Holger Danske's World War II beach battle with Nazis is described in the introductory "NOTE" on pp. 7-11. Thus, it "really happened"/happened in our world. By contrast, when he wakes up naked in a forest at the beginning of CHAPTER ONE on p. 13, we know that he has been transported/translated to another world - we know what kind of book we are reading, apart from anything else - whereas he has yet to deduce that fact.
Old leaves crackle. Earth, moss and moisture are pungent. A brook tinkles. It is day, not night; afternoon, not morning. The trees are of Medieval wildness. There is a squirrel, a pair of starlings and a hovering hawk which joins our list of birds of prey.
We are going to like the Carolingian universe.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I did too! And I regret how Anderson wrote only this single story set in the Carolingian universe. And of course Holger himself came to feel more and more at home in this world, esp. as bit and pieces of old memories rose to his conscious mind.
Ad astra! Sean
BTW, except in remote frontier areas, medieval forests -weren't- all that wild. In France or England they were carefully managed -- right down to who had the right to pick up dead branches that had fallen, and how many pigs you could feed on the acorns. Trees were harvested on a controlled rotation, and coppiced if they were of a species that sprouted from the roots.
In fact, "coppice" is a slightly archaic word for "small area of woodland".
It was only in the late Victorian period that woodland in England stopped being so carefully tended.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have seen mention of things like that, such as special codes for managing wooded areas called "Forest laws." Even now, there are still some remnants of that in the UK.
Ad astra! Sean
By the early 1300's there was about as much land under cultivation in western Europe as there is now; there was a regression after the catastrophe of the Black Death and the population decline of the next 150 years, but essentially settlement reached its modern extent 700 years ago. That's when England's population reached the level of late-Roman Britannia, by the way.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And if agricultural production is a lot more now than it was 700 years ago, that's due to advances in agricultural technology, methods, machinery, fertilizers, etc. And not to any serious increase in the QUANTITY of land being cultivated.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: correct, apart from the drainage of some swamps and land reclamation like the Netherlands.
Post a Comment