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thecalendarwomen · 1 year

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Viking historian Nancy Marie Brown’s new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, explores what life might have been like for the warrior woman of Bj 581. Using more evidence from the recent tests conducted on the remains, Brown traces her journey from Norway to the British Isles to Kiev then, finally, to Birka. Brown imagines the unnamed warrior meeting other prominent Viking women, such as Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, or Queen Olga, ruler of the Rus Vikings in Kiev. She also explores the Viking sagas and contemporary sources with a new lens.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Brown about her new book, valkyries, and the assumptions that underlie the history we think we know.

How did you initially get interested in Vikings—and female Vikings in particular?

When I went to college, I actually wanted to study fantasy writing and, you know, learn to write like Tolkien. I learned very quickly that that was not appropriate for an English major in the 1970s, so I decided to study what Tolkien studied, and he was a professor at Oxford University, teaching Old English and Old Norse. So I started reading all of the Icelandic sagas that I could find in translation. And when I ran out of the English versions, I learned Old Norse so that I could read the rest of them.

One of the things I liked about [the sagas] the most was that they had really interesting women characters. There’s a queen in Norway who appears in about 11 sagas, Queen Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. She led armies. She devised war strategy. And then I was looking at the valkyries and the shieldmaids and thinking, you know, these are really interesting people that have always been considered to be mythological.

So when I learned in 2017 that one of the most famous Viking warrior burials turned out to be the burial of a woman, that just absolutely dazzled my imagination.

Is this the first confirmed grave of a female warrior that we have?

This is the one that has the best proof. There are one or two others that have since been DNA tested and proven to be female. But in each of these cases, it’s hard to say if the person in the grave, whether male or female, actually was a warrior, or if the object that we are interpreting as a weapon was used for hunting or for some other purpose.

What do we know about the life of the Viking warrior woman in Bj 581?

In 2017, by testing her bones and her teeth, [scholars] could say she was between 30 and 40 years old when she died. They could also tell that she ate well all of her life. So she came from a rich family or maybe even a royal one. She was also quite tall, about 5’7”. By the minerals in her inner teeth, [scholars can determine] she may have come from southern Sweden or Norway, and also that she went west maybe as far as the British Isles before her molars finished forming. She didn’t arrive in Birka until she was 16.

We also have her weapons and a little bit of clothing that were found in the grave. And these link her to what is known as the Vikings’ East Way, which was the trade route from Sweden to the Silk Road.

We can link, through the artifacts and through the bones, that she could have traveled from as far west as Dublin to as far east as at least Kiev in the 30 to 40 years of her life.

How do we know that there were Viking warrior women?

They are mentioned many, many, many times in the literature. In most cases, they have been dismissed as mythological because, of course, we know warriors were men. But we don’t know that. That is an assumption that is based on traditional Victorian ideas that because women are mothers, they’re nurturing, they’re peacemakers, and they don’t fight.

That’s not historically true. Women have always fought. And they appear in most cultures until the 1800s, when Viking studies and archaeology pretty much started. So we sort of have this problem of bias in our earliest textbooks.

There’s this assumption that the warrior men of myth must have been based on real people, but it’s not the same for the mythical warrior women. Why is that?

It’s just an assumption based on what people think women are like. Most of the material we have from the Middle Ages was written by men, and most of the material we have until the 1950s was written by men, and women are slowly making their way into the field of Viking scholarship. But many of them are still working under the assumptions that they were taught.

I noticed when I went back and reread some of the sagas in Icelandic that there wasn’t this clear distinction between the warrior women being mythological and the warrior men being human. When you actually look at the old Norse text, there’s a lot of words that have been translated as “men” that actually mean “people,” but it’s always been translated as “men” because it’s a warrior situation.

Is it possible for historians to remove all of those biases?

No, I don’t think it is. I think we all are looking through our own lenses. But we have to revisit those sources every generation to see past biases. So when you have layer after layer after layer of removing biases, you may get closer to the truth.

What most surprised you in the course of researching your book?

One of the controversies right now in Viking studies is should we really be talking about men and women at all? Maybe there were all kinds of different genders. We don’t know if there were more than two genders in the Viking age. Maybe it was a spectrum.

If you look at this one group of sagas called the Sagas of Ancient Times that are often overlooked because they have all these fabulous creatures in them, like dragons and warrior women. It’s really interesting [because] these girls grow up wanting to be warriors. They’re constantly disobeying and trying to run off and join Viking bands. But when they do run off and join the Viking band, or, in another case, become the king of a town, they insist on being called by a male name and use male pronouns.

So it was very shocking to me to go back and read it in the original and say, “Wow, all this richness was lost in the translation.”

#Nancy Marie Brown #vikings #history #women in history #archaeology #women warriors #warfare #warrior women #norse history #atlas obscura

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howelljenkins · 4 years

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As a muslim Iraqi American with a significant tumblr following, I feel as though I should let it be known exactly where I stand when it comes to Riordan’s statement about Samirah. I have copied and pasted it down below and my reaction to it will be written down below. This will be the first time I have read it. If you want to engage with me or tell me that I’m wrong, I expect you to be a muslim, hijabi, Iraqi American, and from Baghdad. If you are not, I suggest you sit down and keep quiet because you are not the authority on the way I should be represented.

Like many of my characters, Samirah was inspired by former students of mine. Over the course of my middle school teaching career, I worked with dozens of Muslim students and their families, representing the expanse of the Muslim world and both Shia and Sunni traditions. One of my most poignant memories about the September 11, 2001, attack of the World Trade Center was when a Muslima student burst into tears when she heard the news – not just because it was horrific, but also because she knew what it meant for her, her family, her faith. She had unwillingly become an ambassador to everyone she knew who, would have questions about how this attack happened and why the perpetrators called themselves “Muslim.” Her life had just become exponentially more difficult because of factors completely beyond her control. It was not right. It was not fair. And I wasn’t sure how to comfort or support her.

Starting off your statement with one of the most traumatic events in history for muslim Americans is already one of the most predictably bad moves he could pull. By starting off this way, you are acknowledging the fact that a) this t*rrorist attack is still the first thing you think of when you think of muslims and b) that those muslim students who you had prior to 9/11 occupied so little space in your mind that it took a national disaster for you to start to even try to empathize with them.

During the following years, I tried to be especially attuned to the needs of my Muslim students. I dealt with 9/11 the same way I deal with most things: by reading and learning more. When I taught world religions in social studies, I would talk to my Muslim students about Islam to make sure I was representing their experience correctly. They taught me quite a bit, which eventually contributed to my depiction of Samirah al-Abbas. As always, though, where I have made mistakes in my understanding, those mistakes are wholly on me.

As always, you have chosen to use “I based this character off my students” in order to justify the way they are written. News flash: you taught middle school children. Children who are already scrutinized and alienated and desperate to fit in. Of course their words shouldn’t be enough for you to decide you are representing them correctly, because they are still coming to terms with their identities and they are doing this in an environment where they are desperate to find the approval of white Americans. I know that as a child I would often tweak the way I explained my culture and religion to my teachers in order to gain their approval and avoid ruffling any feathers. They told you what they thought you’d want to hear because you are their teacher and hold a position of power over them and they both want your approval and want to avoid saying the wrong thing and having that hang over their heads every time they enter your classroom.

