this and that – Page 12

Sleeping Beauty and the Spindle

Irish_spinning_wheel I found out all about spinning on the weekend. There was a Christmas crafts event in town, and a couple of ladies from the Spinners and Weavers Guild were doing a spinning demo. Actually, that demo was the main reason I went to the event – spinning is one of the old crafts I haven’t actually tried my hand at, not properly, anyway, and I’ve wanted to know for a while how it works.

And sure enough, my suspicions were confirmed: every last “Sleeping Beauty” movie has got it wrong.

You know how the story goes: the wicked fairy curses the princess to prick her finger on a spindle on her 16th birthday. To try to prevent it, the king bans/burns all spinning tools. But of course, as he ought to have known, that does nothing; she finger-pricks anyway, falls asleep, a century later prince shows up, etc.

So how does that look in the movies? Huge conflagration of spinning wheels, for the most part. Then the dimwitted (ahem – sorry) princess, in a trance, walks up to a wheel, which has a sharp thing sticking out of the top, goes and purposely jabs her finger on that sharp pointy thing, and on we go with the snoozing etc. etc.

Complete baloney. It’s pretty obvious the movie-makers have never seen a real spinning wheel in their lives. It’s mildly forgiveable in the film makers of the 1959 Disney movie, when research was a little more difficult to do; but in 2014, you’d think that the set designers of Maleficent could have done about ten seconds of googling, which would have told them that there are no sharp pointy things sticking out of spinning wheels. Spinners of the past would have been severely puzzled by those movie spinning wheels.

I can just picture it now. The scene: a Great 21st-Century Folklorist has been time-transported back to a 17th-century German Spinnstube (shpinn-shtoo-ba, spinning room), where the women of the village are gathered around the fire on a dark winter’s night with their spinning wheels. Folklorist rubs his hands – here’s his opportunity to tell the “Sleeping Beauty” story as he knows it, and really get it entrenched in the minds of these peasants. So there are Gretl, Liesl, Anna, Maria, Maria, and Anna Maria, all sitting in a circle, their spinning wheels humming. [No! Turn off those lights! The only illumination we have are the fire and a couple of rush lights. It’s dark, folks. Got that image in your mind now? Okay, good. Carry on.]

Folklorist: “…and on her 16th birthday, she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel!”
Maria 1: “On what?”
Maria 2: “Maybe she had a poor-quality wheel; the wood might have been splintered.”
Gretl: “Oh, you mean she pricked her finger on a splinter?”
Folklorist: “No! She pricked it on a spindle! You know, that pointy thing!”
Liesl: “What pointy thing?”
Folklorist: “Well, that – um…”
Anna: “This makes no sense at all. If the bad fairy wanted the princess to kill herself with a spinning wheel, she’d have to find a better curse than that.”
Maria 2: “Yes; if she hasn’t got a splintered wheel. What about…”
[SCENE FADE OUT. FADE BACK IN. THE FIRE HAS BURNED DOWN A LOT, INDICATING THAT SOME TIME HAS PASSED.]
Anna Maria: “That makes more sense. I mean, who would believe anything so silly as someone pricking her finger on a spindle on a wheel? All right, Mr Storyteller, carry on, please!”
Folklorist, extremely reluctantly: “…so the wicked witch cast her curse. ‘On her 16th birthday,’ she said, ‘the princess shall club herself to death with the drive wheel of a spinning wheel…'”
The women: “Yes!” “That’s better!” “Now it makes sense.” “That’s so exciting!” “What happened next?”
[THE FOLKLORIST TURNS AWAY FROM THE WOMEN, SOBBING QUIETLY TO HIMSELF. FADE OUT.]

Anyway, that’s a more likely scenario than this poke-yourself-on-a-spinning-wheel one. Sorry, Mr. Disney.

The device that Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on is, in fact, a hand spindle – and not a drop spindle, either, which might serve to poke out your eye or be used to inflict classic blunt-force head injuries, but isn’t really pointy. It seems that the most likely device for inducing century-long royal hypersomnia was what spinners call a Russian spindle, which is very pointy indeed. I’d love to learn how to use one sometime (for making yarn, not putting teen girls to sleep), but I wouldn’t sneeze at getting the hang of a spinning wheel, either.

