Why are blacksmiths so stigmatized in folklore? What about the profession gave them such a bad name and caused them to be closely associated with the Devil?
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/039219216801606202 Maybe because traditional smelting techniques involve, human sacrifice? Allegedly?? Or maybe “Molten metal that flows is associated with flowing blood because
of its color, heat and the danger that arises from it”
Those who are only slightly familiar with anthropology are aware
of the many explanations that have been proposed to account for the “blacksmith complex". He is impure because he is in contact
with iron (a loathsome and repulsive element), or with fire (from
which demons are born), or because he forges murderous weapons; or because he is endogamous, or is not independent, or because
blacksmiths are the dregs of conquered peoples, do not produce
their own food, do not go to war, and break some unknown divine
interdict. They are respected because they have dared to break
a divine interdict, because they make useful instruments, because
they are rich, because they are initiators, educators, religious chiefs,
peace-makers, sacrificers, civilising heroes, and even, according to
the embryological theory of M. Eliade, because they help the Earth
to give birth to minerals and in so doing are a substitute for Time etc. Their powers issue from their tools, from spirits hidden in
the bellows of their smithies, from fire, from the “numinous” force
of iron, from the ornaments they forge for shamans; or from the
celestial origins of their techniques, from their novelty, from the
fact that these secret techniques are hereditary, or simply because
they are in their possession; or again from the “ambivalent magic
of weapons made of stone,” which, by emitting sparks when
struck, are likened to lightning, a magic that is transmitted into
the metal; or from the fact that they forge flashes of lightning
for the gods, etc…
One can see that, even when they contain elements of truth,
all these explanations are one-sided and often in need to be
explained themselves. The only valid explanation is one that can
show the inner reason for the different manifestations of the
“blacksmith complex” and their coexistence, and attain to the
structure that determines their interconnection and renders them
interdependent.
An interpretation that coordinates the various elements of the
problem, on the basis of the blacksmith’s violation of taboo, should
satisfy these conditions. It would form part of a wider interpretation
of magical violations of taboo in general, based on an
analysis of the nature and function of taboos.
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”
I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).
So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.
If you think Walt Disney was the first person to create a feature length animated film you’re wrong. The first person to do it was a woman – Lotte Reiniger. See more about how her silhouette stop motion worked.
I’ve already reblogged this but I’m going to again because ever since I found out about Reiniger I’ve been horrified and pissed off that she was NEVER ONCE mentioned in my history of animation class. And neither were any of the other women animators I’ve learned about since.
Animation majors of all people should be taught about this, but no the only figures deemed worthy were all men
it’s really wild to see how batman has evolved over time as a consequence of writers wanting to change everything while also changing nothing because any comic that lives that long is a shambling stitched-together corpse
early batman is a swashbuckler and he’s having a good-ass time beating up these bad guys, because he existed in the context of organized crime being a big fucking problem. they were coming out of the 1930s. that’s the era of al capone, you know? john dillinger only died five years ago and he was a fucking celebrity. and batman shows up to be like YOU KNOW WHAT’S COOLER THAN SHOOTING PEOPLE AND BRIBING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS? BEING BATMAN.
early batman could not have been more clearly edutainment, pulpy enough to make kids feel like they were reading That Good Shit but always with a really obvious message (the message was DON’T DO A CRIME). he fights a lot of giants because having to protect yourself from people twice your size is very #relatable to children.
when he adopts robin it’s very clearly to give kids a character to relate to more strongly than they can bruce wayne–FIGHTING CRIMES ISN’T JUST FOR RICH MEN, IT’S ALSO FOR COOL KIDS LIKE YOU. see how cool robin is, kicking the shit out of these dudes? don’t you wanna be cool, like robin? he’s from the circus, that thing you wanted to run away to because that’s a viable life choice in this era!
bruce wayne was rich but his whole cover was that rich people are fucking useless. a man who inherited money? a fucking useless, lazy shit, no question. this was just accepted by everyone, that obviously an heir would never be suspected of doing anything that might take effort. the difference in attitude on a fundamental level toward the idle rich is staggering.
his wealth is also MONUMENTALLY downplayed, in the same way you see in old movies. they deliberately did not film the philadelphia story in an actual mansion because they didn’t think anyone would believe that the rich got to live like that. so bruce wayne ends up looking like he lives in a tract home in a suburb. “is this how rich people live? yeah, sure, probably. who cares, let’s fight crimes.”
they only introduce a backstory after the comic has been going for a while, because at first it’s like? why would he need a reason to fight crime? it’s fun? but i guess they figured they had to create SOME reason for bruce wayne to not be completely useless, as all rich men are. why is bruce wayne the only rich man capable of doing cool shit? because his parents died, that’s why. check out robin kicking this dude in the head. fucking sweet, right?
there’s a whole storyline where batman fights a whole fucking town because it’s corrupt and the cops are corrupt and THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS CORRUPT so he’s gonna FIGHT THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IF HE HAS TO, FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR COCAINE.
