Don't Take My Advice For It.

1. No one is trying to convert you, you elementry-level reading comprehension moron.

2. You’re the ones who have read only “one book”.

3. We’re not asking you to believe. Again, reading comprehension much?

4. There is nothing wrong with someone using a comfort mechanism to get through life. Some have religion, others have Dawkins.

5. Not every religion is evangelical Christianity.

There is, to me, as a Jew. ZERO difference between:

An evangelical Christian trying to convert me to “save my soul” because they think Judaism is primitive and sinful and I will go to hell and also the continued existence of my people don’t look good for their stupid “Christianity improved on Judaism so much and Jesus came and saved us so none of us need that primitive bullshit” agenda.

And

as the snake sheds her skin 🐍🩸

Posted by Steven Payne to Facebook group British Medieval History:

Like, Reconstructionist Neopaganism is any neopagan faith that seeks to get as close as possible to recreating the actual practices it's drawing on. Esoteric Neopaganism is any neopagan faith that draws upon pre-Christian traditions and beliefs but interprets and combines them in new ways. Both perfectly valid paths to take

1. loz is imperialist and orientalist in its themes

2. its narrative in some games functions more as propaganda rather than any sort of fairy tale-esque fantasy story

that is to say the orientalist themes wrt to ganondorf start when they decided to take the main antagonist, originally only a non-human monster, and portray him as a man from the desert with every possible caricaturization

and, a lot of the way that the hylian monarchy is portrayed is based on both medieval europe and japanese myth — the latter especially embodying the "divine emperor" ideology, which was something that was often utilized to justify imperialist aggression from japan, by inculcating the belief that the emperor was divinely ordained to rule the world

and b. what i mean that loz narratively functions more like propaganda than a fairy tale-esque fantasy in some games, is that there is no coherent moral statement to be found. particularly in ocarina of time and totk (the latter of which is sort of a revisit of the former) ganondorf does not actually function as any sort of parable. which is why any attempts to analyze and determine his goals beyond "evil guy from the desert wants to steal our grass" hits a dead end. you can't determine any sort of moral statement or anything about ganondorf's actual character just from looking at the source material alone. which is why so many people who analyze these things often come to these conclusions — not because we're trying to "defend" or ""woobify"" ganondorf, but because the writing in loz often makes it hard to come to any other conclusion with him besides this "fear of the other," that the demon from the desert will ruin everything you know and love

Aladdin, Al-Qaeda, and Arabs in U.S. film and TV is a great read but specifically i want to point out a specific quote and how it relates to ganondorf in wind waker:

I.... have a lot to say about this actually. Get ready for an essay about translation and historical queerness.

So. I've been thinking about the best way to translate 'trans' for a while now. I used one word in a post from last summer but I don't really like it anymore. I've come up with a few options since then, but I'm not fully satisfied with any of them.

When I choose things to translate for this account, I generally try to choose things that I can translate without too much anachronism; that is, things that actually have OE translations. I don't mind bending the rules a bit (ie using the word for well/spring for sink, or grain cakes for mochi), but I generally keep those pretty simple. Following that ethos, ideally I could find a good word encapsulating queer gender identities in Anglo Saxon England. Unfortunately, our options are not exactly ideal.

Putting modern labels on people in the past is a tricky business. I have taken two classes that largely focused on this question and I still don't feel particularly well equipped to give any sort of definitive answer. My priorities are two somewhat contradictory ideas.

First, keep in mind that modern queer labels are social tools and conventions. Using them willy-nilly to describe the past can and will give you an inaccurate view of the past. Saying Eleanor Rykener (look her up!) is definitively a trans woman glosses over complexities of her life and experience, while extending a false sense of the age of the term 'trans' to a word and social category that is extremely modern. To me, saying she was a trans woman is far less interesting then actually considering how she and the people around her thought of her!

At the same time, I think examining the modern queer community's connection to the past is incredibly important to understand where we are now and where we are going. We always have been and will always be here. At the same time as I feel uncomfortable describing Eleanor Rykener as a trans woman, I see myself and my experiences as a trans person reflected in hers. I consider her an ancestor of mine, even if I don't want to think of her as explicitly trans. In Getting Medieval, Caroline Dinshaw sees her goal as queer historian as "making relationships with the past, relationships that form parts of our subjectivities and communities, [...] making affective connections, that it, across time" (pp 11-12), which really resonates with me. We just need to remember that connections are not the same as anachronistic labels. (Go read the intro to that book it's very good and much more readable than most queer theory)

All that being said, let's look at some Old English

One source of information about a third gender category is from Ælfric's glossary (a basic Latin-OE dictionary) for the translation of hermaphroditus, the Latin word for an intersex person (a super complicated word in its own right). These people certainly had a queer (in the sense of non-normative) gender, but I don't want to conflate them with our modern sense of transness. Plus, the words are weird and shitty. One is wæpenwifstre, in ME penis-woman; wæpen is literally weapon, but is often used to mean penis. There's also scritta/scrætta, which can also mean prostitute, and also maybe monster? Not a fan of those.

