So I just started reading A Court of Thorns and Roses (audiobook), and am I the only one who is wondering if the author did any research into poor subsistence living or the lives of peasants? Because wow, I know Feyreās family used to be rich, but if that was 8 years ago and yāall are poor as dirt now, somehow in the intervening period you might have learned:
- trap lines in the winter are far superior to active hunting. It burns less calories, you can use it with fish and land animals, and it will save you from frostbite bc instead of sitting in a blind for hours, you can go to your lines at certain times and head home, or drive animals toward your lines.
- buying flower seeds - or any garden seeds - is a suckers game when youāre poor. You only really need to buy seeds once!! Once you harvest, you let stuff āgo to seedā and then you collect it and store it for the winter, often trading seeds with your neighbours.
- they let things actively RUN OUT before doing anything about it. Thatās absolutely buckwild if youāve ever been poor ā when youāre poor, you know how to make a meal stretch, and you DO IT.
- there is hunting, but no gathering?? This family has not stored any veg for winter, but neither do they go gather mushrooms, rosehips, roots, tubers, nuts, or even fucking bark?? What happened to their cottage garden?? Was it just flowers?! Were they that rich that they donāt understand that a garden produces food? Did they close their eyes as they walked past all their peasant neighbours and their gardens? Bc thatās maybe the wildest thing Iāve seen from both a historical and a āgrew up so close to dirt poor you couldnāt tell the differenceā perspective!
- She left a whole ass Giant wolf carcass when her family is starving. Nah nah nah no that is the universe smiling on you when youāre subsistence! You will make a travois or somehow find a way to tie that to you and drag it along - thatās double the food, and possibly more money, because you could live off the wolf (which I assume does not taste great) and sell off some of the deer (which is delicious).
- she didnāt at least do a basic clean of her kill out in the woods?! She did not tan the hides?! Yāall, you do not want to be cleaning any kill on the kitchen table. Why? Because cleaning involves removing the intestines and stomach. That means shit and piss and food digestion in different stages, and the gases produced. You do that *outside*, typically at least close to where you made your kill, because you donāt want to have to have anyā¦spills, and because it makes things a bit lighter to carry. Butchering? For sure do it on a table, but cleaning is an outdoor chore. Also, tanning a hide is not just skinning a creature! Itās scraping all the membranes off it, stretching and drying it, and curing the skin - sometimes with smoke, but often with a pretty gross solution (often including brain oil, and historically, I believe urine and/or feces, and other things with the right chemical components). Itās not a simple or quick task!
- soups, pottages, stews, with dried lentils, beans, or peas would have been the staple meals (depending on the climate and environment, but it feels fairly British thus far). Just having roasted venison (def not the best way to eat venison just from taste alone) would likely be a very very rare occurrence, because, as noted earlier, theyāre so poor they would need to make it stretch. You would cure it or dry it or turn it into sausage. You would use it sparingly within a meal, not to serve as the whole meal.
- the market. If you were poor, you would likely be a stranger to spices, but not to salt. Salt is deeply necessary to survive in that period, as itās one of the only ways of safely processing and storing meat with any longevity. And? If you got the money that they did while being as poor and as starving as they were? The first thing you would do ā even if you were the most stupid rich person before then ā is stock up your stores of dry goods! Flour, salt, honey, dried beans/peas/lentils, vegetables that store - onions, squashes, potatoes, root vegetables like carrots. Itās straight up Maslowās Hierarchy of Needs here - you will not give a shit about a new cloak before you give a shit about saying your hunger. They are said to be āstarvingā. Sorting out your survival comes before sorting out your fashion.
Anyways, this has been me for channel 4, reporting on anachronisms and misrepresentations in fantasy fiction. More news at 10.