Life, the Universe, and Tales of a Spindle. Or should that be Spinster?

Cat Makes Ink

I picked black walnuts the other day, and decided to make ink. Just like Catriona does in Chapter 11 of Cat and Mouse. You haven’t read it? Here, that’s how it goes:

[Cat and Nikor, the little old town librarian, are collecting black walnuts husks in the garden behind the library.]
“You don’t mind my taking the nuts, do you?” she asked Nikor, who was busy gathering the husks into a large cast iron pot.
“Nuts? Nuts. Oh no, no no. Take the nuts, make the husks easier to find.”
Cat dropped a handful of the black husks into his pot.
“Too bad the pot is so rusty,” she said. “Won’t that harm the ink?”
“No, no no. Rust is good, makes blacker ink. New pots are no good for ink. Besides, ink spoils the pots, makes stains.”
“Well, yes, I suppose it would—it’s ink, after all, it’s supposed to stain. So how do we do this?”
They carried the pot, now half filled with the black walnut husks, into Nikor’s living space in the back room of the library.“Stinks, does ink,” said Nikor, “but don’t want to make a fire outside now. Prefer my stove.” He filled the pot with enough water to cover the husks and put it on top of the little potbellied stove in the corner of his room, which already had a nice little fire crackling in it. “Spoon, spoon—where’s the spoon?” he muttered, digging around in a box of cooking implements that stood on a shelf above the wood box.
“You mean this one?” said Cat, extracting a wooden spoon from between several stacks of books on the floor beside a worn leather-covered armchair. The spoon’s bowl was stained a deep mahogany colour, in contrast to the blonde wood of its handle. “What’s it doing between the books?”
“Books? Oh, yes. Mouse, hit at the mouse with it when I was reading. See, ink stains,” he explained, pointing to the discolouration of the spoon.
“Oh, that’s from ink?” Cat said distractedly, not listening to his answer. The top book of one of the stacks had caught her attention. […]
[Cat gets lost in reading the book, which is called The Rats of Chaelia.]
“Where is Chaelia?” she asked Nikor, raising her head to find that the room was much darker than it had been when they brought in the nuts. Nikor was nowhere in sight, and a frightful stink rose from the steaming pot on the stove. Cat felt disoriented. Hadn’t she only just sat down? It could hardly have been more than a few minutes ago, could it? She stood and took a look at the stinking pot. In the bottom of the container, a dark sludge was bubbling away. The walnut husks had mostly disintegrated into smaller pieces now, making the whole mess a deep, brownish black. Cat wrinkled her nose—the stench was quite pronounced, metallic and rotten at the same time.The door from to the main library room creaked open, and Nikor shuffled back into the room, carrying two more books.
“Found it, found it,” he said, dumping the books into Cat’s arms and picking up the wooden spoon to poke at the black sludge in the pot. “Ah yes, coming along nicely.”
“Found what?” Cat asked.
“Looking for the books of Chaelia, wasn’t I,” he said. He waved a finger at the book Cat had been reading. “The Rats is just one; there are others.”
“Just where is Chaelia? Is it one of the places in Isachang?” Cat asked.
“No, no no. Chaelia is Outland, don’t you know?”
“Outland? My Outland, where I’m from? You mean Earth, or America, or whatever?”
“Yes. No. No no. Not Arthur Pendragon. Other land, other Outland. There are many. Haven’t seen anyone from Outlands here in generations, many many generations, not since Septimissimus last.”
“There are other Outlands? Really? And—what did you just say, about the Septimissimus?”
“Septimissimus?” he repeated, stirring the ink sludge in the bottom of the pot, pulling out a spoonful and dribbling a bit on a piece of paper to test its tinting strength. “A few more hours,” he muttered.

My ink turned out a bit pale this time – but it works well enough. If you want (slightly) more precise instructions on making walnut ink, check out my blog post on the topic from three years ago.

Oh, you’re wondering what’s with this Septimissimus thing? You’ll have to read Cat and Mouse to find out, won’t you. You can get it here.

Life, the Universe, and Walnut Ink. Lorem ipsum dolor…

Wordless Wednesday: Memories of a Bygone Summer

Wordless Wednesday: Frankencarrots

Wordless Wednesday – October Glories

Acts of Random Photography

Once again, my store of wit and erudition is a rather on the low side. So, without further ado, here are a few random pictures from my life over the last few days:

IMG_20150930_145253 — Pickled Beets and Quince Candy (aka Membrillo). Just when I thought I was done canning for this year, there were beets and quinces in the veg store. What was I supposed to do? They attacked me!

IMG_20151002_091308 — Logs by the roadside

IMG_20151002_091017 — Something that would like to become a log some decades in the future

IMG_20151001_153315 — I’ve taken to ingesting drugs. Yes, that’s coffee in that mug. The hard stuff. With caffeine and everything.

IMG_20151002_091729 — A Canada Post box looking decorative. They’re like that.

Seeing as a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s about 5k right there.

So that, for today, was Life, the Universe, and Random Acts of Photography. See you next time!

Holiday Slide Show, Part 3

Slide holder is changed. Here goes the rest. (Yes, lil’ Joey, Aunty A. is almost done; then you can go out and play. I brought you a chocolate from Germany; you can at least have the good manners to sit through my slide show, can’t you? Oh, fine, here, have some more gummibears.)

Germany'15 (20) — We went on a train. That’s how fast it went. Yup. You think the Autobahn is fast? ICE trains leave those cars in the dust.

Germany'15 (21) — This is the lovely little town of Wetzlar, in Hesse (central Germany). The town centre is almost unchanged from 240 years ago, when the young Goethe visited here – a visit which inspired him to write his runaway bestseller “The Sorrows of Young Werther”.

Germany'15 (22) — You barely need any imagination to see Goethe walking through these streets. Do away with the cars, add a few powdered wigs and pannier dresses, and you’re in the late 18th century.

Germany'15 (23) — Fachwerk – half-timbering. Isn’t this beautiful?

Germany'15 (24) — And THIS is the Lottehaus, the very house where Goethe met Charlotte Buff, the original of the Lotte in the book with whom Werther falls in love. (DESPERATELY. Clutch hair, press wrist to forehead. I mean, emo isn’t even in it.) The Werther story is almost entirely autobiographical – however, those aspects end, obviously, before Werther blows his brains out (Goethe survived to a good old age). That part was modelled on the suicide of a guy named Jerusalem, which happened in the red-beamed house on the far right of the above picture.

Germany'15 (25) — I was fascinated by the slate tiles on the roofs – so different from the red clay tiles which dominate in Southern Germany. Sometimes the whole side of the house is tiled in these, arranged in fancy patterns. Incidentally, this is the roof of the Lottehaus.

Germany'15 (26) — Germans have their ducks in a row.

Germany'15 (27) — Pretty flower being pretty.

Germany'15 (28) — The Cathedral in Wetzlar. There’s a story here too, but I’ll tell you that some other time.

Germany'15 (33) — This is how Germans celebrate birthdays. Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) is a meal in its own right, and you can see here why. Mind you, that’s not a daily or even weekly occurrence, just for special occasions. But then you pull out all the stops. Oh, and all those cakes are homemade.

Germany'15 (34) — In a field on the edge of town: Flowers, 50 cents. In other words, you drop half a Euro into the little box on the post, and help yourself to a sunflower bouquet (a knife to cut it is provided as well). Gotta love it.

Germany'15 (35) — Warnings in the commuter train on the way back to the airport: Don’t Eat Bananas. Don’t Listen to Music Off-Key. And above all, Do NOT Play the Accordion! I thought y’all needed to see that; who knows, it might prevent disaster.

Chick-chook, and there’s that last slide. Turn on the lights in the room, yawn and pretend you hadn’t dozed off half-way through. These were just the highlights, anyway – I spared you the other 790 pictures I could have inflicted on you as well; aren’t you grateful?

And that, folks, was Life, the Universe, and What I Did On My Holidays. Thanks for listening!

Holiday Slide Show, Part 2

Okay, the second slide holder is in. Lights off, here we go (chick-chook):

Germany'15 (11) — Palaces aren’t the only buildings that were dripping with gilding and marble in the Baroque. This is the Abbey Church of Fürstenfeld, outside of Munich, which was one of the strongholds of the Counter Reformation. They pulled out all the stops to convince the people that the Catholic church was worth sticking with. Speaking of pulling out all the stops, we got to hear an organ concert here – it was fantastic.

