Just pretend you are our friend until the end

I finished reading The Abbot (Scott) and The Roots of the Mountains (Morris), but I haven't been able to take time to compose posts about them because I saved a ton of quotations and I really wanted to finish the sweater I've been knitting. I finished weaving in the ends today, so tomorrow I can block it.

Also the remaining Emily Wilson translations I've got are Roman plays by Seneca, not Greek tragedies, and I'm not liking them as much. Also the book is a pdf which is always a pain. I've got another William Morris reread and another Walter Scott novel set in the middle ages to read queued up, but I'm taking a break to reread the original Villeneuve Beauty and the Beast, which I've been meaning to get around to for a while, because it has hilariously elaborate fairy lore backstory but I couldn't remember the specifics.

From the hospital, that is. He got home yesterday and I spent all day expecting (in vain) my mom or sister to remember to explain the medical mysteries and the outcomes (my sister explained them today). It seems things were caused by medication errors. He missed a heart medication the day of his surgery and was on too many blood thinners, which have been adjusted now. He is still too weak to use his phone though, so I haven't heard from him in a while. Usually he is quite active in our family chat. But this is probably because he didn't get the medication he takes for tremors while he was in the hospital.

I was happily expecting to go pet the spring lambs at Stentorp today, and also buy more local untreated wool at their Easter open house. Then last night I had cramps that were the most painful I have felt in years and years. It didn't hurt as much as when I broke my elbow, but that was almost ten years ago. I do most months have cramps bad enough to curtail how much I move around in spite of taking painkillers, but usually less than a whole day's worth of them, and nothing that I have ever needed stronger painkillers for than ibuprofen. In fact in the last few years they've gotten much less severe and I have mostly been fine with 1000 mg of paracetamol (acetaminophen). I guess I've used ibuprofen instead maybe... three times in the last year, and then usually only 400 mg. Last night I took 1000 mg of paracetamol and 600 mg of ibuprofen and I was crouching over the side of the bed pressing a microwaved wheat hotpack to my belly with one hand and wolfing down buttered toast with the other (my stomach is sensitive and I never take ibuprofen without food), and then I lay there with a hot pack under my lower back and another on my lower abdomen for like... an hour, probably?

I was mentally clinging to this promised treat of petting lambs and getting wool last night, and I got up a little early today. But apparently Wax's new episode of 911 came out early this morning and she spent four hours or something trying and failing to get a copy of it and then she was so mad about bad writing and the continued absence (second week in a row) of her blorbo from the screen that she was unable to... leave her computer chair... or think about anything else... until it was too late to go today. They still have an open house tomorrow, though. We'll have to go tomorrow.

(This bad writing on 911 isn't related to the previously-mentioned fact that apparently her ship is going canon. Since last update, a press release for next season promised to continue the "will-they-won't-they" between the characters, so this seems like confirmation, but also confirmation that they won't before the end of the season. The bad writing is a pretty widespread issue, since it's a network tv primetime soap opera, and continuity, plausibility, and character development are spotty. This week's offensively bad writing is related to a ridiculously implausible medical emergency and melodramatic brush with death [two things that happen frequently], the apparent departure of one of their biggest stars and the first time a main character has departed the show. Either someone died, or it's another fakeout: he did already fake die a year ago, according to Wax, so it's repetitive either way. Seems like maybe the actor is actually leaving now? The character death, besides being silly, implausible, and repetitive of past notes, is not good writing for the character, according to Wax, who is also giving angry jaded snorts at text posts looking forward to characters dealing with "deep grief" because the show is notoriously bad at remembering to show characters grieving or, in general, experiencing psychological consequences after traumatic experiences.)

Oh no, not my guy William Morris putting a New World ingredient in Europe 700 years too early!

...came out of the house clad in a green kirtle and a gown of brazil, with a golden-hilted sword girt to her side.

—The Roots of the Mountains (1889), William Morris

brazil (plural brazils)

Noun. (obsolete) A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. [14th–17th c.]

ETA: this might be wrong! Thanks to mildred_of_midgard, I now know the Wiktionary entry quoted above was incomplete 😠 and didn't inform me that brasilwood was a commonly used source of pigment/dye throughout Europe in the high middle ages and came from East Asia, frequently Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). (Brazil, the country, was named for the wood, because a close relative — the plant now known as Brazil wood — was plentiful there before being exploited almost entirely away.) The question remains whether this trade really did go so far back, but it's not so implausible after all. Morris was likely familiar with the dye's usage after 1000 CE and extrapolating backwards, as with the fiddle which was definitely incorrect, but it is possible that the wood was present in the book's setting (probably the 4th - 5th c. CE, somewhere in the a Carpathian region - see Wikipedia Hlöðskviða (also Hlǫðskviða and Hlǫðsqviða), known in English as The Battle of the Goths and Huns and occasionally known by its German name Hunnenschlachtlied for discussion of the possible historical context of the Old Norse heroic poem on the subject).

Even though I was already super into the medieval pastiche novels of my pal William Morris, a big part of my motivation for finishing The House of the Wolfings and reading The Roots of the Mountains was learning that these books were a major, perhaps the primary traceable literary influence on LOTR. I was suddenly curious! My reading in a brief web search promised that The Roots of the Mountains influenced:

✒️ The Dunedain as a proud wandering people descended from a great and noble culture in a more heroic past, dedicated to protecting the less warlike civilizations around them (inspired by the Sons of the Wolf in ROTM)

✒️ A culture with warrior women (the article that said he probably borrowed this is hilarious, given that the only culture with warrior women in Tolkien is actually a culture where the woman has to crossdress and sneak away to war; The Sons of the Wolf actually have warrior women)

✒️ The armies of orcs are said to be inspired by the "Huns" in ROTM, which, as I've mentioned in the past, are actually an army of demonic? monsters? apparently in spite of the name. (I still haven't reached their part in ROTM yet, but if it turns out that JRRT borrowed the idea and all his changes made it LESS racist that will be funny.)

✒️ Apparently the cross-cultural romances in general and the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn triangle in particular have clear antecedents in ROTM. I've seen the beginning of this already, but I'm assured that the novel contains five couples and am intrigued to find out where the others are going.

So far I've only read about 10% of The Roots of the Mountains, but I've already noticed that its gender politics (and its other politics) are more progressive than LOTR's (ROTM was published in 1889, LOTR 1954-55; Morris was born in 1834, Tolkien in 1892). Truly, as one of the websites I read said (paraphrasing), a chunk of LOTR is a reactionary Catholic reimagining of Morris's radically socialist fantasy.

This reminds me of how Morris & Co was also notably less sexist in the Victorian era than the supposedly progressive idealists at the Bauhaus in the 1920s-30s.