And then there's bæddel/bædling, which is... complicated. I know there are some transfemmes who do/did use it as a label, but I don't know the nuances of how and why, and it seems controversial enough that I don't want to throw it around. It shows up in OE texts only five times as a term for intersex people, effeminate (ie bottoming) men, and/or a third gender category. There's a lot of interesting inferences one could draw from its use, but we really don't have enough evidence to say anything conclusive. If you want to know more, see Religion and Trans Literature by David Wade and Between Medieval Men by David Clark. (there's also the whole other discussion of people thinking it's the origin of the word bad. I don't find the argument super convincing but whatever)

So, I'm not a fan of really any of those options. The other direction I could go in is making up a word. Disclaimer, I never do this sort of thing, so there is a good possibility that my construction doesn't make any sense.

I don't think a straight up calque would work that well, but perhaps a combination of cynd and wendan would work. The word gender is originally just referring to the grammatical concept (there are gender systems besides masculine/feminine! lots of them!), but the OE word for grammatical gender and sex are the same, (ge)cynd. Wendan does quite a few things, but it often means to move/change from one condition to another, which works well for my purposes. Cyndwendan would mean to gender-change, or transition, which could be conjugated as one needs; cyndwendednys (after a-wendednys) would be the noun form, a transition. The past participle cyndwended means transitioned, which could be used as a substantive adjective (ie a transgender person). Another option is wendancynd, meaning a changing sort of person or a person who changed.

Again, I don't ever make up words like this. @arachneedle (or anyone else!) I think you're better at this sort of grammatical nitty gritty than I am, do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

1/3 of the Fellowship

The Dwarfs are very clearly inspired mainly from Old Norse, so that's the main reference for Gimli's dress. There's also some other influences, like some Bronze Age Mediterranean influences and Iron Age Eastern Europe.

To me Tolkien's elves are very high Middle Ages and Gothic, but for Sindar I mixed in plenty of Celtic and especially Irish influence, and based Legolas' dress heavily on Irish léine.

Hello, I have had this question in my inbox for a minute waiting until I could find a good answer, and I just did! I found this book while browsing Project Muse:

I write queer medieval romance books, and I'm by no means an expert but I've got some recommendations!

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages - Robert Mills

The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex unions in premodern Europe - John Boswell

Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto others - Ruth Mazo Karras

All Leah DeVun's papers, especially The Shape of Sex

and also this post I made a while ago about gender/transness and medieval europe.

Clare A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (1994)

Louise O. Aranye Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (eds.), Premodern Sexualities (1996).

Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, James Schultz, Constructing Medieval Sexuality (1997)

Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Early Christian Theology (1997)

Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (1999)

A seminal work is Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (eds.) Queering the Middle Ages (2001). Seriously, this is one of the top books I'd recommend OVERALL if you want to get the hang of it.

Francesca Canade Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (2001)

Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Pasternack (eds.), Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (2003)

Glenn Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation (2003)

Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homo-Eroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Same Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (2003)

William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature : France and England , 1050-1230 (2004)

Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres (2004)

Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncracies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't (2005)

N. Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (2007)

Louise Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (2007)

David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (2009)

Tison Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (2008)

Ruth Evans, A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages (2011)

Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe (2013)

Larissa Tracy, Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (2013)

Anna Klosowska Roberts, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (2016)

Victoria Blud (ed.), The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000-1400 (2017)

Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (eds.), Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (2017) (NOTE: I cannot help you with anything related to this because, to be perfectly frank, queer temporality is one of my LEAST favorite branches of queer studies. It is valid and the scholars who study it are valid but I Don't Like It.) (And because the people I've known who've studied it have been cishet twats.)

Ann Marie Rasmussen, Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies (2019)

Will Rogers and Christopher Roman (eds.) Medieval Futurity: Essays for the Future of a Queer Medieval Studies (2020)

Marina Montesano, Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages (2024) (NOTE: I get why this title alone might make people nervous, but my understanding of it is less that it's equating trans identity to cross-dressing and more that she's covering the various ways and contexts cross-dressing could be utilized in the middle ages, inclusive of people who would possibly be trans today.)

Jacqueline Murrary, From Texts to Bodies: Sexes, Genders, and Sexualities in Premodern Europe (2025)

This seems like a lot and it is a lot, and that's not taking into account the journal articles. My advice is to look at the table of contents, read the introductions, and figure out what interests/is most applicable to your interests. Pay attention to how they speak about the field and speak about one another and their work, because queer studies has changed a LOT since the early 90s, and, even at the time, scholars will often disagree on things.

Also, since you're an undergrad, I recommend getting your theory reading out of the way, since you're going to need it. Read up on Foucault but ESPECIALLY Butler, Gender Troubles is your friend when people start talking about how "can we REALLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYY say that they were queer back then?" Or "But HOW are they queer?" Develop the vocabulary to talk about these things, it'll save your neck in the long run, especially when you're being cornered by your cishet colleagues and need to think on your feet. I also like Lee Edelman's work on queer futurity, since it's applicable to a lot of medieval Guys™, though it's a little LESS necessary. When you're writing a paper and ESPECIALLY when you're writing a thesis, make sure to establish your theoretical framework.

Because of the huge overlap between monster theory and queer theory, I highly recommend at least reading Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "Seven Monster Theses" in Monster Theory. "What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with Grendel and The Green Knight"? YOU'LL FIND OUT. (...that sounded more ominous than I intended.) This is also because I think everyone should read Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Monster Theses at least once. Just never listen to anything he says about the Welsh Marches.

Also see: Will Stockton, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly.