Paper: Real-world paper is a Chinese invention, so if you are aiming for a pseudo-European feel, it might not seem quite right. But silk is Chinese too, so if your Elves are clad in silk, there’s no reason they should not write on paper. (and Middle-earth isn’t really Fantasy Europe) Paper is an old technology so it should not automatically ‘feel wrong’ and we still use it, so probably you have an instinctive feel for how it works: that you can tear it, scrumple it, burn it, make it into scrolls and books.
It’s easy to write elves as having paper, but maybe you feel it seems a bit too familiar…?
Parchment This stuff is basically a kind of pale rawhide. Has a strong medieval vibe, though it’s much older than that. It lasts a long time and is really tough, so might be a good choice for someone wanting to keep very long-lasting records. It’s beautiful and it’s expensive, and it’s very very strong. The best-quality kind, made from young animals, is called vellum. Personally, I like to think of elves as the kind of people who don’t routinely slaughter lambs and calves for their skins, so I tend to think if they used parchment at all, it probably came from older animals, and they were quite careful with it. You can re-use parchment by scrubbing the ink off and writing on it again: that’s how tough it is. So you can correct mistakes made on parchment, though it’s work. Given the way it’s made, probably anyone writing on parchment is going to draft out the document on some less permanent medium before they write it on something so tough and valuable. Probably for books or law records rather than letters.
It’s NOT paper. It’s not going to scrumple up or tear like paper does, and if you burn it, it’s going to take a while to burn, and it will probably stink.
Wax THE popular temporary writing surface of the ancient world tends to get forgotten now, but if your writer is drafting out a difficult letter or making notes to be written out later in fair on good paper or parchment, this might be what he’d use. You get a flat wax surface which can easily be erased and you write on it with a simple stylus. You don’t need ink, you are essentially scratching letters into the wax. You can squish the wax around if you make a mistake to erase it. Your tablet probably has a gorgeous ornate cover which folds, so you don’t accidentally lose your notes.
Downsides: given that ‘tablet’ and ‘stylus’ now have very modern equivalents, you probably need to emphasise that it’s a wax tablet and a lead stylus when you write about it in fic, not that your elves have suddenly all got Ipads.
Bark Another old technology – at least 2000 years old, and I think this one feels nicely elven. Birchbark can be harvested without doing a lot of harm to the tree, and it’s relatively easy to harvest a lot of it, just with a sharp blade: it needs less complex manufacture than either parchment or paper. Birches like relatively exposed, relatively northern climates, so this is a good fit for Beleriand.
You can write on it with anything you’d use to write on paper, such as ink, or you can scratch stuff directly into the bark, like six-year-old Onfim of Novgorod did back in 1260AD.
It’s probably going to be a little stiff to scrumple, and probably a bit harder to tear than paper, but elves can probably rip up thinner sheets and they can certainly fling it on the fire in a dramatic manner and it will burn very nicely.
Wood It’s a lot of work to mince up wood fibres into a mush and then roll it out into paper. Why not instead simply carve wood into thin slices and write on that? This was a technology much used in the Roman Empire; the surviving writings from Hadrian’s wall are written on wood tablets in ink. Holly is a nice dense fast-growing and very pale wood, which might be particularly suited to use by the Noldor in Beleriand. Instead of sending someone an entire plank of wood, send them a set of thin tablets sewn together with thread. Perhaps you’ll have a unique signature knot, or seal your letter-knot with beeswax and a signet ring, so that you know nobody else has read it.
Scrumpling is probably out, but this stuff is likely to be cheap and it will burn well, so feel free to fling it on the fire!
Bone Bone is nice and pale, but it’s more of a pain to carve into strips than wood is, and I think has a slightly menacing feel. Still, it seems like the perfect surface for necromancers to write spells on, and like wood, you can bore holes in it with an awl and stitch the strips of bone together to make a longer document that can be folded or rolled up.
Papyrus This stuff has a very long history in Egypt of course, and makes a very durable kind of thick paper, as long as it’s kept dry. The papyrus reed is a hot-weather plant and papyrus scrolls, like paper, aren’t so tough in damp environments, so this one might be good for southern Avari elves to use, or perhaps southern Numenorean bases, or other Men of the South.
Slate This dark stone splits into smooth flat pieces easily and can be written on with chalk. It does crack very easily though, and perhaps has a less ‘ancient world’ feel to it as a writing substance than most of the previous options. Possibly suitable for notes, and for learning the alphabet, but it’s easier to preserve notes on a wax tablet than in chalk on a slate. Scratching messages on stone in general has a very long history, and is canon for Lord of the Rings!
Probably not so good for letters that need to move from place to place, and definitely not so good for scrumpling or burning, though you could fling a slate dramatically out of a window and smash it, I suppose.
Charcoal As a writing material, I always feel that the sheer ephemeral nature of charcoal can’t be overstated. It’s widely available, true: pick it out of any fireplace or bonfire – but as a writing/drawing material, it comes off almost as easily as it goes on. Good for quickly drawing secret maps that you want to be able to wipe out again.
Chalk Like charcoal, crumbly and ephemeral. So very ephemeral. Depending on the geology, your elves might be able to pick it up on any stony surface, or there might be none of it about for leagues and leagues.
Ink Sooooo many kinds of ink. You might imagine elves writing with dip-pens, but the fountain pen is an earlier technology than you might think: in the real world, it was invented in Egypt over a thousand years ago.
We mostly tend to think of ink as a liquid now, but solid ink-sticks are still used, made from a mix of different kinds of soot (pine wood soot or charcoal) with a glue to hold them together: you grind them on an inkstone then add water. Perhaps the Falmari might use pinewood soot ink-sticks bound with fish-glue, and mixed with pearl-dust? And the Doriathrim might use egg-glue inksticks made with charcoal.
The mining Noldor might use ferrous salts with oak-galls to make their ink: it perhaps is fitting that iron-gall inks, though very clear and effective at first, over a long period of time corrode the writing surface.
What a great resource!!
I have my additions:
I work with bark a lot, so I can pitch in there! I don’t hardcore strip it, so I dont get thick sheets, but I take bark from logs and peel it from birches.
Birch bark: a big thing for native americans using it. I followed some of it and made a model canoe, which worked. So, it’s pretty water durable. I must not have processed my bark sheets right becuase they were very brittle. They would, however, make fine paper. In terms of texture, the thing brittle sheets I had don’t crumble like paper, but they do kinda break apart like dried leaves.
Which brings me to the next topic!
Valinor.
We forget that elves and middle earth had magical bioengineering and plants we don’t have. It’s very possible the elves took up writing and requested that Yavanna make growable paper, like some sort of big flat durable leaf that you can use as an individual sheet. That would make sense.
Bone: a real fuckin hassle to clean and deal with, but highly abundant. I’ve got some bone experience as well. Anything larger than a fox basically will have bones big and surface-y enough to write a bit on.
For canon:
We know middle earth had extensive books and libraries, old ones too. To last that old, maybe parch as you said? Or like, just enchant the paper or whatever? Elves had material-longevity magic.
Some good additions on bark and bioengineering, thanks @verymaedhros ! (I admit my experience of birchbark is pretty limited, but generally with carving wood, I find the time of year you cut it and if it’s still green it is makes a big difference : it’s much easier to work fresh-cut green wood when the sap is running, and perhaps bark may be the same?) Though no doubt Elves can do a lot with enchantments if they want their birchbark more flexible! @nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui mentioned clay tablets, and I admit I left them out deliberately, because I think clay seems like a Mannish technology not an elven one. Sundried clay doesn’t seem a technology for misty Beleriand, and although they could of course have kiln-dried it, that does make it that much more fiddly to use for record-keeping. (Though my thoughts are perhaps coloured by this, from The Last Ship [link]:
Firiel looked from the river bank, one step daring then deep in clay her feet sank, and she halted staring. Slowly the elven ship went by whispering through the water: ‘I cannot come!’ they heard her cry. ‘I was born Earth’s daughter!
Idk, clay tablets just seem not quite Elven somehow…
I forgot to write about pencils! Pencils are surprisingly modern. You need the right sort of graphite, which isn’t widely found, or a complicated way of mixing powdered graphite and clay, and then making the wooden casing bit is pretty fiddly too. So I tend to think that pencils might be one of the things invented later by Dwarves. I suppose Elves might have them in Valinor, but perhaps that’s one more thing they have do to without in Beleriand.
i made a chrome extension that automatically blocks amazon and all of its child companies during the worker strike (prime day) and that can also be used to block any sites for future strikes in a scheduled way.
here’s the code rn, i uploaded to the chrome webstore but it’ll take a bit, ill update when I get it published so it’s easier to install
(i cant reblog this post but this was useful – it also blocks some more child companies not listed here)
again it’s only for chrome and i made it in like 3 hours so it might be fucked but afaik it works fine. just install it and leave it be, it’ll automatically activate on strikes.
in light of the Amazon strike, I wanted to offer some alternative online stores you can use INSTEAD OF Amazon for the upcoming months until the employees at Amazon are granted some basic common decency 🙂
rakuten.com – has nearly everything Amazon has
ebay.com – just be careful for scams!
newegg.com – for electronics/technology
emusic.com – music for as little as $1!! They also have a membership program where you can get music for even less!!
barnesandnoble.com – they have collectible items and childrens toys too!
etsy is a big fave of mine. its focused on homemade goods and art but you can find some practical goods on there too, and it feels nice to support artists.
wish is pretty good too!
Since I’d like to support the workers of Amazon in their struggle, please contact me directly if you’d like to buy my books! 🙂
Interestingly, if your apology language is showing insight then it actively benefits from a lot of things that are discouraged in modern social justice contexts. Like, I appreciate it if someone says to me ‘hey, I was hostile towards you because I was brought up in an awful purity-culture religious environment and I never really learned that people like you were people’.
But I think that’s exactly the kind of behavior that often gets a reaction of “so do you want a cookie for basic human decency?” or “stop making excuses”, mostly from people whose apology-need is accepting responsibility and who read that as refusing responsibility.
It’s not an apology, and what’s appropriate for apologies is a little different, but recently I read a touching, smart and self-reflective post by a woman exploring the horrible sexism she experienced and the way it’d made it hard for her to sympathize with men and caused her to have the habit of starting interactions with men on a confrontational footing, and how she wanted to address that. And she ended by worrying that maybe the post focused too much on her history of experiencing and being harmed by horrible misogyny, and how this might come across as justifying the habit she wanted to change instead of explaining it. And I could totally imagine someone having that complaint, but wow, I really hope they don’t, because it’s way easier to connect with people when you get why they’re making the mistakes they do and why they have the needs they do and where they’re starting from, and we’d have lost something if the start of that piece carefully avoided explaining critical pieces of the picture.
Making excuses is actually easy to fall into, and it’s harmful and unhelpful. But making yourself understood – to yourself, not just to other people – and getting where you come from and what is actually making it hard to do the right thing is so important that I’d rather err on the ‘making excuses’ side than the ‘don’t make this about you’ side.
And if people know their apology languages then maybe they’ll have the vocabulary to communicate “I need to hear that you’re sorry, and it’s not helpful for me to hear about what caused it, because I experience that as a shift of the emotional burden” or alternately “I find it really helpful to know where you were coming from”.
Pro tip from a blunt-ass motherfucker who has learned how to apologize through trial and error: explaining why you did something is generally fine, as long as you also make it clear that you recognize you made a mistake, on your own responsibility, and know that you shouldn’t have done it and are trying to take steps.
Example:
“So, [friend], I’m really sorry I lost my temper and shouted at you/treated you like that/whatever, and I shouldn’t have said the things I said. I know we were both under a lot of stress/we both deal with problems differently and we clash sometimes/whatever, but I still shouldn’t have said those things in the way I did. Sometimes I have a lot of trouble regulating my emotional responses/I have XYZ past trauma that makes it hard for me to be objective/whatever. It’s something I work hard on managing, and I’m sorry that I hurt you like that. I can’t promise it will never happen again, but I’m going to do my best.”
Important things to keep in mind:
YOU made a mistake. Explain if you want, but remember that ultimately YOU control your actions, and your actions hurt someone. Make sure to address that point.
