take my mail to dreamland

@snuggly-eve

Okay, let me try to take a stab at it:

Firstly, one thing I'd want to quickly go over as reference is what it actually means to say that a "stock fantasy setting" is more rooted in the late middle ages/renaissance than in earlier periods. Generally, the traits of these settings that are characteristic of this time are:

Aesthetics generally. Like, castles in a "stock fantasy setting" are usually these big ornamented things covered in towers and turrets (consider, say, Neuschwanstein Castle, which was itself an early modern nostalgia piece rather than a genuine Renaissance fortress), while armor leans more towards full heavy plate (like these 16th-17th century pieces, for instance). These are all classically late styles.

Likewise, your classic fantasy merchant city -- you know, your Ankh-Morporks, your Lankhmars, that sort of thing, with tangled crime-filled alleys, probably a network of scummy canals, a huge bustling port, a guild of thieves, all of it ruled over by dynastic merchants in fine brocade and velvet and heavy jewels -- that's very heavily inspired by the merchant cities of the Italian Renaissance like Venice or Genoa, or North Sea merchant cities like Amsterdam around that time or a little later, or, frankly, even early modern London.

Also, generally, urbanization. Roman civilization was very urban. Renaissance-era European civilization was very urban also, especially in places like Italy, the North Sea, and other areas rich in commerce. In fantasy, too, the notion that cities are major centers of life and politics remains -- merchant cities bustling with commerce, capital cities with the king's fancy castle, fortified cities with huge bloody walls, these are all recurring archetypes. Crack open, say, a D&D setting sourcebook, and that assumption that major cities or city-states are major focuses of culture and economy while rural areas are clearly in their orbits is fairly evident, I think.

Also, in my experience, medieval fantasy monarchies tend to be fairly centralized affairs, with powerful monarchic kings, the royal seat in the capital or the king's castle as the bustling focus of governance, and a tendency for the edicts from the king's person and the intrigues of court to be the driving focuses of political life. Also, a lot of intrigues in a classically corrupt court. This tracks fairly well for the late period, historically, where European kings put a lot of effort into centralizing and strengthening their authority, some more successfully (the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the Reconquista), some less so (Charles I of England). Absolute monarchy was less of a factor in earlier medieval Europe, which operate chiefly under a network of looser, less centralized feudal ties.

By contrast, what would these things equivalents in the earlier Middle Ages be like?

Castle-wise, the really early periods were the time of the motte-and-bailey, aka wooden palisades on top of earthen mounds. Later, you'd tend to see squatter, more fortified constructions for defensive purposes (take the Krak des Chevaliers as an example). Even well into the later middle ages, though, a typical rural keep or castle was often a fortified house or manor more than what we'd picture as a castle today.

Armor was usually dominated by chainmail, scale armor, and non-face-covering helmets (a knight of the Carolongian Empire, for example, might have worn something like a scale or mail shirt and a helm with earguards or a noseguard, but certainly not the "classic" knightly set of plate you usually see in fiction). In terms of helmet styles, for instance, compare this 11th-century nasal helm or these illustrations of 12th-century styles with later forms such as the classic "bucket helm" that was popular during and after the Crusades period. Helmets with more articulated shapes and visors came later. What's called a close or closed helm, for instance, like these ones, was mostly a 16th-17th century style, although antecedent forms were already common in the 15th. Even the barbute with its distinctive T- or Y-shaped visor slit was a distinctly Renaissance Italian thing.

(Like, as a practical example in terms of helmets, this reminded me of a passage in the first Dunk & Egg story where Duncan buys a great helm/bucket helmet, and it's described as coming across as a goofy-looking and antiquated choice when other knights all use visored and often very ornate close helmets. And this makes sense! Westeros is very explicitly based on England during the Wars of the Roses period, in the 15th century, by which point medieval armor and helmet styles had gone out of use and most armored troops wore jointed plate armor and visored helms.)

Religiously, monasteries were often the center of religious life and, for rural communities, often more important than distant bishopric seats. They were also centers of, among other things, record-keeping, writing, and brewing.

Cities. The middle ages proper were a very rural time -- cities existed, and exerted political and economic influence, but took a significant dip in both size and importance for a time. For a good few centuries the center of life for most people was the manorial system, where you had a local knight or lordling living in a fortified house or a small keep and providing protection to a town or two around this in exchange for material support. Self-sustaining religious communities like monasteries were also important. All of these, for a long time, would have basically self-supporting.

