticalDragon In other words, the author is not obliged to create representations of all IRL existing groups of people in his work?

@user-cl6yc9ev5l it depends on what the writer is doing and why. Stan Nicholls' series, Orcs, seems to use a Westernised form of Native Americans as the basis for his orcs. Peter Jackson cast native Australians as the Uruk Hai. In Rings of Power they used Tolkien's concept of Dwarves being created from rock to create the diversity of that culture representing the variety of rock we have in the world. So with all fantasy creations there are a whole host of factors that come into play. There aren't rules etched in stone for how writers 'must' write.

Every decade? I think it is a bit more often than that... unfortunately.

​@@ACriticalDragonI'm remembering four and dividing by my age, so it might be a bit off. Two in one year was a bit much tbh.

A quick check on IMDB - Robin Hood (2018) Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood (2012) Robin Hood (2010) Robin Hood: Beyond Sherwood (2009) Princess of Thieves (2001) Robin of Locksley (1996) Robin Hood: men in Tights (1993) Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) Robin Hood (1991)

The more we find out about ancient peoples, ancient trade, and the sheer diversity of the ancient world, the more that many of our preconceptions about the 'reality' are proven to be extreme fictions. So every attempt to recreate historical settings has to balance current knowledge about the setting, needs of the narrative, and assumed reader knowledge of the setting. But in discourse the whole discussion usually gets flattened to 'accuracy'.

Got your interaction 😜

It was a placeholder title that I forgot to change. I have been a bit distracted and have not been as organized in sorting out thumbnails, titles, and even scheduling times as I normally am. It will get updated shortly.