What did I read for research? I have read five different English interpretations of the Qur’an. (I understand the message is inseparable from the original Arabic, so it cannot be considered ‘translated’). I have read the entirety of the Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadith collections. I’ve read three biographies of Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) and well over a dozen books about the history of Islam and modern Islam. I took a six-week course in Arabic. (I was not very good at it, but I found it fascinating). I fasted the month of Ramadan in solidarity with my students. I even memorized some of the surahs in Arabic because I found the poetry beautiful. (They’re a little rusty now, I’ll admit, but I can still recite al-Fātihah from memory.) I also read some anti-Islamic screeds written in the aftermath of 9/11 so I would understand what those commenters were saying about the religion, and indirectly, about my students. I get mad when people attack my students.

And yet here you are actively avoiding the criticism from those of us who could very well have been the children sitting in your classroom.

The Quran is so deep and complex that its meanings are still being discovered to this day. Yes, reading these old scripts is a must for writing muslim characters, but you cannot claim to understand them without also holding active discussions with current scholars on how the Quran’s teachings apply today.

When preparing to write Samirah’s background, I drew on all of this, but also read many stories on Iraqi traditions and customs in particular and the experiences of immigrant families who came to the U.S. I figured out how Samirah’s history would intertwine with the Norse world through the medieval writer Ahmad ibn Fadhlan, her distant ancestor and one of the first outsiders to describe the Vikings in writing. I knew Samirah would be a ferocious brave fighter who always stood for what was right. She would be an excellent student who had dreams of being an aviator. She would have a complicated personal situation to wrestle with, in that she’s a practicing Muslim who finds out Valhalla is a real place. Odin and Thor and Loki are still around. How do you reconcile that with your faith? Not only that, but her mom had a romance with Loki, who is her dad. Yikes.

First of all, writing this paragraph in the same tone you use to emulate a 12 year old is already disrespectful. “Yikes” is correct. You have committed serious transgressions and can’t even commit to acting serious and writing like the almost 60 year old man that you are. Tone tells the reader a lot, and your tone is telling me that you are explaining your mistakes the same way you tell your little stories: childishly and jokingly.

Stories are not enough. They are not and never will be. Stories cannot even begin to pierce the rich culture and history and customs of Iraq. Iraq itself is not even homogenous enough for you to rely on these “Iraqi” stories. Someone’s story from Najaf is completely unique from someone from Baghdad or Nasriyyah or Basrah or Mosul. Add that to the fact that these stories are written with a certain audience in mind and you realize that there’s no way they can tell the whole story because at their core they are catering to a specific audience.

Yes, those are good, but they are meaningless without you consulting an actual Baghdadi and asking specific questions. You made conclusions and assumptions based on these stories when the obvious way to go was to consult someone from Baghdad every step of the writing process. Instead, you chose to trust the conclusions that you (a white man) drew from a handful of stories. Who are you to convey a muslim’s internal struggle when you did not even do the bare minimum and have an actual muslim read over your words?

Thankfully, the feedback from Muslim readers over the years to Samirah al-Abbas has been overwhelmingly positive. I have gotten so many letters and messages online from young fans, talking about how much it meant to them to see a hijabi character portrayed in a positive light in a ‘mainstream’ novel.

Yeah. Because we’re desperate, and half of them are children still developing their sense of self and critical reading skills. A starving man will thank you for moldy bread but that does not negate the mold.

Some readers had questions, sure! The big mistake I will totally own, and which I have apologized for many times, was my statement that during the fasting hours of Ramadan, bathing (i.e. total immersion in water) was to be avoided. This was advice I had read on a Shia website when I myself was preparing to fast Ramadan. It is advice I followed for the entire month. Whoops! The intent behind that advice, as I understood it, was that if you totally immersed yourself during daylight hours, you might inadvertently get some water between your lips and invalidate your fast. But, as I have since learned, that was simply one teacher’s personal opinion, not a widespread practice. We have corrected this detail (which involved the deletion of one line) in future editions, but as I mentioned in my last post, you will still find it in copies since the vast majority of books are from the first printing.

This is actually really embarrassing for you and speaks to your lack of research and reading comprehension. It is true that for shia, immersion breaks one’s fast. If you had bothered to actually ask questions and use common sense, you would realize that this is referring to actions like swimming, where one’s whole body is underwater, rather than bathing. Did you not question the fact that the same religion that encourages the cleansing of oneself five times a day banned bathing during the holiest month? Yes, it was one teacher’s opinion, but you literally did not even take the time to fully understand that opinion before chucking it into your book.

Another question was about Samirah’s wearing of the hijab. To some readers, she seemed cavalier about when she would take it off and how she would wear it. It’s not my place to be prescriptive about proper hijab-wearing. As any Muslim knows, the custom and practice varies greatly from one country to another, and from one individual to another. I can, however, describe what I have seen in the U.S., and Samirah’s wearing of the hijab reflects the practice of some of my own students, so it seemed to be within the realm of reason for a third-generation Iraqi-American Muslima. Samirah would wear hijab most of the time — in public, at school, at mosque. She would probably but not always wear it in Valhalla, as she views this as her home, and the fallen warriors as her own kin. This is described in the Magnus Chase books. I also admit I just loved the idea of a Muslima whose hijab is a magic item that can camouflage her in times of need.

Before I get into this paragraph, Samirah is second generation. Her grandparents immigrated from Iraq. Her mother was first gen.

Once again, you turn to what you have seen from your students, who are literal children. They are in middle school while Samirah is in high school, so they are very obviously at different stages of development, both emotional and religious. If you had bothered to talk to adults who had gone through these stages, you would understand that often times young girls have stages where they “practice” hijab or wear it “part time”, very often in middle school. However, both her age and the way in which you described Samirah lead the reader to believe that she is a “full timer,” so you playing willy nilly with her scarf as a white man is gross.

For someone who claims to have read all of these religious texts, it’s funny that you choose to overlook the fact that “kin” is very specifically described. Muslims do not go around deciding who they consider “kin” or “family” to take off their hijab in front of. There is no excuse for including this in her character, especially since you claim to have carefully read the Quran and ahadith.

You have no place to “just love” any magical extension of the hijab until you approach it with respect. Point blank period. Especially when you have ascribed it a magical property that justifies her taking it on and off like it’s no big deal, especially when current media portrayals of hijab almost always revolve around it being removed. You are adding to the harmful portrayal and using your “fun little magic camoflauge” to excuse it.

As for her betrothal to Amir Fadhlan, only recently have I gotten any questions about this. My understanding from my readings, and from what I have been told by Muslims I know, is that arranged marriages are still quite common in many Muslim countries (not just Muslim countries, of course) and that these matches are sometimes negotiated by the families when the bride-to-be and groom-to-be are quite young. Prior to writing Magnus Chase, one of the complaints I often heard or read from Muslims is how Westerners tend to judge this custom and look down on it because it does not accord with Western ideas. Of course, arranged marriages carry the potential for abuse, especially if there is an age differential or the woman is not consulted. Child marriages are a huge problem. The arrangement of betrothals years in advance of the marriage, however, is an ancient custom in many cultures, and those people I know who were married in this way have shared with me how glad they were to have done it and how they believe the practice is unfairly villainized. My idea with Samirah was to flip the stereotype of the terrible abusive arranged match on its head, and show how it was possible that two people who actually love each other dearly might find happiness through this traditional custom when they have families that listen to their concerns and honor their wishes, and want them to be happy. Amir and Samirah are very distant cousins, yes. This, too, is hardly unusual in many cultures. They will not actually marry until they are both adults. But they have been betrothed since childhood, and respect and love each other. If that were not the case, my sense is that Samirah would only have to say something to her grandparents, and the match would be cancelled. Again, most of the comments I have received from Muslim readers have been to thank me for presenting traditional customs in a positive rather than a negative light, not judging them by Western standards. In no way do I condone child marriage, and that (to my mind) is not anywhere implied in the Magnus Chase books.