Germany'15 (12) — Yes, that’s a dead guy. A 1900-year-old dead guy, to be precise – St. Hyacinth, who starved to death at the age of 12 around the year 100 AD because he refused to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. You can tell that his weight loss program was effective. But at least he got impressive duds out of the deal, even if it was a millennium or two after the fact.

Germany'15 (13) — Munich has several world famous art museums. I took the time out to visit the Neue Pinakothek, which holds a selection of 19th-century art – well, from the late 18th century to the early 20th. I was thrilled to find that there were several pieces by Angelica Kauffmann – for example, this, her most famous self-portrait. She’s got to be awesome with a name like that, no?

Germany'15 (14) — Moritz von Schwind, “The Fairy Tale of Cinderella”. Probably my most favourite piece in the whole collection… (sorry, Vincent van Gogh).

Germany'15 (15) — Cinderella tries on the shoe.

Germany'15 (16) — One of the labels in the frame.

Germany'15 (17) — Fernand Khnopff, “I Close the Door Upon Myself”. There’s something about this chick’s eyes that I find kind of creepy, in a rather awesome way.

Germany'15 (18) — Klimt, “Margaret Stoneborough-Wittgenstein”. My favourite of all the famous pieces there.

Germany'15 (19) — A German supper: at least three different kinds of bread, cheeses, meats, tomatoes, stuffed peppers… I miss it. Can I go back?

Another slide holder change…

Holiday Slide Show, Part 1

I’ve been trying to think of witty things to say about this trip which Steve and I just got back from. Erudite things, informative ones – but I can’t really come up with anything. So I think I’ll just show you a few pictures, and you can decide yourself what you think of it all.

Imagine yourself in my living room, the blinds drawn, a slide projector set up, and the painting of the West Coast taken off its hook so I can project my pictures against its spot on the white wall. (That, dear children, is why they call it a ‘slide show’ when you put pictures in consecutive order to show to people. It’s how folks back in the dark ages, ca. 1975, shared their holiday experiences with friends, family, and other unsuspecting victims. Depending on the liveliness of the presenter, one was rather apt to want to fall asleep – the darkened room didn’t help. However…)

So here goes, the first slide (chick-chook goes the slide projector):

Germany'15 (02) — Air Canada Jazz planes looking decorative at the Calgary airport, where we switched from a little cloud hopper like this (I think ours had a yellow leaf on in) to one of the big jets.

Germany'15 (03) — Munich, Marienplatz. The towers in the background are those of the Frauenkirche (Our Lady’s Church), the icon of Munich. This is the Fussgängerzone (pedestrian zone), which is roughly speaking a giant outdoor mall. I love Fussgängerzonen. Stroll around on the city streets, with no cars to get in your way – it’s the best shopping and hanging-out-in-the-city experience ever.

Germany'15 (04) — Munich City Hall. What everyone is staring at is the Glockenspiel, the musical bells, where a bunch of little puppet guys pop out of the tower and do a dance. It’s sort of half-way up the tower.

Germany'15 (05) — Weisswurst and a Brezel at the Viktualienmarkt (victuals market) in Munich. They’re an institution. Oh, and Weisswurstsenf – a special sweet mustard which is mandatory to eat with Weisswurst.

Germany'15 (06) — View over the Marienplatz through the ancient window panes of the toy museum.

Germany'15 (07) — Nymphenburg, the baroque summer palace of the kings of Bavaria.

Germany'15 (08) — I did say baroque, didn’t I?

Germany'15 (09) — A selfie the old-fashioned way. The green bed in the background is where Ludwig II of Bavaria was born (the royal nut bar who built Neuschwanstein, that Disneyland castle that Americans are all so terribly fond of).

Germany'15 (10) — Nymphenburg was, and still is, the site of a world-famous porcelain manufactury. These are from the 18th century, by Bustelli (I think). They’re no more than 20cm (8″) high; the detail is astounding.

Excuse me while I change the slide holder. Anybody want another drink of Spezi (cola-orange pop mix) or Apfelschorle (apple juice spritzer) while I do that? No?

