Both sides

Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.

“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”

The “X the Y” works with modern names: John (the) Thatcher, Hugh (the) Smith; William (the) Carpenter etc. Other trades-as-names are Archer, Fletcher, Hedges, Fisher, Plowman, Farmer, Taylor and so on; the list is enormous.

French Kings called Louis (there were XVIII of them) tended to pick up descriptions rather than trades - Louis the Pious, the Stammerer, the Fat, the Prudent (also The Spider…) and so on, so there’s plenty of precedent for calling characters …the Fair, the Truculent, the Rich, the Well-Beloved etc.

Different translations can show what people think of a character: there were two medieval Dukes of Burgundy known as “…the Bold”, but while one was Phillipe le Hardi (daring, tough, hardy) the other was Charles le Téméraire (rash, reckless, foolhardy).

Tweaking previous names is another method: compare Edward “the Confessor”, from his dubious reputation as an early 10th century god-botherer, and Edward VII “the Caresser”, from his definite reputation as an early 20th century skirt-chaser.

With “X of Y”, Y usually means somewhere big where all the Xs need told apart: John of Gaunt (Ghent), Hugh of Lincoln or Richard of York. Villages and hamlets were small enough that everyone knew who people were, so you’d seldom find Henry of Barton-in-the-Beans, or Matthew of Bagthorpe-with-Barmer, or Edward of Little Hautbois - they pronounce it “Hobbis”, but it’s also the name of an early oboe and that’s pronounced “Hoboy”. Whatever. Those are all real places, BTW. English hamlet names are amazing.

“X son of Y” might be used (also the Nordic X Ysson or simply X Y‘s son - See “Wolves Beyond The Border” by Robert E. Howard) while father and son with the same name might be tagged “the Younger” and “the Elder”. School pupils at a certain class of school used to be Watson Senior or Junior, or Watson Major, Watson Minor and Watson Minimus, or Molesworth One and Molesworth Two. There’s also the US custom of e.g. John Henry Doe III for when the same name(s) keep popping up in a family.

TVTropes (of course) has an entry called “One Steve Limit”, about how fiction avoids having two characters with the same or even similar names, and like the Welsh joke it makes sense in context. Read the “Real Life” section and boggle. It mentions, among many other examples, the Wars of the Roses when England was overrun by Richards and Edwards, Elizabeths and Henrys, as if there was some sort of penalty for choosing a different name. Since George of Clarence and Edmund of Rutland both died by violence, you have to wonder. (Though various Richards, Edwards and Henrys went out the same way, so maybe not.)

In my own family there was an “eldest son” name on both sides for as far back as I can go, almost two centuries - Robert on Dad’s side, Peter on Mum’s - differenced with a second name from one or another uncle. There seemed to be no obligation to use the “difference” name - my Dad did, I didn’t - so for a time in the early 1960s there were often three Peters in my Gran’s house simultaneously.

she is jester lavorre

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Ursula Le Guin

- speak in Estonian half the time

- the other half of the time, say random english phrases and slang

She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE.

characters who pick a single face and wear it like a mask

who cling to smiles and insist everything’s fine even though they’re breaking because they can’t bear to let the world see them crack

who tell themselves they’re angry and insist that they hate everyone even as they risk life and limb to keep their ‘definitely not friends’ safe

Of course, while Taliesin may be claiming that that photo is from 1984, we all know he’s been around long enough for classical portraits to exist, too. But in the interest of politeness, we’ll play along.