Sometimes it helps to explain, especially if it’s something that you have trouble with and are working on. I tend to be a contrarian jackass when I’m having a bad PTSD episode, and that can do damage, so I make sure to mention it to people so that they know I’m trying to improve, even if I can’t magically resolve the issue.
If you probably won’t be interacting with the person again, then just apologize and don’t explain if it’s deeply personal. They don’t need that kind of insight into a stranger’s life, it’s uncomfortable. Limit yourself to “I was unaware” type explanations with strangers. If it’s a friend, explain in more detail.
We are taught to write off apologies. If someone tries, saying “it wasn’t a big deal” or “you were right” or whatever, it’s okay to say “it was a big deal to me because you’re my friend and I feel bad that I was a dick.” Apologies are for you too, a lot of the time.
Saying “I’m sorry you were hurt/offended/whatever” is not an apology, it puts the onus on the other person and suggests that you don’t think you were in the wrong. Say “I’m sorry that I hurt you” instead.
It sucks to apologize. It means admitting you were wrong. Get the fuck over it and apologize anyway.
I generally do a combination of moving and various striking angles; I don’t really have a set routine, I just work on what I feel needs work for half an hour to forty five minutes or so.
First things first, none of the categories you’ve defined here are “ethnicities”. They’re all jobs and nationalities, or jobs and time period, depending on what you mean by “Victorian.” I’m assuming that, since you’re asking me, you want to see people of color wearing these outfits before you draw them? That’s not really necessary. You can really just search for fashion references, then make the person in the outfit a person of color.
I’m guessing you’re making a comic or illustrated story, since you mention wanting visual references for drawing-there’s nothing stopping you from making a bazillion drawings of people of color wearing whatever historical costume you fancy them wearing. Sadly, some people seem to find it brain-breaking to envision a person who isn’t white wearing a dang cravat, so this blog is full of images of actual people (even religious and mythological subjects used models), so have at it if you need inspiration.
If you want to just browse around, you should check out the “1800s Week” tag here; that’s more if you just want general visual fashion references like this:
But to go bit by bit specifically, I’ll do what I can for ya.
1. Prussian General
This one’s not hard at all, you’ll find thousands of resources from a google image search, or you can check out what the Deutsches Historiches Museum has available.
For European generals of color in general (ha…), you might wanna check out Ivan Abramovich Gannibal (1735-1801):
And Abram Petrovich Gannibal, his father, and incidentally the great grandfather of Alexandre Pushkin, whose unfinished novel Peter the Great’s Moor, is about his life as a military commander:
Well, here’s Edmonia Lewis, an artist living & working in Europe during the time specified:
A woman of Ojibwe, Haitian, and African-American heritage, she was
accused of poisoning her female classmates with an aphrodisiac because she was gay, then a LOT of
bad stuff happened, then some good stuff, then some WEIRD stuff, and
somehow she ended up rich, single, and working in Rome until her death,
sometime around 1911.
He was multilingual, an independent thinker, and had good knowledge of
politics and diplomacy. He was a distinguished and much loved member of
Athenean society, a favourite subject of many contemporary painters,
sculptors, and poets. When the painter Gyzis came to Athens, Christos
was a living legend and he painted him on many occasions between
1871-1875 other than the portrait: Head of an Arab Oriental man with a musical instrument Oriental man smoking Oriental man with fruit The punishment of the chicken thief (first man on the right)
As you can see, once you get to princes there’s not “a Prince” it’s literally just “the prince at this time of this nation was this guy” type of thing. At least when it comes to Crown Princes and such, but you can go ahead and check out the families and the youngest sons and daughters and royal nephews or whatever and see who they were. It just depends on if you’re like, writing historical fiction and want to keep your facts straight or if you’re doing some kinda alternate-history or fantasy type deal in which case you can quite literally do whatever you want.
Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.
My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.
So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?
(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)
Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.
They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.
Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.
So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.
Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear. But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
People need to know.
PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone.
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
This. All of this.
Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.
Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”
I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.
And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.
And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).
But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.
So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)
And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.
I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.
But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.
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