Foster Theory

The Look

Chapter 16 - Go west

Summer is almost over and Tauriel is travelling to Belegost for Kili's trial.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85398296/chapters/235635326

Summary: After a railway bombing that goes south, Kili is on the run and ends up on the other side of Middle Earth, in the capital of Rhovanion. Back in Belegost in Ered Luin, Ori, a crime investigator, is trying to piece together what happened, suspecting his cousin's involvement. Kili meets Tauriel and embarks on a very different life than the one he had in Ered Luin. But Kili is on the run and the past might catch up at any moment. What happens if it does?

Rating: M

Fandoms: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types

Categories: F/M, M/M

Relationships: Kíli/Tauriel, Kili/Ori (past), Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield (mention)

Characters: Kíli, Tauriel, Ori, Fíli, Thorin Oakenshield, Legolas Greenleaf, Thorin III Stonehelm, Original Elf Character(s), Original Dwarf Character(s), Original Orc Character(s), Balin, Dwalin

Additional Tags: 

Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Middle Earth Politics (Tolkien), Dwarf Culture & Customs, Middle Earth biology, Indigenous struggle, Hurt No Comfort, Breaking the Law, Starting Over, two love stories for the price of one, kiliel - Freeform, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, inspired by real life, Modern Middle-earth (Tolkien), Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Berlin's Kreutzberg + Copenhagen's Nørrebro + Malmö's Möllan wrapped into one place, That's Dol Lant, I was thinking about Kiruna when I wrote Belegost, Or Giron as it's also called

Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.

Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.

The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder--there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs--all the males and some of the females--would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or "baby beef", depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.

Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that's much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.

That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.

And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.

And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

First, two things that hold true, even accounting for the stuff I'm about to bring up: dicks are ALWAYS in inches, and long distances are measured in Time if you (or the person/people you're talking to) is/are going there.

This chart is, not wrong really, but too simple (two words nobody wants to hear in proximity to a chart). A lot of this chart varies by individual, and a bunch of Imperial vs Metric measurement things show up as generational gaps, ESPECIALLY temperature scale. AND those things, the individual jank and the generation gaps, go together - when you were born determines what was used at home vs. what you learned in school, plus randomization for which parts of each experience stuck with you. Someone from a generation where imperial was used at home and metric was taught in school is going to have really random and arbitrary-seeming situational use of imperial vs. metric.

For an example on generation gaps: the Pool Temperature one. I've never heard anyone under 50 use Fahrenheit for the pool temperature - and vice versa, over 50 use Fahrenheit for everything, 30-ish use Celsius for everything but cooking, and even then, Fahrenheit may not mean anything intuitively, just kind of arbitrary numbers that you set your oven to (and much younger than that you'll start seeing Celsius used for everything, including cooking.)

Also, for Speed - you can sometimes see the gears turning when people born before the start of the switch to metric roughly convert from miles-per-hour to kilometers-per-hour (1 mile = 2 km, approx.) in their heads. And that assumes they were born close enough to the switchover to have had the rough conversions drummed into them, and thus usually aren't so old that they wouldn't even think to convert to metric and will just give you everything in imperial, because most old folks default to imperial for everything (and still assume everyone else does too).

Another age-range thing is, when someone whose first instinct is to measure distances in imperial needs more precision, do they fraction the inch into ever-smaller halves (half, quarters, eighths, and so on, forever), or do they switch to measuring in metric and start using centimeters and millimeters?

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

It turns out there exists Acer pseudoplatanus, which in the US is commonly called a sycamore maple and in the UK is called a sycamore. Probably that's what the artwork depicts. Acer, for those not already in the know, is the genus of maple trees. Their seedpods look like the above, and I grew up calling them "helicopters" for the way they twirl to Earth when they fall.

What we in the US call sycamores are several members of the Platanus genus, most commonly Platanus occidentalis, the American sycamore, or the American planetree. And you see the species name above of the so-called sycamore maple reads as pseudo-sycamore.

I myself have several specimens of London planetree in my yard (technically the verge, so they belong to the city). It's a hybrid of Platanus occidentalis and Platanus orientalis, that is, a type of what I would call sycamore. Wikipedia tells me it is also known by the name Platanus × acerifolia, plane tree hybrid with maple leaves (just to add to the confusion).

Anyway, its seedpods look like this, so you can see why I was sure enough to post a rant about it.

I also have maple trees in my yard, Acer platanoides, the Norway maple (not to be confused, Wikipedia tells me, with Acer pseudoplatanus, though its name looks like "maple that is sycamore-ish"), and Acer saccharinum, the Silver maple (not to be confused, again Wikipedia, with Acer saccharum, the sugar maple).