(Well, alright, that's also an oversimplification. In rural France-England-Germany, that'd be about right, sure. In northern Italy and in Flanders-Saxony, though, you start to see... not urbanization as such, but, let's say, townization early on in the system of the medieval communes, where farming and trading towns left isolated by the collapse of Roman-era state systems formed confederations for mutual defense. So the main form of urban culture in this timeframe isn't really centralized around a single big city but more along the lines of fifty towns who formed a loose alliance because they're afraid of bandits and robber knights.)

Government. Centralized states and nations weren't... really things for a long time. Feudal governance was based much more strictly on the notion of personal debts and obligation between rulers and those who administered portions of land for them. A feudal noble had obligations towards his king, but he also had a tremendous amount of freedom in running his own affairs and could have gone for the majority of his life without every showing up in the vicinity of his lord's castle -- the idea of, like, the royal court as the focus and center of political life wouldn't really crystallize for some time, and this degree of independence meant that negotiation and re-negotiation (read:testing how much you could ignore the king or going into outright revolt) were very common.

Also, the notion of national identity -- of saying "I am French, I am English, I am Italian" -- also didn't really exist (I'd recommend Liah Greenfield's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity for a discussion of how this mode of thinking about group-and-land identity formed in the 16th-17th centuries). Before then, concepts of identity were either strictly local ("I am from this village"), based on loyalty systems ("I am from a village defended by Knight Whatshisname, who gives his tithe to Lord Whatshisface, who gives his tithe to King Whatshisproblem"), or based on religion ("I am Christian", "I am Jewish", "I am Muslim").

So, broadly, there weren't really "countries" the way that we think of them today, with clearly delineated cultures and borders and directed from a central capital. The most granular political units were the rural manorial keep and the free town, which gave their fealty to a larger lord or a grouping of peers, and the span and size of a kingdom or an empire was determined in large part by how many of these tiny units or groupings of tiny units you could claim tithe-right and allegiance from. And that's feudalism!

Event-wise, the Big Things in the medieval period proper were the Crusades, a series of primarily religion-motivated wars (or, well, religion-land-and-luchre-motivated wars, granted) and the Black Death. It really cannot be overemphasized how the terror of being struck by this mysterious dying dominated medieval thought for large spans of time.

*Not Actually Every Type.

Something I spent WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much time on lol. This is entirely just riffing off of the many 'kinds' or 'tropes' in mecha design I found. Feel free to suggest more of them.

Might make a document providing examples for each one, but idk. I think most of these are pretty self-explanatory.

Tell me your favourites below

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

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May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

Equiping an armor tutorial

Most nations choose a real predator to represent them on a shield. A wolf. A bear. A soaring eagle.

Scotland went a different route entirely. They chose a creature from a storybook. Modern tourists think it’s a joke, a bit of whimsical, harmless folklore meant for the gift shops.

It isn't.

In the medieval world, that beast wasn't a children's toy. It was an untamable engine of pure malice. It didn't yield to spears, and it didn't step into traps. If you look closely at the historical Scottish royal coat of arms, the beast is wrapped in heavy gold chains, physically bound to the crown. It was a psychological warning to the rest of Europe: Our land breeds a chaos so dangerous, only a king can put it on a leash.

But you don't keep a weapon like that just to show off the gold. You keep it because of what it hunts.

If you go back to the old texts on heraldry, this creature was recognized as the ultimate apex predator. It was known as the only beast in existence capable of hunting, cornering, and tearing a lion to absolute pieces.

And the lion... just happens to be the national animal of England.

The original trio: Arthur, Cai and Bedwyr - the Heroes of the Welsh Corpus. Standing for: Supreme Warrior Prowess in this world and the supernatural Otherworld, Proto-Nationalistic Resilience against foreign encroachment, and the Bardic Tradition.

Superseded by

Sir Gawain, the First Exemplar of Courtliness and (Secular) Chivalry - The 1st Hero the non-Welsh writers latched on to project an ideal model of the emergent Code of Chivalry and Courtliness. A bit rough around the edges as he combines traits of old and new modes such as supernatural abilities, combative knighthood, heroic lineages and blood ties alongside refined manners and the championing of ladies.

Superseded by

Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristan, The Knights of Love - Two figures whose mode of heroism is expressed though their steadfast pursuit of their respective Beloveds, despite the taboos inherent in such. As Medieval Romance holds that emotions, and in particular Love, as supreme forces that affect the heart and body, these two men are thus elevated above all other warriors, in both physical prowess and nobility, thanks in part to the great passions they harbour.