I simply can’t even begin to explain everything that is wrong with this paragraph. Here is a good post about how her getting engaged at 12 is absolutely wrong religiously and would not happen. Add that on to the fact that Samirah herself is second-generation (although Riordan calls her third generation in this post) and this practice isn’t super common even in first generation people (and for those that it DOES apply to, it is when they are old enough to be married and not literal children).

As a white man you can’t flip the stereotype. You can’t. Even with tons of research you cannot assume the authority to “flip” a stereotype that does not affect you because you will never come close to truly understanding it inside and out. Instead of flipping a stereotype, Rick fed into it and provided more fodder to the flames and added on to it to make it even worse.

I would be uncomfortable with a white author writing about arranged marriages in brown tradition no matter the context, but for him to offhandedly include it in a children’s book where it is badly explained and barely touched on is inexcusable. Your target audience is children who will no doubt overlook your clumsy attempt at flipping stereotypes.

It does not matter what your mind thinks you are implying. Rick Riordan is not your target audience, children are. So you cannot brush this away by stating that you did not see the harm done by your writing. You are almost 60 years old. Maybe you can read in between your lines, but I guarantee your target audience largely cannot.

Finally, recently someone on Twitter decided to screenshot a passage out-of-context from Ship of the Deadwhere Magnus hears Samirah use the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” and the only context he has ever heard it in before was in news reports when some Western reporter would be talking about a terrorist attack. Here is the passage in full:

Samirah: “My dad may have power over me because he’s my dad. But he’s not the biggest power. Allahu akbar.”

I knew that term, but I’d never heard Sam use it before. I’ll admit it gave me an instinctive jolt in the gut. The news media loved to talk about how terrorists would say that right before they did something horrible and blew people up. I wasn’t going to mention that to Sam. I imagined she was painfully aware.

She couldn’t walk the streets of Boston in her hijab most days without somebody screaming at her to go home, and (if she was in a bad mood) she’d scream back, “I’m from Dorchester!”

“Yeah,” I said. “That means God is great, right?”

Sam shook her head. “That’s a slightly inaccurate translation. It means God is greater.”

“Than what?”

“Everything. The whole point of saying it is to remind yourself that God is greater than whatever you are facing—your fears, your problems, your thirst, your hunger, your anger.

337-338

To me, this is Samirah educating Magnus, and through him the readers, about what this phrase actually means and the religious significance it carries. I think the expression is beautiful and profound. However, like a lot of Americans, Magnus has grown up only hearing about it in a negative context from the news. For him to think: “I had never heard that phrase, and it carried absolutely no negative connotations!” would be silly and unrealistic. This is a teachable moment between two characters, two friends who respect each other despite how different they are. Magnus learns something beautiful and true about Samirah’s religion, and hopefully so do the readers. If that strikes you as Islamophobic in its full context, or if Samirah seems like a hurtful stereotype . . . all I can say is I strongly disagree.

I will give you some credit here in that I mostly agree with this scene. The phrase does carry negative connotations with many white people and I do not fault you for explaining it the way you did. However, don’t try to sneak in that last sentence like we won’t notice. You have no place to decide whether or not Samirah’s character as a whole is harmful and stereotypical.

It is 2 am and that is all I have the willpower to address. This is messy and this is long and this is not well worded, but this had to be addressed. I do not speak for every muslim, both world wide and within this online community, but these were my raw reactions to his statement. I have been working on and will continue to work on a masterpost of Samirah Al-Abbas as I work through the books, but for now, let it be known that Riordan has bastardized my identity and continues to excuse himself and profit off of enforcing harmful stereotypes. Good night.

#*#og #rr crit #samirah al abbas #rick riordan

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nicolepremier · 5 years

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Nano’s Knife

I’m currently writing a Nano/Akira fic and it occurs to me that I need to explain to everyone what’s really going on with Nano’s knife and its mysterious inscription that appears on so much iconic TnC merch. I was planning to write a brief summary in the author’s notes, but I wanted to go into a little more detail here, since I thought some of you might be curious.

Fandom lore would simply state that Nano’s inscription reads “wish” in some mysterious language, a symbol that he “wishes” to meet Akira again, and leave it at that.

It’s a lot more complex than that. And spoiler alert - the inscription on that knife does not literally read “wish” in any language.

For starters, there is some confusion in the translation from Japanese to English. The word the Japanese use that is translated to English as “wish” is 願い (negai), and that word has another meaning, a meaning that contextually makes a lot more sense. “Negai” also means “prayer,” and the context that it is used in throughout Nano’s route suggests that “prayer” would have been a more accurate and appropriate translation. For example, when Akira finds Nano sitting alone in the church with the black kitten, Nano says that he is there because he is “wishing” for another person’s happiness (obviously Akira’s, though that goes completely over Akira’s head) because it’s the only thing left to one whose fate has already been determined (referring to himself). What he’s actually doing is praying for Akira’s happiness. You don’t go to church to “wish,” you go to “pray.”

This distinction becomes very important when translating Nano’s knife inscription.

The inscription on Nano’s knife is written in Elder Futhark, a pre-viking Norse and Germanic rune system. (Though popular perception today simply refers to them as “viking runes.”) Being of Scandinavian decent from a family who loves anything and everything to do with vikings, I recognized the writing immediately since the same runes are on a ton of decorations all over my family’s home.

If you try and translate Nano’s runes phonetically, you get “hingath,” which is complete rubbish and means absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. It most certainly does NOT mean “wish.”

There is some additional complication due to the fact that N+C is horribly inconsistent with the runes from one set of merch to the next (presumably because they mean nothing to the designers), and the designers sometimes write them in ways that make the inscription even MORE nonsensical.

I actually sent a number of the different versions of the inscriptions to a professor friend who studies runes in several dead languages, and he came up with exactly the same nonsensical gibberish I did - it’s badly written Elder Futhark mixing several time periods that says nothing. He said it wasn’t all that uncommon for people to write nonsense runes on all sorts of stuff just because they like the look of them. For example, a well-known rune translation guide book has runes going around the cover which translate to “These runes don’t say anything, but they sure look cool, don’t they?”

But I wasn’t satisfied.

Elder Futhark is not purely a phonetic language like the Latin alphabet. The god Odin “sacrificed himself to himself” by hanging on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, receiving no form of nourishment from his companions. At the end of this ordeal, he perceived the runes, the magically-charged ancient Germanic alphabet that was held to contain many of the greatest secrets of existence.

The fact that the runes have, since their conception, been thought to be imbibed with magical powers is the reason they have been so extensively used by modern Neopagans in so much of their ritual practice. Simply the act of inscribing the runes, or keeping inscribed objects close, can confer power and blessings. Each rune has multiple meanings, but keeping that in mind, I believe I have cracked the code of Nano’s mysterious knife inscription.

The knife isn’t a “wish” or a symbol of a “wish” - it’s a “prayer.” It’s a prayer to the old gods.

Name: Hagalaz, “hail.” Phoneme: H. Meaning: destruction, chaos, change, invocation

This is a common invocation to begin a prayer to petition the gods.

Name: Ingwaz, “the god Ingwaz.” Phoneme: Ing or ng. Meaning: male fertility, the beginning of something, the actualization of potential via sacrifice

He must offer a sacrifice. The old gods don’t work for free. One must give something up in order for one’s prayer to have a chance of being answered.

