What questions do you have about stuff from History, or am I the only one?

[EverySongbirdSays]

Hi all, HQ here. We're moving this thread over to History Club now where Songbird will be starting a Part 2 thread for more History quizzical shenanigans

The main history thing I've been pondering for the last couple of days since the weather shifted is the history of clothes.

So... how did Early Man manage in the winter, how did they make clothes out of animal skin?

After that, I understand that clothes production as we know it today began with the industrial revolution.

But how did people manage for clothes you know before we had cotton or machinery

How/when did we realise you could knit wool to make a jumper?

I'm sorry if it's a bit of a stupid question

Has anyone got any stupid questions I might know the answer to ?

I think I recall reading an older version of Cinderella where the ugly sisters chop bits of their feet off in order to squeeze their feet into the glass slippers.

Not something that was reproduced in the Disney film.

I remember reading that too. And the blood dripping from their feet was the giveaway that they were not Cinderella.

The Philippines Pullman translation of Grimm which came out three or four years ago is mostly undanitused, with Rapunzel getting pregnant, and plenty of wicked old women being put into barrels lined with nails then rolled down a hill. Grimm by name and grim by nature.

how did we get from tales of beefy warriors wrestling with dragons and beasts (Beowulf) to little girls being eaten by wolves for disobeying their parents?

They coexist, though. Red Riding Hood is pretty old. I was going to suggest Marina Warner's books on fairytales, but on the other hand there has been a lot of recent research and publication about them, a very in topic these days.
The classifications and "genetic" models for fairytales are surprisingly systematised, quite different from the usual ideas of literature study: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/14/red-riding-hood-math_n_4275490.html - interesting although hard to prove definitively.

Philip Pullman, thank you, useless autocorrect.

walruswhiskers - most of the original written fairytales are pretty grim (no pun intended): I wasn't aware there was much to suggest that the various authors did much sanitising at that point, though sometimes they were blending stories? Obviously the popular modern versions are very different from the early written collections though... Would be really interested to know more about it, can you recommend any books (or articles accessible via JSTOR) if folk/fairytales are Your Thing? I was "Should Have Been In Hospital"!ill while I was trying to do a presentation on Russian folk/fairy tales in my final year at uni & I still feel a bit frustrated I didn't cover it well enough. We had to present for 20 minutes & I included a full 5 minutes of Stravinsky...

My guess would have been that fairy tales we're just as old as Beowolf, but harder to track as belonging to the oral tradition & - being told by women to children - considered unworthy of even a passing mention in any record that's survived.

I had a book of fairy tales when I was little that was somewhere between the very grim Grimm and the sanitised versions we have today. the Little Mermaid kills herself because the Prince doesn't want her after all!

I've heard a few times that "glass slipper" was a mistranslation from the French word for fur, but I find that hard to believe. I have visions of Cinderella in her ballgown with a pair of Uggs on...

I agree fairy tales are old, probably even older than Beowulf

Have you come across the theory that there are basically only seven stories? (Copy and Paste from Wikipedia:)

Overcoming the Monster.
Rags to Riches.
The Quest.
Voyage and Return.
Comedy.
Tragedy.
Rebirth.

The opportunities for women and girls to voyage and return are limited; the Quest is usually bagging the prince. Overcoming the Monster is the most interesting: boys get to battle Grendel (and Grendel's mum), girls get to battle other women in the form of the wicked witch or their stepmother (who are only marginally worse than the average MN MiL )

I'm a bit shocked my undergraduates often think the Disney versions are the version, and seem nonplussed when I point out that in early versions of the Rapunzel story the prince impregnates Rapunzel on his visits to the tower, or that in the Basile version of Sleeping Beauty, the prince rapes the sleeping princess and she gives birth to twins while still unconscious.

A propos of nothing, other than that I've been reading about it -- the spread of female-friendly public spaces in later 19th London, like teashops like Lyons' Corner Houses or the ABC tea rooms, had a huge impact on middle-class women being able to be out and about in city centres - not just because it was ok for 'respectable' women to be in these (unlike, say pubs or clubby male restaurants) but because they had women's toilets. Before that, in the absence of women's public toilets, women could only stay out as long as they could hold out without a wee.

There's some debate over the ending of the Little Mermaid. IIRC, the bit about the Daughters of the Air looks like it was tagged on as an afterthought as a nod to Victorian morality.

Olenna, there was a theory at one point that the slipper wasn't 'verre' (glass) but 'vair' (squirrel fur), making the furry slipper a metaphor for Cinderella's vagina virginity, especially with all that 'the Prince will search the country doing a lot of inspecting girls and things being tried on for size, fnar fnar' stuff and the ugly sisters shedding blood in their attempts to get the Prince's attention.