Superseded by

Sir Percival, Sir Bors and Sir Galahad, the Spiritual Trio - As the Legends reach the apex of its religionization, there comes an awareness that the previous models do not fit the highest theoretical standards in accordance with the faith, of which is the rejection of worldly and material, with a particular bent towards sexual matters. Thus, out of the deconstruction of the previous characters (namely, Lancelot and Gawain), the characters of Percival and Galahad were put forward, with the third figure of Bors included to fulfill a thematic trinity of knights.

Special Mention:

Sir Segurant - A small retrograde movement away from the progressions of Lancelot (Romantic Love) and Galahad (Spirituality), a sort-of course correction towards basic chivalry and less high-minded pursuits, such as monster-slaying. Also found is the undercurrent of the Prior Generation's greatness, as members of the Knights of Uther Pendragon's Round Table (which includes Segurant's family) are shown defeating the Knights of Arthur's Table.

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Watsonian vs. Doylist

Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.

The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet

Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres

Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism

The Weird Al Effect is a fun one

Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations

Law of Conservation of Detail

Law of Conservation of Normality

Anthropic Principle

Word of God, Death of the Author

Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness

Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness

Genre Savvy

Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling

Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.

Lampshade Hanging

Noodle Incident is just fun imo

Genre Title Grab Bag

Fridge Horror

Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule

The Smurfette Principle

The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film

A.K.A. Everyone who's not Merlin, Morgan le Fay or Ninianne/Vivien/Nimue. 'Cuz they're oversaturated

Cerridwen (Welsh Mythology)

Taliesin the Bard (Welsh Mythology)

Ambrosius Aurelianus (Historia Brittonum)

Uther Pendragon (The Welsh Triads)

Menw ap Teirgwaedd (Welsh Mythology)

King Arthur (?) (Welsh Mythology)

The Nine Witches of Ystawingun (Pa Gur)

The Nine Witches of Caer Lloyw (Peredur)

Orddu the Witch (Culhwch and Olwen)

King Bladdud (Historia Regum Britanniae, The Faerie Queene)

The Nine Sisters of Avalon (sans Morgan) (Vita Merlini) [Names: Mazoe, Moronoe, Gliten, Gliton, Glitonea, Tyronoe, Thiten, Thitis]

Queen Ganieda (Vita Merlini)

Queen Guinevere (De Ortu Waluuanii/Enfances Gauvain)

King Melwas (Welsh Mythology)

King Valerin (Lanzelet)

Malduc (Lanzelet)

Sir Tristan (The Welsh Triads)

Iseult the Elder (and possibly Iseult the Fair herself) (Tristan and Isolde)

Thessala (Cliges)

Eliavres (Perceval - 1st continuation)

The Maiden of the White Hands (Le Bel Inconnu)

Mabon the Enchanter/Mabon ap Modron (Le Bel Inconnu, Prose Tristan, Post Vulgate)

Evraine (Le Bel Inconnu)

Lady Tryamour (Lanval/Launfal)

Klingsor (Parzival)

Kundry (Parzival)

The Artisan of Cluse (?) (Daniel von dem Bluhenden Tal)

Giramphiel (Diu Crone)

Gansguoter (Diu Crone)

Enfeidas (Diu Crone)

Fairy L'Orgueilleux (L'Atre Perilleux)

Queen Morgause of Orkney (L'Atre Perilleux)

King Celidoine (Vulgate Estoire de Graal)

Guinebal (Vulgate Merlin)

Master Elias of Toulouse and his fellow clerks (?) (Vulgate Lancelot)

Vortigern's Clerks (Vulgate Merlin)

Arthur's Clerks (Historia Regum Britanniae, Vulgate Lancelot)

Lady Gamille (Vulgate Lancelot)

False Guinevere (Vulgate Lancelot)

Lady Brisen (Vulgate Lancelot, Le Morte D'Arthur)

Lady Sebile (Vulgate Lancelot, Le Propheties de Merlin, Perceforest)

The Queen of Northgallis (Le Propheties de Merlin, Le Morte D'Arthur)

The Queen of Sorestan (Vulgate Lancelot)

The Queen of Eastland (Le Morte D'Arthur)

The Queen of the Out Islands (Le Morte D'Arthur)

The Lady of Avalon (Le Propheties de Merlin)