Name: Ansuz, “an Aesir god.” Phoneme: A (long and/or short). Meaning: prosperity, vitality.

He’s calling on one or more of the aesir gods for help - Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Loki, Baldur, Heimdall, Idun, and Bragi.

Name: Thurisaz, “Thor, Giant.” Phoneme: Th (both soft and hard). Meaning: danger, suffering, solitude. (Note that this rune is often written with shorter vertical lines so that it looks more like an angular D. Both versions appear on different TnC merch.)

He wants an end to his suffering and solitude. His prayer is a desperate cry for help.

To be clear, I do not believe that Nano is a time traveling viking, or even of Norse decent - if he were, he might have written a more sensible inscription that actually meant something in one of the Scandinavian languages - all of which use the roman alphabet nowadays, and that is NOT the alphabet that Nano’s book uses, since Japanese use romanji as well and Akira has never seen those sorts of letters before. No one writes books in Elder Futhark these days. Here is what I believe happened:

Nano was the son of academics. He mentions in Kou Un (his official afterstory) that his father whose face he can’t remember made the knife. That’s not a normal skill, and even a rudimentary knowledge of Norse runes (and Norse gods) isn’t common knowledge among the general populace. This is consistent with how Nano dresses and presents himself - he isn’t the sort of person who puts a lot of thought into his clothing, but he likely tends to subconsciously gravitate towards what some part of his brain still registers as “normal” - things his father might have worn, and which he probably wore himself as a child before he was taken to ENED. His primary hobby is reading, and his eloquent speech and precise pattern observation makes clear that he’s quite intelligent, despite his naivety and eccentricity.

I headcanon that Nano’s father was an engineer, and his mother was a history professor (probably NOT in Norse studies), both of whom worked for a Russian university with government funding in South eastern Russia, in close proximity to both China and Japan. His father may have been involved in the design or manufacturing of weapons during WWIII. Likely both parents had an interest in historical reenactment and were eager to involve their children. Nano likely spent a good deal of time with his mother as a child since his father would have been kept extremely busy during the war. He was almost certainly taught to read at a very young age and given books on his mother’s favorite subjects to keep him occupied while she worked. When he developed an interest in vikings and Norse mythology as a young boy, he was almost certainly encouraged to pursue it. Therefore, although he was raised Russian Orthodox Christian, he was aware of (and likely fascinated by) mythology from various cultures. His speech in the game illustrates that he does indeed have a distinct interest in Christian mythology in particular, and likely that of other cultures as well, given that his only known possession was a knife inscribed with Elder Futhark. His father likely recognized his interests and made the knife for him as a gift, then let him help inscribe it with a prayer. To a little kid who really liked vikings, that was probably very exciting, so it isn’t surprising that the knife would become his most prized possession, even after his memories were altered and he could no longer remember anything else about his family.

After Nano’s family was killed, he was put into an overcrowded Russian orphanage, then later taken away by the Japanese for use as a nameless test subject in what was often lethal experimentation. At that point he was so scared that he was willing to try just about anything. Having no control at all over his own fate, his only recourse was to pray for salvation. When no one answered his prayers and his circumstances kept going from bad to worse, he almost certainly started to lose faith in the Christian god, and tried to invoke the old Norse gods in hopes that maybe he was just praying to the wrong god and there was still SOMEONE out there who would listen. He may even have forgotten what the inscription on the knife actually meant, only recalling dreamlike bits and pieces. It was a prayer. To be completely honest, I find it completely unrealistic that Nano could have kept that knife hidden for so long from ENED, given that it’s fairly large, he had no privacy, was watched 24/7, and only wore a medical gown inside the facility. I think it is slightly more likely that he was allowed to keep it, given how submissive he was to the researchers, since the end goal was to brainwash him into BECOMING a weapon himself.

In the end, when Nano had lost all hope and knew he was about to lose even himself… the sacrifice he made to invoke his final desperate prayer WAS the knife itself, his last remaining possession, the last reminder he had of his humanity, and with it his last remaining hope of salvation. He gave it all to Akira, in hopes that maybe one day, they would meet again.

Now, Nano’s fate, and his salvation, depends entirely on Akira.

#Togainu no Chi #Nano (TnC)#Nicole Premier #headcanon

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ilovetuds · 5 years

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So I'd like to write my opinion towards the so waited last movie of the loved franchise How to Train your Dragon, the post will contain Spoilers so if you didn't watch it yet I recommend not reading this post. I was quite disappointed with the movie but there were also parts I really enjoyed, like I said at the beginning its my opinion and I just want to share the cons and pros of that animated movie (AGAIN IN MY PERSPECTIVE), I just felt like it had more potential than what we got and it left a lot of unsweared things about the plot of the whole dragon universe created by them and felt a little lazy.

CONS:

1- This one made me feel uncomfortable, the whole snoutloud and valka ( Hiccup's mother) kinda romance, he was clearly into her and fighting to get her attention. Common if that's not at least a little bit disturbing? It's like one of your friends start to hit on your mom, its just weird. In the end of the movie we are not sure if they will have something or not, she praises him and he gets all lovey dovey. (FOR THOR NO, PLEASE NO) 2- OKAY THIS ONE IS THE THING THAT I WAS PASEKAEOSAKOEA (really annoyed), for me the last villain, the so called 'Night Fury' killer, the one who everyone was afraid of and said he was some master of the hunt, he was pretty shallow and dumb. His character was not really detailed and his reason to kill all Night Furys was even worse. He tells Hiccup when he killed his first Night Fury his whole tribe cheered because of that, so he just decided he wanted to kill all of them, I mean that's a good reason for a villain, pride or whatever you want to call it but not for the "ultimate villain", it's just really weak and lazy plot. Maybe I should put topics here about him, I watched the whole series and read the books so I might get a little into them now:

a. He doesn't look scary at all! I mean common when we had villains like Drago who had a really cool concept, a tough looking guy who called himself Dragon God or Dargo Bloody Fist, and the guy is 50 old! The guy enslaved dragons, controlled na Alpha dragon and he even rode Toothless. He was a hell of a villain he was really a madman. Now let's talk about Krogan, if you watched the netflix series you know him. The man is fucking awesome and you can actually fear him, he has a hell of a dragon as a 'partner', has a cool scar and a tough face, he's brave and fiercefoul, you don't want to mess with that dude. He ran to every fight with his dragon or without, let's not forget he captured a titan dragon! And his plans were smart too, it was a character that had knowledge and was a really amazing. We shall not forget about Viggo Grimborn, for me one of the best character in the series, you never know if you can trust him or not, he is the Crime Lord his whole appearence on the series was amazing, you saw him grow as a character and he had a lot of good plans and traps agaisnt the raiders. And we shall not forget about Johann, the man used the vikings for years and never revealed his true intentions, he was a master mind really good villain and a big plot twist in the whole universe. I could mention some other small villains here and there but my point is, all of them were really smart and were challanging for the gang to beat, with the so called "Night Fury Killer" was really dumb and he felt not so special, he had no good plan or a good reason for you to like, hate or fear him, he was just there because they needed to show the guy almost wiped all the little toothless off the earth. His character was really dissapointing to me.

b. We wanted to see new dragons, and especially new 'bad dragons' and we got some cool scorpion like dragons, nothing super creative and new, because we had the Triple Stryke already, (which is na awesome dragon). He had to drug those dragons to obbey him, which doesnt explain how they would listen to just him it made no sense at all. They were strong yea, but they were also dumb. Toothless got rid of 5 or 6 of them so easily it felt stupid. Like no challange whatsoever.