TipTopTriceratops

On the topic of reality TV ignorance, it was only a few months ago that I realised Essex was Joey's real surname, like David Essex; I'd figured he was just called that because he was from the show, as it doesn't immediately sound like a surname.

Joey Essex is his real name? I assumed it was a nom de plume or whatever the TV version of that is.

Ps Essex isn't David Essex's real surname.

I have always wondered how languages evolved and how people learned to translate.

I've always wondered how the Egyptians made electrum - I know it can occur naturally but how do you take gold and silver and make an alloy of them? Also how did the Egyptians build the pyramids?

Like a pp, I wonder what knowledge we lost in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

As an aside, my mother had a friend who had escaped from Poland to the UK during WW2. She managed to get a visa to go back to visit in the late 70's/early 80's. Her family would come to her bedside in the dead of night, to offer her soap, matches, etc to take back with her as they"d been told we were short of them :-( .

Fabulous thread, btw.

Joey Essex is his real name. Like the rest of you I assumed it was some kind of nickname or stage name but no

Which means his ancestors have always been from Essex for hundreds of years.

Restricted genepool?

Groovee

I recommend going to watch Arrival

I thought Joey Essex was a stage name too!! (I knew David Essex was, so kinda assumed it was a tag that the papers had added to him, and it had stuck...)

Language evolved presumably by the grunts needing to become more sophisticated to deal with new issues. There are fewer than 20 language families, which I think is a remarkably low number considering how dispersed the population is around the globe. Translation is easy when you can point to the thing you mean, or if you can fall back on a common language

Mondegreens
That's a bit depressing really. I'd not be surprised/would expect them to be most familiar with the Disney versions, but to have no idea at all that those aren't THE version is... wow.

Mind you, at the 8th(?) birthday party of the girl who lived over the road from me I was the only one not utterly traumatised by The Wrong Little Mermaid being shown to us. I knew the original story, having been brought up with fairytales at my maternal DGM's house coming from a beautiful Victorian book. The rest of the attendees only knew the Disney version & there were actual hysterics... (Granny also had "Peter Pan" & "The Just So Stories" pretty much by heart & a range of French children's books for us to pick from, but my brother always used to haul out one of the hefty volumes of myths & legends from around the world [1920s/1930s tomes, encyclopaedia-style, almost, in terms of size & multiple-volume arrangement] when it was his turn to choose - well, or the book of Stories From Africa... but see me digress like a digressing thing at a digressathon...)

Monde there was a theory at one point that the slipper wasn't 'verre' (glass) but 'vair' (squirrel fur), making the furry slipper a metaphor for Cinderella's vagina virginity.

That is very interesting, because one of the old medieval euphemisms for pregnancy was "to be with squirrel”.

I think languages are fascinating because they shape not only how we communicate, but also how we perceive the world. It's like the old story (which I know isn't strictly accurate but it's illustrative) about Eskimos having 20 words for different types of snow - how differently speakers of that language must perceive a snowy landscape when they can differentiate what they see like that?

I agree that languages are fascinating. I love how different languages have words for certain concepts which would be more convoluted to express in English. It gives a window into culture. The history of English is really interesting in itself - love listening to Old English being spoken.

I love linguistic diversity and a part of me feels so sad about the different dialects and minority languages which are dying out.

Yes, and 'squirrel' is a euphemism for genitalia. There are lots of medieval stories about innocent young girls who see a cute squirrel and want to pet it.

I think fairy tales would once have been closer to fabliaux (smutty stories), too. There are lots of these in Western European culture. This is one of my favourites:

Once, there was a hard-working carpenter and his wife. The carpenter was so skilled that all the great church builders sought him out to make statues of Jesus and the saints, for their churches. But his wife was not satisfied, and she took a lover. One day, the wife and her lover sneaked into the carpenter's empty workroom to have sex. They were so carried away, they only remembered the time when they heard footsteps outside.

"Quick!" gasped the wife, pulling her dress over her head, "There's no time for you to dress! Go stand by that cross and pretend to be Jesus!"

The lover draped his naked body over a half-finished cross, hoping that in the dim light the carpenter would not see him. The carpenter, however, was a cunning man. Entering the workroom, he kissed his wife, turned, and gasped. "Goodness! I had quite forgotten I had made that statue of Jesus!" The wife bit her tongue nervously. "And it has a terrible mistake!" the carpenter continued. "How blasphemous! I have actually carved visible genitalia on the Son of God - something I should never do!"

Swiftly, he grabbed his chisel and his hammer, and ---

!

Language is fascinating. And does tell you about societies too. In my experience when you learn a new language, to become fluent you have to think in that language. Often simply translating from English doesn't work. When learning Spanish in South America I was often asked why I said 'sorry' so often :) it isn't a word that punctuates their speech like in England.