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Diana Awakening Apollo (1910)

𝙰𝚞𝚐𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝟷𝟸, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

the messed up thing is that I’ve heard literal history teachers (and my own parents) say that the people of the past were used to it and that it didn’t have as big an effect on them as it would have had on us…which is absolutely untrue and so, so freaking dehumanizing - see the 14th century poem ‘Pearl’, in which a father mourns the loss of his infant daughter, with palpable pain

Since in that spot it slipped from me I wait, and wish, and oft complain; Once it would bid my sorrow flee, And my fair fortune turn again; It wounds my heart now ceaselessly, And burns my breast with bitter pain. Yet never so sweet a song may be As, this still hour, steals through my brain, While verity I muse in vain How clay should her bright beauty clot; O Earth! a brave gem thou dost stain, My own pearl, precious, without spot!

Because a bad harvest or a famine didn’t typically look like people starving. That happened when things were apocalyptic, but it was much more common to simply have bad years where there was enough for everyone to survive, but not quite enough to be healthy about it. And do you want to know what that looked like, for subsistence farmers who had to do hard farm labor to grow their food?

It looked like the adults in their prime having to eat their fill while they watched their children and elderly parents not get enough. It meant watching your parents nobly turn away half of their portion, and eating a full hearty meal while you watched your three year old kid beg for more food. Because if you were an adult in your prime and you didn’t eat your fill, you would not have the strength to work the fields, come planting and next harvest and grain preparation. And your entire family would surely die the next year.

But eating that much less typically would not kill your parents or your kids. Typically. It didn’t cause them to keel over and die of starvation directly. What it did was make them more vulnerable to disease. So every year your town had a bad harvest, every year war meant you lost food to the army, whether your own or a hostile one? You were rolling dice. Was this the year your youngest kid would get a winter cold and not have the strength to fight it off? Was this the year your mother finally caught a fever and didn’t wake up in the morning? Maybe, who knew.

So when some revolutionary came around asking you to risk disruption and chaos and possibly war to improve things … what’s going through your head? Trauma. You’re thinking of the two kids you already lost, the bad winter where your father passed, and this fucker is asking you to roll those dice again.

It wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t be. Because Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949. And while parents grieved horribly for their lost children… everyone just knew that parents buried their children. A lot. That women bore three or six or eleven children, from when they were 16 or 18 or 20, until they were about 40, and buried almost half of them.

The line wouldn’t have been in the book, not because parents didn’t grieve, not because 1/3 of all people’s children died (of course, wealthy families were much less prone to infant mortality), but because at the time, nobody could imagine a world where it was unnatural for parents to see their children die.

By the time LotR was written, infant mortality had improved greatly. But that’s not the world he grew up in, and he wrote LotR after serving in WWI. As far as he could tell, “more children are living through their first few years” could just mean “there’s been a war so fewer children are being born.”

It’s not that Tolkien couldn’t write about a deeply grieving parent. It’s not that Middle Earth is so directly based on European middle ages that he designed that same level of child mortality into the background of his worldbuilding. It’s just that, he wouldn’t have that parent even imply, “it’s against the natural order of things,” because such a concept was outside of his experience. (It’s not against nature. The natural order of things, for a couple million years, has been that about 1/3 to ½ of all human children will not live through puberty.)

Grief was constant.

So was callousness developed to stave off grief.

So was mourning so deep it was almost catatonia; people got lost in their thoughts and just… stopped interacting with the world around them.

sons is, in fact, a big part

of Tolkien’s work.