c. His poison darts were na idea we seen in the whole franchise a lot, so nothing new, I know it is a movie for kids but his darts could be deadly, like when he shot the dragon who charged after him, it would add a lot more to his character as evil and na asshole if he killed the dragon instead of putting it to sleep, just looked really overused to me. d. Overrall it was a really wasted character, the movie felt way too rushed and we didn't have time to see and develop anything for him. It was just a waste of animation and plot. 3- The light fury, I know a lot of people must be loving her concept, desing and etc etc, after all she is Toothless's mate, but her character at least for me wasn't much likeable. It seemed like she was just put there to end the story and to show the whole thing about growing up, because you will start to get distant of a lot of your friends and things change, because it is real life, that's true and we get it, but she as a character, she has no story, no explanation and we don't even get to know more about her. Again it felt really rushed. Don't get me wrong, I know it would be a lot of things to cover in a movie, but the whole franchise was always about giving and learning about dragons and how they react and their characteristics, so when we get nothing explained or the whole let's study this dragon or Fishleg's thirst for knowledge ( I do know he tried to draw her but he gave up too easily and didn't really seemed that interested) is dissapointing... It was finally someone Toothless could relate to and not be the end of his species, the way they should've dealt with it should've been different. There was more promo than plot. FISHLEGS DIDN’T EVEN CARE TO NAME HER, THATS HOW SPECIAL SHE WAS.

4- Hiccup's friends, his friends weren't really that important and funny, I get this whole movie is supposed to be more grown up, but we grew up with them, it felt like they were more like background characters than secondary. I think there were less dialogs and interactions between all of them, kinda sad.

5- Again the movie felt really rushed I don't think they covered things that were important for the end of the plot and focused on shallow and stupid things.

6- The hidden world, I wanted to learn and to see more of the hidden world, how it worked, the new species there, something, anything. Instead we just got a grumpy toothless going back to the new Berk with Hiccup and a stupid chase. I found something really strange too, with that many dragons, there should've been an Alpha, another dragon other than Toothless, but it's too convenient that we learn that Toothless is also Alpha in the Hidden World, and not just that suddenly all the dragons see him as a superior. AGAIN RUSHED and lazy, IT WAS THE FUCKING HIDDEN WORLD OF THE LEGENDS....

7- If you watched the trailer you watched the movie. I dont know whats going on with some trailers nowadays, but they are showing too much and basically you can tell everything that it's going to happen. I think it's really dumb and disrespectful to the watchers.

8- I know maybe you guys don't care but I really wanted to buy a new Toothless toy to put as a display on my computer, but the toys that were created for this movie, were really terrible looking and bad quality. And the new toothless (The huge one) is just the same as the other one from 2014, disapointing.

9- They said all the dragons disappeared and bla bla, but we seen that there were dragons in the sea, in some islands really far far away and hidden caves all around the world. Maybe the dragons near Berk were gone, near the vikings but not all the dragons in the world.

10- Where in the hell is Heather? Just that lol Where is Heather. Her dragon is sound and safe and didn't go to the hidden world. Neither did her brother's. Again a big flaw in the plot.

PROS 1- Okay I really liked the cinematography of this movie, you can tell how much they invested in it and how much they evolved, the animations, landscapes the dragons, the reflection on Toothless eyes were breathtaking. Amazing.

2- Toothless and Hiccup friendship, it is beautiful till the end, we love their friendship and how they interact with each other, theres no complain. Maybe we hate to see them getting apart because we realize that its what we are going to experience in some point of our lives, I thought I'd always see my friends from school and my friends that I had for more than 19 years, but time and life get in the way, friends will still be friends but you will likely see them less, which somehow make us sad.

3- Astrid and Hiccup marriage, it was touching and cute, I did feel like it was more for fan service but it's alright, it was cute and they deserved each other. 4- Astrid Growth, she had na amazing develop as a character and being always there to help Hiccup was really a big plus for her.

5- 'Mini meatlug' IT WAS ADORABLE ENOUGH SAID.

6- Hiccup realizing he had potential and with or without Toothless he would be a great leader, that is a really special moment in the movie and it's touching too, learning to believe in yourself and being independent.

7- Hiccup mother's appeared a lot during the movie, she had no super special scene but it was nice to see her and her adorable dragon.

8- The new 'elk dragon' I'm sorry I don't know his name in english yet and I just wanted to write this fast cuz I mainly don't really have anyone who's a fan to talk about and I'm excited! Anyways, he is just so cuteee!

9- The riders armors, it was a really cool idea and cool looking I approve that.

10- Toothless Babies, I really thought they would look cuter lol but I guess that's alright and we can't complain we got to see a nightlight fury babies for the first time so cuteee! Okaaaay if you guys want to add more points to my list or disccus about some feeel free! I want to talk about the moviee lol

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fanesavin · 6 years

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What do you find most challenging about writing your character, if anything?

OOC Ramblings under the cut:

I’m not sure I can say writing Fane is challenging per say because on several topics we share a similar opinion and writing him in terms of his issues with self-perception and his struggle to entirely know who he is as a person and feel comfortable in that is based from my own experience not entirely or ever really feeling like I’ve quite fitted in anywhere. Whether that’s in real life or really in the 10 years I’ve been hanging around roleplays on tumblr. That being said his childish side is probably the easiest part of him to write honestly. He’s got the eternal humour of a 13 year old and I can’t ever see him growing up really. So in certain things so depending what it is he’s doing, chatting about and up to (at least in a wider sense) it’s pretty easy to write his thoughts and opinions. I’ve tried writing characters in the past with opinions I don’t entirely agree with and always found it hard to keep and maintain a certain muse for them going not to say I agree with everything he thinks or does but he can be a stubborn bull-headed childish grudge-wielding idiot at times.

There’s not much I can really do about that. XD

I’ve spoken in the past about the struggle of defining who Fane is as a muse and my initial hesitation in even taking him up. I’m not usually very fond of taking characters that other people have come up with because I always get anxious that my interpretation won’t really fit or gel with what they had in mind for the character initially. It’s a challenge for me to define and pinpoint exactly what I want to work off and use to define/shape the character I have in my head when there are certain things have to stick. So I’d probably say the biggest thing I struggle with I think is establishing and portraying his background and writing about his early history. I’m a planner, I like to have a general scaffold to work off of whether that’s for a thread or a character. Normally when I’m making an OC I start from scratch, I start at their family and community and I branch from there how those dynamics would typically influence them and then how certain historical events would have consequently impacted on them. I keep branching and I keep building until I have a rough timeline of why they became the person they are. Normally that’s easy for me, but having to do that for a character from a different culture that I really have no experience of knowledge of makes it a lot harder and more than once I’ve almost thrown in the towel because not being able to pinpoint his background really makes me feel his muse is more untethered and less grounded than I’d really like him to be. That’s mostly because:

A) I have absolutely no experience or had any exposure to any Eastern European cultures really. Being English myself we’ve never really studied or been introduced to anything regarding it so my exposure to their events is more limited than I’d like to admit. So writing about both requires a huge amount of background research which I do try to do but when it’s such a complex and interwoven series of events that shaped the country and era I wanted Fane to come from… It’s really really difficult to split it out into understandable timelines to see where I wanted Fane to slot in. I’ve spent days and days researching but I still don’t feel like it’s really ever gotten me close to what I’d usually feel comfortable having for a character.