To be continued…

Medieval Marriage, or, I Thought I Just Made That Up

The things you find out…

I was watching a really cool BBC documentary yesterday called Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death. Specifically, this one was episode 2, “A Good Marriage” (at the moment you can watch it here, although it might not stay up forever. Canadians can also stream it off Knowledge Network, which is what I did). And I learned something really interesting: up until the 12th Century in Europe, all it took to get married was for two people to make a commitment to each other. That’s right, you just said to each other: “I take you as my husband” and “I take you as my wife”, and bingo, you were married. It could be anywhere – a pub, a hedgerow, a cottage…

And I was sitting there, watching this, and started to sputter: “That, that, that – I made that up for Seventh Son!! That’s my idea! And it was actually real!!” The marriage customs of Ruph, the place where Cat and Guy live, are exactly that: they say “I marry you,” and that’s it, they’re hitched. But I just made that up – and now it turns out it was exactly like that in medieval Europe! I had no idea. It’s kind of cool when you find that your fiction inadvertently copies reality.

So, yes, according to that documentary, the meaning of marriage was two people committing to each other. They didn’t even need witnesses, although if you had some, that helped if the marriage was ever contested (by your spouse who wanted to get out, or by anyone else, say, your parents because they wanted to hitch you to someone with more money). If you had witnesses, your friends John, Joan, Robert and Roberta could confirm that the Thursday after Whitsun, you (Joseph) and your sweetheart Margaret had pledged your troth at the Blue Hare in front of all of them (after you’d quaffed about five pints of ale each, Margaret’s eyes had sparkled exceptionally bright, so you figured it might be a good idea to officially tie the knot. Fortunately, John and Joan had only had about two pints each, so they have a clearer memory of the event than you do). And that was entirely legal.

It was only from the 12th century onwards that the church figured it should put a bit more of a control on this marrying gig, so they could keep tabs on folks a little better. However, it really was just an extension of the old custom, with the priest serving as the witness and delivering God’s blessing on the union. Legally, it was still the same thing; the priest didn’t have any actual powers – the marriage was in the vows, not in the priest’s role or a legal document. (Apparently, also, the marriage – the spoken “I take thee…” commitment – took place outside the church, in the porch, so the couple was already married by the time they crossed the threshold into the church for the blessing service).

So then I got to thinking: it’s almost like we’ve come full circle again in this day and age. From where I sit, it looks like that in the Western world, a large proportion of marriage-like relationships take place on an informal basis – two people make a commitment to each other, they move in together, and they’re a couple. In the most telling phrase, they’re in a common law marriage. All it takes is a commitment.

The one great, big, ginormous difference between medieval marriage customs and ours today, though, is not the way marriages are contracted – formally or informally, common law or regulatory law. It’s the fact that today, marriages can be un-contracted. If the common law marriage doesn’t work out, you just move your stuff out of your girlfriend’s house; if the formal law one goes sour, you go to divorce court, and (at least in Canada) after a year you can start all over again with someone else. That, in the Middle Ages, was very much not happening. A marriage was a marriage, whether contracted in a hedgerow with just the sparrows and the odd bunny rabbit as witnesses, or in Westminster Abbey with the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. And they took that “til death do us part” thing deadly serious. The only way you could ever get out of a marriage while your spouse was alive was to establish that it hadn’t actually taken place – get it annulled, in other words. Didn’t matter if your wife turned out to be a vicious shrew or your husband a jerk who knocked you about; if you’d slept together (proof positive: children), you were stuck with them for good.

I have to say, I prefer our way of doing things today. Divorce sucks, but at least it means you’re not permanently trapped in a relationship you contracted in the heat of the moment (see “five pints of ale”, above). Could you imagine if you were bound for life to your first boyfriend, the one you thought you couldn’t live without and swore eternal faithfulness to back in grade 10? Urgh, yeah. Mind you, “for life” in the Middle Ages was a considerably shorter time period than it is today. But still.

Incidentally, I hadn’t considered it before, but I do think that in spite of their medieval marriage style, the people of Ruph do have divorce as a last-resort option. It hasn’t come up yet in my stories, but it might, some day. I wouldn’t want anyone to be stuck in a horrible relationship, you know? But I’m sure they’ll think long and hard about it before they call it quits. People are like that in Ruph.

Life, the Universe, and Marriage. The things you find out…