A lover of history and specultative fiction

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Sir Gromer from The Moonlit Knight, commissioned by the author L.R Tourmaline @queer-ragnelle thank you so much!

Portrait of the lovely Mahtab for @queer-ragnelle 💕 Thank you so much!

Hi!

I have a little passage about this in the Author's Note at the end of the book, but when I first wrote The Moonlit Knight, I actually had no access to any academia whatsoever for research. I was limited to what material I could afford to purchase with my own money. Sometimes I had to buy whole books just to read a single relevant chapter! It was only near the very end of development that a friend allowed me to log in through their school so I could download a handful of essays and make adjustments with the new information found there. But even then, much of the material I wanted to access was barred from anyone, even academics, who weren't enrolled in a relevant field of study. So that really set me back.

I can say for sure there are historical inaccuracies, some intentional, and some an unfortunate result of my limited resources.

I also hired people from relevant backgrounds as sensitivity readers including a Zoroastrian person, a Jewish person, multiple British people, etc to read the story before publication and guide me through any corrections that it needed. But of course, those are modern perspectives, and while helpful for writing for a modern audience, that didn't fully alleviate the deficit a lack of academic access left me with.

The way I look at it, the story details are "right" for the universe of the characters I wrote. It's impossible to be 100% historically accurate and so I try not to fret too much about it, (particularly bc Arthuriana is built on anachronisms anyway). I did the best I could with what I had, and with the help of those I employed, and that has to be enough. There's no perfect novel! Finished and published is better than researching forever and fretting.

All in all, it was five years from conceptualizing my book series to publishing the first installment, The Moonlit Knight, and I conducted research continuously throughout. I continue to do so! Most recently I read Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire and Evil, Good, and Gender: Facets of the Feminine in Zoroastrian Religious History and I'm currently working through Post-Roman Kingdoms: ‘Dark Ages' Gaul & Britain, AD 450–800. These would've been so helpful back in like 2020 haha.

There are still books I can't access, my Holy Grail is A Zoroastrian Tapestry - Art, Religion & Culture edited by Firoza Punthakey Mistree and Pheroza Godrej. Alas! I'm going to continue learning with what I can read and that has to be sufficient.

Egyptian toy in the shape of a rider and two horses on wheels

4th century CE

Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), family Casuariidae, order Casuariiformes, QLD, Australia

"Although she may not have survived quite into the Augustan period, Aba of Olbe (or Olba), active at least into the late 30s BC, provides a fine example of an obscure (to modern readers) ruling woman of the era. She is known only from a single passage in the Geography of Strabo, who was particularly well informed on the political situation in Asia Minor during the first century BC. The scant surviving information provides an insight into the politics of the region in the years just before Augustus came to power.

Olbe lies in the district known in antiquity as Rough Cilicia, so named for its rugged topography, essentially the south central part of modern Turkey. The site is only fifteen miles inland but lies at more than 3,000 feet elevation and was an ancient shrine of Zeus Olbios, with a town just to its west. The locals believed that the cult had been founded by Aias, the son of the Trojan War hero Teukros, and thus the sanctuary was thought to have had its origins in the dispersal of peoples after the war. The shrine and the region around it had become a prominent temple state by the fourth century BC, with its priest-kings taking royal privileges and ruling an extensive territory, one of several such entities in central Anatolia. (...)

The younger Zenophanes does not seem to have been priest-king himself, but his daughter, Aba, married into the priestly family. The name of her husband, presumably the priest-king, is not known. When he died, she succeeded to the rule, but her position was precarious and she eventually sought help from both Cleopatra VII and Antonius; there is a sense of desperation in her request (Strabo referred to “earnest pleas”). This would have been sometime between when the couple met at Tarsos in 41 BC and when they died, eleven years later. The Ptolemies had long-standing interests in Cilicia, including the region of Olbe, and under his triumviral authority Antonius had regularly restored parts of this territory to Cleopatra’s control: as early as 38 BC she had a military governor of Cilicia and Cyprus in office. Aba’s position was thus confirmed by both the Ptolemies and the Romans.

Red Silky Anteater Cyclopes rufus

This species is endemic to eastern Brazil, where it occurs in the western Amazon basin, between the Rio Madeira and Rio Aripuanã. It is probably affected by deforestation of its habitat.

Lusitanian Pine Vole Microtus lusitanicus

It is endemic to the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain and Portugal. This vole species appears to have monogamous pair bonds. Lusitanian pine voles prefer agricultural landscapes with significant habitat diversity, especially traditional Mediterranean agriculture characterised by small fields and abundant hedgerows.