A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
We’re going to talk about the comically nonsensical logistics of the “Battle of the Goldroad” from Game of Thrones (S7E4), commonly just called the ‘Loot Train battle.’
Happy New Year! Good riddance 2020! Fireside this week. Next week, we’ll be finishing up our look at the Dothraki of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones by looking at how they are shown to fight and comparing that to the fighting patterns of actual historical horse-borne nomads. Of course, it’s … Continue reading Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021
Hey folks! Fireside this week. A bit of a change-up in terms of the coming attractions. I had planned to start “Textiles, How Did They Make It?” next, but I want to do a bit more reading on some of the initial stages of textile production (that is, the production of raw flax and wool) … Continue reading Fireside Friday, November 27, 2020
Welcome to the first “Kit Review” post. In a ‘kit review’ post, rather than looking at a scene or sequence, we’re going to look at a character (or type of background character) and all of their ‘kit.’ We’ll try to figure out if the kit has a historical model and how well it manages to … Continue reading New Acquisitions: Unsullied Kit Review
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the fourth part of a six part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) taking a military historian’s look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter … Continue reading Collections: The Siege of Gondor, Part IV: The Cavalry Arrives
This is the third and final part of a discussion (I, IIa, IIb) discussion of the notion that there is a ‘universal warrior’ – a transcendent sameness about either the experience of war or ‘warrior values’ which might provide some sort of useful blueprint for life generally or some sort of fundamental truth about the … Continue reading Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part III: The Cult of the Badass
This is Part IV of our four-and-three-quarters part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude) on the Fremen Mirage. We began by sketching out the basic outline of this pop theory of history: that a lack of wealth and sophistication leads to moral purity, which in turn leads to military prowess, which consequently produces a cycle … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part IV: Desert Power
This series is now available in an audio format; the entire playlist can be listened to here. The following is the third part of a three part series where we look at the question “how medieval is Game of Thrones?” and – if not the Middle Ages – what period of European history does Game … Continue reading New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III
This series is now available in an audio format; the entire playlist can be listened to here. The following post is the first part of a three part series where we look at the question “how medieval is Game of Thrones?” and – if not the European Middle Ages – what period of history does … Continue reading New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part I
This is Part IIIb of our four-and-three-quarters part series (I, II, IIIa) on what we’re calling the Fremen Mirage. Last week, we traced the origins of this idea in the Greek and Roman ethnographic tradition. We found that the tropes that make up this concept – the poor, unsophisticated, but morally pure and militarily powerful … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part IIIb: Myths of the Atreides
