Saturday, October 28, 2017

So...there's an umlaut in Linear B?

I've reached a low point of confidence in the novel.

At this point, I know more about the Jason myth than a so-called professional writer who used that as the basis of a whole Tomb Raider novel. But I know significantly less about Homeric epic than your average Heavy Metal songwriter.

(This is not a joke. I just read an article in Amphora about the long relationship between Heavy Metal lyrics and themes and ancient history and myth. And not just Germanic, either. Apparently there are even epic-length songs about Alexander.)




Fortunately the Mycenae are not Greeks. Homer may have been casting his eye back into the Greek Dark Ages, but he as often as not described his Heroic Age in forms that were contemporary to him. There's a big difference in researching these two periods.

The classical world is a literate world. It is a world in which History exists. The earliest writings are mostly accounting, interrupted at long intervals by inflated claims of kings. The classical writers talked about themselves. Political and military analysis, philosophy, fiction. The amount of Greek writing available to the researcher today is staggering. It's also moving online and becoming more and more searchable, too.

Worse, through quirks of history literacy in classical languages was wide-spread for at least a hundred years. Many, many students and dilettantes and professors and professionals have sorted, interpreted, collected, codified, analyzed, extrapolated. If the amount of Greek and Latin writing available is staggering, the amount of writing about Greek and Latin writing is terrifying.

So if an author wants to set a scene among Plato's students on a hillside below the Parthenon there is a multitude of secondary sources that have already sorted out for you from the available clues in the primary literature what they would be wearing, what they would be eating, how they would address each other, etc.

Researching the Bronze Age throws you rather more prominently into those primary sources. Not to say there isn't extensive analysis and interpretation. There rather has to be, in part because the primary evidence is so much more sparse.

There's a couple of letters I have heard about so many times I even recognized when one was being referenced as a joke (a podcaster, speaking of the wealth of New Kingdom Egypt, said "gold was like sand." Which is a reference to a rather cranky letter from I believe a Hittite king that reads something like, "Why were you so stingy with your last gift? Are we not like brothers? Gold is like sand in your country, you only have to scoop it up. I'm building a new palace here, bro. Help me out.")

There's three shipwrecks that give so much information about trade in the Mediterranean I can practically recite their manifests by now. And for all the Tholos tombs, there's a handful of really indicative grave goods.

This sparsity, and the fact that these are mute indicators, not the pontifications of contemporaries, means you engage with primary sources as an archaeologist does in order to construct the world of your narrative.

And that means writing a book looks more and more like making a thesis defense. Or at least preparing for your orals.




There's another reason to be really familiar with the primary sources. A reason I'll go into in another post. And that's the name problem. If I was researching a scene set in Paris I'd be okay with discovering the names of the street, museum, metro stop, whatever. But due again to those historical flukes we have many names for things of the Bronze Age that are misleading, too modern, or just not right.

I don't even know if I want my Minoan character to self-identify as Minoan. She may have never heard of King Minos, and she certainly hasn't heard of Sir Arthur Evans. Unfortunately there's no Amarna letters for Minoan rulers. And we can't read their own writing. Best we've got is what the Egyptians may have called them, based on some medical texts.

One way to avoid the name problem is to describe. Either in alternative to or in addition to, portray the thing in question through what it looks like, how it is used, where it comes from. Instead of "He held a Naue-II" say "He held a long cut-and-thrust sword with a straight blade." Or more organically, "He thrust, using the reach of his long sword to advantage."

And that's why, in addition to sweating the research, I'm thinking about buying a sword.



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