then the comics code happens and fucks everything. batman can’t fight, like, systemic corruption and dudes with tommy guns anymore. all the crimes get CARTOONY AS SHIT. the joker isn’t just a murderous jewel thief with a weird face, he’s a fucking clown. he’s a weird clown man committing clown crimes. puns everywhere. suddenly batman is fighting Supervillains, and they’re all insane. but they aren’t, really? they are a cartoon’s idea of insanity, like a wolf in a straitjacket getting hit on the head with a mallet. when a character is insane what that actually means is they’re wacky, they do weird shit, they have no meaningful motivation and do crimes for no reason because the alternative is having them commit real crimes for good reasons and that’s not good for the kiddos. the fact that batman changed so much after the code is fucking WILD because, remember, it was ALWAYS for the kids. it was BLATANTLY for the kids. the code still managed to fuck it just through the culture shift it created.
then later there’s this shift, again, away from the code and away from kids entirely. late seventies, i think? fuck if i know, i don’t know shit about damn. suddenly they want to be more GRITTY and REAL and DARK. they want REAL CRIME. batman is PUNCHING RAPISTS IN ALLEYS. but this isn’t the era of dillinger anymore. as a society, collectively, we understand more about crime and the societal forces that drive people to crime and so on. there are a lot of alley rapists in this era of comics tbh and this is probably why. rapists always deserve to get punched regardless of class struggle. also at this point we understand more about violence, and people who are violent, who commit acts of violence and solve problems with violence and enjoy being violent. a rich guy having a blast kicking a guy in the head for robbing a bank is no longer great optics.
so batman stops having fun. this is now his dark mission, his grim assignment. he doesn’t like this job, but someone’s gotta do it. he will not smile as he punches a rapist in the head. this is serious business. i don’t necessarily have a problem with this decision, because i think it’s a legitimate course of action to say “in a modern context, these behaviors become unacceptable, and so we will change his behaviors so that he can continue to be a heroic figure”. that’s valid as a motherfucker and i wish more people would remember that the whole point of making batman a grump was so that he could continue to be a good guy, as opposed to the alternative of gleeful violence.
(getting rid of most of the violence is also good–he’s a detective–but these are comics we’re talking about here so lol)
and then there’s the villains. you’d think this would be the point where they say “hey, maybe let’s go back to the way some of our villains were before the code”. you’d think that if they hated the goofy villains so much they’d just move on. but it’s comics so nothing ever goes in the trash for good. and that’s when you have writers who look at a cartoon wolf in a straitjacket and they say “that’s not what insanity looks like! we should make him a sociopath.”
i mean you could have just said “let’s stop calling him crazy and try to find a better motivation for these crimes, like being an asshole” but instead now batman has all these villains with sociopathy and OCD and DID and schizophrenia, because that makes it REAL, because now instead of being cartoon crazy people committing cartoon crimes they are real crazy people committing real crimes!! OH BOY
and at some point someone looks at this and goes “you know i feel like this might be ableist as shit” and writers could have said “yeah in retrospect the only evil clown i’m aware of was legally deemed sane and didn’t actually commit thematically appropriate crimes, so maybe mental health isn’t the issue here” but instead they said “yes, batman is kind of an asshole to be punching these sick people, but he’s a necessary asshole because without him there would be Crazy Crimes and we all just have to come to terms with that i guess”
now we’re at this place where we’re trying to reconcile about eighty years of nonsensical horseshit and all of these decisions that were made because of shifting cultural attitudes or to sell comics or because one writer in particular assumed everyone would love his cool OC as much as he did, and there are writers going “you know, bruce wayne probably has pretty severe ptsd” and there are writers going “what if batman was the REAL villain all along” and there are writers going “lol rich man wears bat costume to punch the mentally ill and poors, did u ever think about that” and there are writers going “hey have you heard of this ayn rand chick because boy howdy i just did and now i’ve got ideas”
but the reality is that heroism and goodness are not static concepts that look the same to all people even within the same era and trying to reconcile every different version of what the popular conception of heroism has looked like for almost a century is dumb as hell and batman should have entered the public domain in 2014
germans: ok, so our country is called Deutschland
the french: got it. the country of Allemagne
germans: …no? that doesn’t even sound like it
the english: oh no, we got it, it’s Germany
germans: not even close
the polish: it’s Niemcy, right?
germans: how are you each getting it wrong in a completely different way
danes: Tyskland
lithuanians: Vokietija
slovakians: Nemecko
germans: …
finns: Saksa
germans: you know what? sure. whatever
japanese: Doitsu?
germans: i mean at least you tried
(Edit: wah no my comments got deleted when I reblogged D:)
Ok look this is actually fascinating and there is a wikipedia page on it! It boils down to whether the source is the current native German name (which means “of the people”), Tacitus’ Germania (of unknown meaning), the name of one of the ancient tribes (Alemanni, Saxon, etc.), or a non-German word for “can’t speak properly, aka like us”.
I get that this is a laugh-at-the-white-guy post, but it’s actually an interesting question.
In the US, the 100 most common surnames represent about 18% of the population. In South Korea, the 5 most common surnames represent more than 50% of the population, with Kim/Gim/Ghim/김 alone being around 22%.