B) There really isn’t very much for me to truly work from in terms of literature or sources that aren’t in an entirely other language that I can’t speak. Latin, French, Spanish and a bit of Italian I can do but unfortunately I don’t know any other languages besides those. So that language barrier also makes it all 10 trillion times harder.

Following on from that, I love history. That being said there is a HUGE difference between truly being an academic historian/archaeologist and someone who has a passion for history but only really has access to books, some journals and documentaries. As a kid I wanted to be an Egyptologist, Ancient history fascinates me and if it wasn’t for my grades I likely would have chosen history as my career path. Even now I can rattle on forever about lore regarding Ancient civilisations (Egyptians, Vikings, Greeks, Romans, Mayans and I know a shit ton about pirates and most English periods in time) not to mention a pretty thorough grasp of most British/French monarchs from the middle ages up til now. So I can write the historical things pretty well, but writing Fane’s job again because it isn’t a field I’m all that confident in or even something research can really help me with means it just doesn’t quite feel as fluid as I’d really like it to be.

So those are a few of the things I find challenging about Fane, and I think I’m always going to be a bit cagey when I write certain things about him because I do my best to keep it real but when you’ve only got so much to go off of sometimes you have to allow for some creative licence.

#Anonymous #answered #savin speaks #maybe this explains why my muse with him is so on and off

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Last Kingdom’s Historical Advisor on Accuracy: ‘It’s a Constant Compromise’

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After completing his PhD in Early Medieval History, Ryan Lavelle picked up a novel dramatising the events of King Alfred’s early reign. The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell was the first in what was then known as the Saxon Stories saga. It told the story of Uhtred, a fictional 9th century Northumbrian warrior raised by Vikings who, despite a conflicted relationship with the king of Wessex, became Alfred’s military tactician. Lavelle lapped it up.

In the following years, Cornwell published another, and then another and another. Lavelle read them all, delighting in their inclusion of real historical events and use of a central character whose divided loyalties allowed a perspective into the very different worlds of Saxon and Dane.

“There were certain things in the novels, details that made me think ‘this isn’t quite right’, but I was impressed with Cornwell’s engagement with historical records and places,” he tells Den of Geek over Zoom, pointing out his editions of the Saxon Stories on the bookshelves behind him.

A decade after reading the first of the books, Lavelle was contacted by fellow historian Dame Janet ‘Jinty’ Nelson, to ask if he’d be interested in advising on a new historical TV drama. Filming was due to take place in Hungary, explained Professor Nelson, and she wasn’t keen to travel. The drama, she said, was an adaptation of a set of novels by “some chap called Cornwell”.

Bernard Cornwell makes a cameo in The Last Kingdom season four

Lavelle laughs at the memory. “To me, Bernard Cornwell was a major figure in my consciousness! He wasn’t just ‘some chap called Cornwell’, this was the Bernard Cornwell. I was enormously excited. I still have an element of that initial excitement of thinking that this is a world that I’ve tried to inhabit in my mind, and it’s being paid enough attention to be able to put flesh on the bones of characters who’ve been dead for 1000 years.”

Six years later, and Lavelle has served as historical advisor across five seasons of The Last Kingdom, the hit Netflix drama that Cornwell’s book series has since been renamed for, which plans to start filming its fifth season in late 2020. On set, he’s felt the heat of a burning Viking hall and heard the battle cries and clashing swords of medieval warriors. Off set, he’s used the show as a talking point for undergraduates at the University of Winchester, looking at how its representation of events differs from historical evidence.

When that happens on The Last Kingdom, says Lavelle, it’s the choice of creators who are informed about the historical context but are choosing to serve the drama. “I have to be pedantic. I have to let them know when things aren’t right, but they have to make the decision, and they make those decisions from a perspective of being informed of the actual history.”

‘The historical clock moves faster than the clock in the drama’

Lavelle found his job relatively straightforward on The Last Kingdom’s first season. It retold the events of King Alfred’s reign from around 871 to the Battle of Edington (or Ethandun as it’s styled in the series) “reasonably closely, with a certain amount of licence.” That licence commonly involved condensing the timeline to cover more story over a shorter period. “In the first year of Alfred’s reign there were lots of different battles against the Vikings and in the series, that basically gets boiled down to two encounters.”

The most recent season took more liberties with the timeline. “Edward the Elder’s reign, on which the fourth season is based, was from 899-900 through to 924. Some of the things mentioned in season four actually happened quite late in Edward’s reign, so you’ve got the battle of Tettenhall, which took place in 910. Aethelred, the ealdorman of the Mercians, died in 911. Aethelflaed receiving the submission of the men of York didn’t happen until in 918… there’s a lot of things they’re having to change.”

The Last Kingdom: How Historically Accurate is the Netflix Drama?

By Louisa Mellor

The Last Kingdom Renewed for Season 5

By Louisa Mellor

There’s a very good reason for the drama to condense these events: the age of its cast. If the series stuck slavishly to the historical chronology, its characters would have had to have aged almost two decades over the course of the last eight episodes. According to a lay-person’s timeline like this one, that would leave lead character Uhtred (played by 37-year-old Alexander Dreymon) nearing his seventies by the finale, which clearly wouldn’t do.

“You’ll have noticed that Alex Dreymon’s still a good looking young man,” laughs Lavelle, “so we can’t push Uhtred’s age on too far! The historical clock moves on faster than the clock in the drama.”

For Lavelle, the most startling change to historical chronology in season four is the continued existence of King Alfred’s widow Aelswith, played by Eliza Butterworth. “Historically, she’s meant to be dead by 903! But she’s such a great character that I would have been very sad if she wasn’t there in season four. Aelswith, as a device, allows the family tensions to play out. If she wasn’t there, it would be difficult to get that to work.”

After being poisoned by the scheming Lord Aethelhelm in the season four finale, Aelswith was looking a bit peaky the last time we saw her, I point out. Lavelle laughs. “She’s not looking well at the end, no indeed! Maybe this is the historical clock catching up with her!”

‘You can’t have something as momentous as the Black Death and it not have a long-term affect’

Season four included a storyline that felt particularly timely when it arrived on Netflix in April 2020 mid-coronavirus pandemic. A deadly sickness was passing through the kingdoms, cutting a swathe through villages. The original idea from the writers was to portray it as “a full on bubonic plague,” says Lavelle, but that was dialled back for the series.

“Where the story eventually ended up, it was a small-scale epidemic in a confined area rather than being the Black Death, which would have totally changed the storyline. Bubonic plague happened much later, in the Late Middle Ages. You can’t have something as momentous as the Black Death and have it not affect life for the next fifty years, but the way the story was panning out, it only affected the drama over a short period. I hope I had some influence in this, because historically, that would have been a big change.”

Lavelle was able to reconcile himself to the sickness plot because there had been an outbreak of a plague in the period, just 10 years earlier, at the end of Alfred’s reign. “It was a case of history catching up with the storyline a little bit.”

‘We always have to play with history to some extent’

As an Early Medieval historian, Lavelle is accustomed to using his imagination to bridge gaps between what is and isn’t known from historical sources. “The evidence for our period is limited so we always have to play with history to some extent.” The Last Kingdom does the same, he says. It’s by no means a documentary, but demonstrates “a respectful acquaintance with the history of the period, a tip of the hat to historical events, you could say!”

Part of Lavelle’s advisory role involves making the Medieval character and place names accessible to a modern audience. He researches the names and spends a few hours practicing the pronunciations before making recordings that are interpreted by a dialogue coach and taught to the cast.