Queen Crisea (Post Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal)

Tanabos the Enchanter (Post Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal)

Darnant the Enchanter (Perceforest)

Queen Lydore (Perceforest)

King Aroes (Perceforest)

Hellawes (Le Morte D'Arthur)

Annowre/Elergia (Le Morte D'Arthur, La Tavola Ritonda)

Lady Lynette (and possibly Lyonesse) (Le Morte D'Arthur)

Pulzella Gaia (Pulzella Gaia)

Sir Fellone (La Tavola Ritonda)

The Green Knight (Bredbeddle ver.) (King Arthur and King Cornwall)

King Cornwall (King Arthur and King Cornwall)

Archimago (The Faerie Queene)

Acrasia (The Faerie Queene)

Busirane (The Faerie Queene)

Duessa (The Faerie Queene)

Caelia (The Faerie Queene, Tom a Lincoln)

Merlindia (Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Tavola Redonda)

Telorique (Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Tavola Redonda)

Notes:

This list is tentative and subject to change. More will included as necessary. If you are viewing a reblog, please check the original post for an up-to-date list.

The list discounts Saints and other Christian Holy Persons (such as Galahad). It also discounts characters with "superpowers" (such as Kay and Gawain). In general, the focus is on "Spellcasters"/Magic as an art or skill (Admittedly, the line is very murky).

If you don't read books: Read a book. Read any book. Read a book you loved when you were a kid. Read a book that interests you now. Read an entire collection of poetry or essays and think about why the author or editor arranged those works in that order. Read an erotic novel. Read nonfiction. Read graphic novels or manga. Read a kids' chapter book or a YA novel. Read a book digitally. Read a book on paper. Read an audiobook and really focus on it - if you notice yourself spacing out, scroll back to the last words you remember and try listening again. Read any book. And then when you finish it, celebrate for a minute (get those endorphins going!) and then read another one.

Want to read some Arthuriana but short on time?

A collection of short medieval texts, poems, plays, and short stories and anthologies.

Links are provided to PDF's for free reading or to download. If a book is still in print, a link to where you can purchase will be provided. This post will be updated as necessary.

This post was made in collaboration with and wouldn't have been possible without @queer-ragnelle! The following PDF's are supplied by the @arthurianpreservationproject, which i emplore you to go check out for yourself. My personal reccomendations are bolded and higlighted in pink, while L's reccomendations are in green.

EDIT: After the scare I got for having my account terminated, I decided to make a Google Doc version of this masterpost in case anything happens again. The gdoc and this post will be updated at the same time whenever I have any new additions, which will be marked as ‼️

Last updated: 4/6/2025

Well hey, here's some spring poetry for everyone. 21 poems, all free and open, no login needed!

Image by Yunyao Chen from the SVA COVID Collection on JSTOR

Spring William Carlos Williams (1919)

Spring Symphony Walt Whitman (1919)

One Spring Eda Lou Walton (1920)

Early Spring John Moreland (1923)

Spring Poems by a Fifth Grade Elsa Miller (1907)

Ode to Spring Henry C. Watson (1866)

Spring Has Come Eleanor Hatch (1922)

Spring Fever Faith Shearing (2002)

Spring in Canterbury Charlotte F. Babcock (1927)

Pulse of Spring Mark Turbyfill (1917)

Spring Albrecht Reu (1915)

An English Spring S. F. Hopkins (1907)

A Forward Spring Lisa Williams (1988)

A Spring View Kokan Shiren, translated by Marian Ury (1992)

Spring Sounds Mercedes de Acosta (1925)

Arpeggio—Spring Winifred Waldron (1923)

Spring Morning Marion Strobel (1922)

One Spring Eda Lou Walton (1920)

Spring Torrents Sara Teasdale (1919)

Spring Day Grace Hazard Conkling (1917)

And we end with:

accelerated aging

anxiety and a constant feeling of dread

disorientation / blurred vision

bones cracking and breaking

bruising around hands and arm

burn marks on palms and finger tips

cognitive decline / memory lapses

debilitating migraines

exhaustion / fatigue

eyes reddening when veins pop

greying hair due to strain / eyes losing vibrancy

joint, muscle and limb pain

losing hair, teeth and finger nails

loss of body heat / constantly freezing

nose bleeds / ear bleeds

numbness / slowed reflexes / brain fog

requiring a lot more nutrition and rest

sensitive eyes and ears / raspy, raw voice

twitches and muscle spasms