The answer, best as I can find it, is that surnames originally in Korea were much more recently brought to the average person.
In Anglo culture, average people having last names dates back to around the Middle Ages, and your surname could be anything from your profession (Smith, Taylor, Cooper, Chandler, Fisher, etc.) to your geographic location or some feature of it (Barrow, Liscombe, Badgerly, Wyndham, etc.) to some defining feature of you or your ancestor (Red, Brown, Small, Little, Longfellow, etc.). These were reasonably widespread in use and are the origins of most Anglo surnames today.
In Korea, until relatively recently, surnames were only used by the nobility and aristocracy. The ruling family for a long time in some rich and important regions? 김. And so, when everyone started taking on surnames, it was only natural to have your surname (which, remember, was largely geographic in nature, although not named after a geographic location per se) be the same as your ruler. And so you end up with more than half the population sharing the same 5 last names.
A similar thing is at work in China with the surname Wang/Wong/王/汪. The two variations are most common and 58th respectively. The first of these, by the way, 王, means King, just to make the connection a little more obvious. It also represents more than 7% of the population all on its own.
King is a really popular name in general it seems.
Shah and raj both mean king, as does the english name king of course. Im sure theres others in other languages.
I thought that was an interesting hypothesis so I looked into it really quick for the Netherlands, because we didn’t become a monarchy until 1806 (thanks napoleon) so I thought the numbers on royal related last names wouldn’t be that high. The first one in the top 100 comes in at #24, which is de Graaf (the Count), then at #48 we have Prins (Prince) and then at #80, we finally have de Koning (the King). So even here, they’re far more common than I thought.
If I had to identify who the big “robot” author was before Asimov, it would be Jack Williamson in the 1920s and 1930s. He specialized in robot stories featuring horrible tyrants that destroy mankind, and his robot stories nearly all have downer endings. Jack Williamson is one of the more crucial people in the development of science fiction. He was the first to use terms that have entered into the English language like “blaster,” “genetic engineering,” and “terraforming.”
The first of Jack Williamson’s robot stories is the Humanoids, a story about superintelligent and frighteningly relentless robots that utterly and completely micromanage the human race by eliminating anything dangerous and removing us from toil, which basically means they’ve eliminated the entire point of the human race and keep us from doing anything fun, letting us sit around “with folded hands.” It was an eerie story about a Borg-like and very alien machine intelligence that simply didn’t understand that everything that gives our lives meaning, drink and junk food and even driving our own cars, has an element of risk, and that our imperfect lives are defined by choice. It does not have a happy ending; the robots win in that one.
Another of Jack Williamson’s “evil robot tyrant” stories is “The Iron God” from 1941, about a machine of colossal intellect that menaces the human race. It’s maybe the first “giant robot” story in the form we’d recognize. Like the Humanoids, it also has a downer ending.
In addition, there was also Eando Binder’s Adam Link stories. “Eando Binder” was a pen name for two brothers, Earl and Otto Binder. The first Adam Link story starts as first-person, with a realization over time that the narrator is a robot. It was also genre self-aware, the main character even reads Frankenstein.
The follow up story is “The Trial of Adam Link,” which is one where Adam is accused of murder. The trial isn’t just about Adam’s innocence, however…it becomes about proving whether he truly is a thinking sentient being responsible for his actions, whether he should be treated as property or a person. It was great stuff, and clearly the inspiration for maybe the best Star Trek episode of all time (”Measure of a Man”).
As the Amazing Stories pulp mag started to become schlockier and more sensational, though, the Adam Link character was brought back over and over and became less of a hounded outsider in introverted stories, and more of a superhero, in tales like “Adam Link Goes to War.” He gets a robot dog, a robot wife (named – and prepare to be blindsided here – Eve), and he became a detective and champion athlete. Adam Link was easily the most popular science fiction character of the 1940s except for maybe the Lensmen.
Isaac Asimov once said that the robot was mainly used as a “wisecracking sidekick.” Except for Grag and Otho, Captain Future’s two allies, I can’t think of a single pre-1960 “straight example” of this.
The single most direct inspiration for Asimov’s robot stories, according to Asimov himself, were not true robots at all, but living alien creatures in immortal cyborg bodies known as the Zoromes. They were found in stories called “The Jameson Sattelite,” a very popular series of science fiction stories told in the early 1930s.
Basically, a man who is dying of an incurable disease, Jameson, has himself frozen and placed in a satellite orbiting the earth, where he is discovered a billion years later when the earth is dead by a race of bizarre alien explorers, the Zoromes, who place Jameson in an immortal robot body the way he does, and take him with them when they explore the universe. The Zoromes are interesting because their analytical brains mean they approach issues differently from the human means of thinking. Asimov said that the Zoromes were not malevolent, but they were different, which is what got him thinking.
Thus far, I’ve mentioned stories about robot tyrants full of dread and unhappy endings, stories where robots engage in soul searching philosophy about sentience, and a bizarre, melancholic series set a billion years in the future. I have absolutely no idea where people get the idea that old school pulp scifi was all optimistic futures and rocket utopias.
blackash26 