“People who are real experts in Old English would probably have me over a barrel in pronouncing them wrong, but it’s no use having the names beautifully pronounced in Old English or Old Norse if the viewers are constantly baffled by them. There are necessary compromises to get these names over the line and to allow viewers to talk about them too. There are constant discussions about what form the names should take.”

Lavelle admires the series’ place name captions, which appear in the original language before transitioning to the modern version. “Eoforwic is one of the most difficult, because there’s the old Norse name of ‘Jorvik’ which became the predominant place name form. What appears in historical documents is often a form of the name that’s been affected by its role in a sentence of historical record. In Old English there are particular forms of words according to what they’re doing in a sentence. What I’ve tried to do, in my imperfect Old English, is convert those to the nominative version of the place name in order that it reflects a version of the historical place name. We do think about these things,” he laughs, “they’re not just plucked off the back of an envelope!”

If he had his way, he laughs, the series would use the Old English letter ‘Thorn’, but it’s a matter of accessibility. “It’s a constant compromise. These things are… oh dear, I just fell into a pun,” he laughs, “a thorn in the side!”

Author Bernard Cornwell describes his books as a gateway into the study of real history, and Lavelle hopes the TV series is the same. On that note, outside of Cornwell’s novels, where might fans go looking for a hint of what’s to come in season five?

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“It’ll be based on books nine and ten – The Warriors of the Storm and The Flame Bearer. Uhtred is charged with training King Edward’s first-born son Aethelstan as a warrior, so Aethelstan is one thing. Read a little bit more about Edward. If you do the homework of looking at the historical sources then it could allow the possibility of seeing some of the faces that might appear on screen! History has its own spoilers!”

Read more from Professor Lavelle on The Last Kingdom at History Extra.

The post The Last Kingdom’s Historical Advisor on Accuracy: ‘It’s a Constant Compromise’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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sa-waai · 7 years

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Interesting read.

Here's Why African History is being suppressed and ignored by white scholars. RACISM, HISTORY AND LIES

Max Dashu

Some doctrines of racial supremacy as classically taught in Euro/American institutions, textbooks and media:

PHYSICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: In which white anthropologists treat people as racial specimens, measuring "cephalic indices" and attempting to prove superiority of the "white" brain. Ugly racist terminology: "prognathism," "platyrhiny," "steatopygous," "sub-Egyptian." Mug-shot lineups of "the Veddan female," "Arapaho male, "Negroid type," "Mongoloid specimen" characterize this approach. Out of favor in the mid-20th-century, it has enjoyed a revisionist comeback with sociobiology and works claiming racial differentials in intelligence, such as "The Bell Curve."

TECHNOLOGICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: Insists on forcing archaeological finds as well as living cultures into a grid of "development" based on whether tools, materials and techniques valued by "Western" scholars were in use. Example: "They were a stone age civilization who never discovered the wheel!" This model forces cultures into a progressional paradigm: Old and New Stone Ages, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Space Age. This classification ignores the complexity of culture, and the fact that metallurgic technology and military might are not the ultimate measure of advanced culture.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE: The assumption that "primitive" cultures represent lower "stages" in historical evolution, and have yet to attain advanced forms of culture. One English scholar referred to "the child-races of Africa." Usually, social hierarchy, militarization and industrialization are taken as prime measures of "advanced" civilization. In the 19th century, scholars openly used the terms "savage," "barbarian," "civilized." Though these offensive words have (mostly) been dropped, the underlying assumptions are still quite influential. (For a good discussion of how the insistence on talking about "tribes" distorts African history, see http://www.africaaction.org/bp/ethall.htm. )

SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION DOCTRINE: Credits all achievements to conquering empires, assuming their superiority in science, technology, and government. Adherents are usually incapable of perceiving advanced earth-friendly systems of land management, agronomy, medicine, collective social welfare networks, healing, astronomical knowledge, or profound philosophical traditions among peoples considered "primitive" by dominant "Western" standards.

PASSING OF THE TORCH DOCTRINE: Claims a chain of cultural transmission from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece to Rome to western Europe to the USA, leaving vast gaps where the history of the rest of the world should be. (And the discussion never returns to Egypt or Iraq to consider what happened there after the fall of their ancient empires.) Most of the planet's cultures are discussed only in relation to the European conquest, if mentioned at all. As a result, few people have any idea of the history of Sumatra, Honduras, Niger, Ecuador, Mozambique, Ohio, Hokkaido, Samoa, or even European countries such as Lithuania or Bosnia.

IF IT WAS GREAT, IT MUST HAVE BEEN WHITE: If advanced science, art, or architecture is found in Africa or South America, then Phoenecians, Greeks, Celts, Vikings (or, in the extreme case, space aliens) must be invoked to explain their presence. (Here, whiteness often functions as a relative concept, as "lighter than.") This bias gives rise to a pronounced tendency to date American or African cultures later than warranted, and as a result dating for these regions is constantly having to be revised further back into the past as evidence of greater antiquity piles up.

Corollary: IF IT WAS WHITE, IT MUST HAVE BEEN GREAT. Thus, the conqueror Charlemagne was a great man, in spite of his genocidal campaign against the Saxons, but the Asian conquerors Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were simply evil. Stereotypes of head-hunters picture Africans (in the absence of any evidence for such a practice there) but never Celtic head-hunters in France and Britain -- much less Lord Kitchener making off with the Mahdi's skull in Sudan, or U.S. settlers taking scalps and body parts of Indian people. This doctrine also underlies the common assumption that European conquest must have improved life for subject peoples.

A 19th century French engraving imagines the conquest of Algeria as a showering of the benefits of superior civilization on abject, genuflecting North Africans.

IF IT WAS NOT WHITE, AND ITS GREATNESS IS UNDENIABLE, THEN IT MUST BE DEPRECATED IN SOME WAY: Example:The Epic of Man, published in the '60s by Time/Life Books, says of the advanced civilization of ancient Pakistan: "It is known that a static and sterile quality pervaded Indus society." It used to be the academic fashion to call ancient Egypt a "moribund" civilization which "stifled creativity." Similar writings dismissed the "Incas" (Quechua) as "totalitarian," or the Chinese as "isolated" and "resistant to change," ignoring their interchange with steppe societies as well as Southeast Asian cultures.

The AFRICAN GAP DOCTRINE: After examining the first humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, this historical approach completely skips over most of the African archaeological record. It discusses ancient Egypt but ascribes its civilization to "the Middle East," denying its African identity and archaeological connections with Saharan and southern Nilotic civilizations. Saharan civilization, Ile-Ife or Mwanamutapa are not discussed at all. Africa is simply dropped from historical consideration until the era of European slaving and colonization, when it is portrayed as culturally and technologically deficient. The existence of female spheres of power in Africa is ignored.

The BERING STRAIT DOCTRINE insists that all indigenous American peoples came across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, filtering down through Central America into South America. Problem: numerous archaeological sites in the Americas predate any possible Bering Strait migration by many thousands of years. Access from Alaska to the rest of North America was blocked for millennia by two great ice sheets that covered Canada. An narrow opening that might have allowed passage appeared much too late (about 13,500 years ago) to explain the growing evidence that people were living in both North and South America much earlier than these "first" migrations.

By 1997-98, the tide of opinion began to turn: several scientific conclaves declared that a majority of attending scholars rejected the Bering Strait theory as a full explanation of how the Americas were peopled.The long-doctrinal hypothesis of Clovis hunters as the first immigrants is crumbling before the new dating, as hundreds of pre-Clovis sites pile up: Cactus Hill, Virginia (13,500 BP); Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania (14,000 - 17,000 Before Present); Monte Verde (13,500 BP); Pedra-Furada, Brazil (15,000 BP, and possibly as old as 32,000 BP).

Bering Strait diehards discount the oral histories of indigenous Americans. In spite of the huge diversity among the American peoples and differences between most Americans and east Asians, all are declared to be of "Mongoloid racial origin." After the initial press stampede declaring "Kennewick Man" to be "white," study of the genetic evidence shows something entirely different. Instead, it appears that there have been several waves of migration: from central China, from the ancient Jomon culture of Japan, from south Asia or the Pacific islands. And "Luzia," an 11,500-year-old female skeleton in Brazil "appeared to be more Negroid in its cranial features than Mongoloid," in the stodgy anthropological terminology of the New York Times (Nov 9, 1999). (Actually she most closely resembles aborignal Australians.) But there is also a uniquely North American X-haploid group of mitochondrial DNA, which has yet to be explained.

THE POWER OF NAMING

STEREOTYPING entire peoples as mad, uncontrollable threats: "Wild Indians," "Yellow Hordes" or "the Yellow Peril." As inferior nonhumans: "primitives," "savages," "gooks," "niggers" -- this last term used not only against African-Americans, but also by 18th-century English colonizers of Egypt and India. Even the word "natives," which originally meant simply the people born in a country and by extension the aboriginal inhabitants, took on heavy racist coloration as an inferior Other.

POLARIZATION: "Scientific thought" vs. "primitive belief"; "undeveloped" vs "civilized"; or "the world's great religions" vs. "tribal superstitions," "cults," "idolatry" or "devil-worship." Depending on where it was created, a sculpture could either be a "masterpiece of religious art" or an "idol," "fetish," or "devil." Few people realize that "Western" scientists did not match the accuracy of ancient Maya calculations of the length of the solar year until the mid-20th century.

Indians who resist colonization and land theft are commonly portrayed as evil in popular media, which applies negative labels such as "Renegades." Here indigenous people are Other; the intruders in their country are The Good Guys. The white hero is named after the Texas Rangers, systematic killers of Indian families. His Indian sidekick's name, Tonto, means "fool, stupid person" in Spanish. RENAMING: Dutch colonists called the Khoi-khoi people "Hottentots" (stutterers). Russians called the northwest Siberian Nentsy "Samoyed" (cannibals). These are blatant examples, but many nationalities are still called by unflattering names given by their enemies: "Sioux" (Lakota); "Miao" (Hmong); "Lapps" (Saami); "Basques" (Euskadi); "Eskimos" (Inuit). European names have replaced the originals in many places: Nigeria, Australia, New Caledonia, New Britain, etc. (But "Rhodesia" bit the dust, after a revolution.)

DEGRADATION OF MEANINGS: "Mumbo jumbo" has become a cliché signifying meaningless superstitions, but it comes from a Mandinke word -- mama dyambo -- for a ritual staff bearing the image of a female ancestor. (Look it up in any good dictionary.) "Fetish" now connotes an obsessive sexual fixation, but originated as a Portuguese interpretation of sacred West African images as "sorcery" (feitição). The holy city of Islam is often appropriated in phrases like "a Mecca for shoppers."

DOUBLE-THINK: Conquest becomes "unification," "pacification,""opening up," and conquered regions are dubbed "protectorates." The convention is to use Europe as the standard, writing texts from the viewpoint of the conquerors / colonizers. Thus, a Rajasthani rebellion against English rule was termed the "Indian Mutiny." A peculiarity of this thinking is the tendency to refer to times of bloody invasions and enslavement with respectful nostalgia, as in "The Golden Age of Greece" and "The Glory That Was Rome," or "How the West Was Won." British subjugation of southern Nigeria is recast as The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

A contributor to Men Become Civilized, edited by Trevor Cairns, explains it all to children:

"When the king of one city conquered others, he would have to make sure that all the people in all the cities knew what to do. He would have to see that they all had rules to follow, so that they would live peacefully together."

Double-think finds ways to recast genocide as regrettable but necessary, due to failings of the people being killed, who are somehow unable to "adapt." Distancing the agent is key here, obscuring the violence with the idea that some kind of natural process is at work: "vanishing races," "by that time the Indians had disappeared."

THE POWER OF IMAGES

Hollywood tomtoms beat as fake Indians jump up and down, uttering brainless cries and grunts. There's the "squaw" complex in literature and cinema, the faithful Indian sidekick, and Robinson Crusoe's "Man Friday." John Wayne as the Western movie hero, saying: "There's humans and then there's Comanches." Or in real life, the actor tried to justify the settler theft of Indian countries: "There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

This picture appeared in an insurance ad.

Advertising is an important transmitter of historical misrepresentation. It draws on colonial mythologies such as the notion that the Dutch "bought" Manhattan for the equivalent of $24 in trade goods --in spite of the fact that the Indians did not think of land as something that could be sold. The role of violence is completely obliterated. Even history books do not go into the massacres of Native people. On Staten Island settlers slaughtered the people they called "Wappingers," and afterward played football with their severed heads. Tarzan goes up against witch doctors and eye-rolling African chiefs. The Caribbean is shown as full of fearful, superstitious natives and zombies, Arabs who have nothing to do all day but loll around in harems, or cheat the white hero. Seductive Suzie Wongs, thieving Mexicans, and shiftless and sexually insatiable African-Americans. Movies commonly depict the Chinese as obsequious and deceitful, Arabs as treacherous, Africans as ignorant and barbaric.

COUNTERPOINT

The Mande were farming millet and other crops in West Africa in 6500-5000 BCE.

Temples in Peru and Sudan are much older than the Parthenon.

People in Mississippi, Illinois and Mexico traded with each other and exchanged ideas and symbols, as the the sea-faring Ecuadorians did with Costa Rica and western Mexico.

A small-statured Black people built the oldest civilization in southeast Asia, leaving megalithic temples and statuary in south India, Cambodia, Sumatra and other Indonesian islands.

Archaeology shows that the earliest formative influences on ancient Egypt came from Sudan and the Sahara, not the "Middle East."

The oldest megalithic calendar in the world has recently been discovered in the Egyptian Sahara, dating back to 7000 years ago. European megaliths may have an African origin.

Polynesian mariners had begun navigating by the stars and settling the vast ocean expanses of the Pacific islands before the time of Moses.

WHAT GETS DEFINED AS HISTORY?

In the last half century, the boundaries of "acceptable" history have been expanded by a multidisciplinary approach, including sources previously dismissed: orature (oral tradition), linguistics, anthropology, social history, art, music and other cultural sources. More recently, the social locations of historians have come under consideration as a factor shaping their perspectives, along with a sense that there is no absolutely "objective" view of history. Past claims of objectivity have biases clearly visible today, notably in siding with European settlers and slavers against non-christian cultures, and the almost total eclipse of female acts and experience from historical accounts.

A reader who might react negatively to a blatant expression of racism often misses perceiving one cloaked in scholarly language, in assumptions, judgments and misinformation most people have not been educated to catch. It does not occur to many people to question a pronounced overemphasis on Europe, the smallest continent (actually, a subcontinent of Asia.) If a chapter or two on African and Asian history is inserted in a textbook, publishers go ahead and call it a world history. Typically, media depictions of history have not caught up with information now available in specialized academic sources, and continue to present the old stereotypes and distortions as fact.