Debate?

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

So here's a maybe controversial thought: I love the Eddisians, but are the stereotypes the lowlanders have about them really all that far off?

goatfoot - Gen does scramble up and down cliffs like a goat, no?
backwards - Didn't Gen need the Magus to send him more recent scholarly and political material?
brutish - Didn't Gen's cousins sound a bit harsh? And that was royalty!
oafish - Weren't Gen's reading skills 'rudimentary' before he started living in a library? And don't we get frequent mentions of how hardly anybody (in the government even!) ever goes into that wing?
barbarian - Did you see them fight those Medes? According to Attolia, all they do all winter is beat each other with swords.

*throws down gauntlet*

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

backwards-i always thought eddis had been kinda isolated so they really wouldnt have recent books and things
oafish-from what we can guess most of the people in sounis arent very well educated either.

[chubbyleng.livejournal.com]

I promise I'll post more on this later on, but my only thought right now is the barbarian part. I always assumed all three countries were rather barbaric. We know that Nahuseresh calls Attolia the "barbarian queen" when he talks with Kamet, so I think that all three countries have some aspects of that.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Besides, barbaric is always a relative term. Someone is barbaric if their cultural norms don't match that of the person calling them such. "barbarian" is a way of saying that someone is the Other, and that the Other is bad.

[olivebride.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The original term in Ancient Greek only designated foreigners to Greece, although it already had a negative ring to it since the Greeks thought they were superior to the rest.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Had to do with the fact that Greeks thought everybody who spoke anything other than Greek sounded like sheep.

[crazededdisian.livejournal.com]

Or possibly goats . . .

[crazededdisian.livejournal.com]

In this case.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

baaa

[(Anonymous)]

(barks like a sheepdog instead)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I thought that Gen's rudimentary reading was more of a comment on the idea that he went from being an average reader to being someone with a passion for it, not that he went from barely knowing how to being a scholar. Plus, I saw him being moved into the library relatively young.

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

Doesn't QoA say something like "there weren't many scholars in Eddis"? I think it's when Gen takes over the library as his room? Or, maybe when he's healing after the chopchop and notices that his scrolls are still all lying about?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

All that's mentioned is that before Gen moved into the library, it was rarely used, which implies that the Eddisan Royal family is not big on the scholarship, though the Thieves are stated to be so soon after. Equal implications are made about the scholarship of Sounis, Magus and Sophos excepted.

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

I found it! It's on pg. 101 of the Is-it-an-Amphora-or-a-Hook? paperback. (http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1293505506l/40158.jpg)

"Those who needed the books or the scrolls from the library made their selections and carried them away to read elsewhere. There were not many scholars in Eddis."

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Ah, there it is! Still, as I said before, it's strongly implied throughout TT and CoK that scholarship is less than respected in the court of Sounis, and there is no discussion about scholarship in Eddis at all, except that Dite is a bit of a poet.

definitely a hook. Amphorae have two handles and a very distinctive shape.

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

True, poor Sophos! Though, when you think about it, it's ironic that the people most starved for cultural arts--plays and poetry--are the slaves in the barracks at night. More like storytelling, I guess.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The nobles get to play politics. The slaves? soul crushing tedium. Sophos, you have found a captive audience.

[creative-lefty2.livejournal.com]

You make me want to be laugh and cry with that pun.

One thing from real life that I want to point out: in my experience, some of the people who love reading, books, and scholarship the most are the ones who don't start life as readers. As in, they didn't really start reading until 4th grade. Maybe that was the case with Gen. He found himself surrounded by books and was curious enough to want to know what was in them and went from there. Same with Sophos and the Magus.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

count me in there. couldn't read until 3rd grade, though that was because of the seizures.

[elle-winters.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting that you point that out. Wonder if there's any real truth behind it though.
I grew up with books (reading Dr Suess at 4), I can easily say that I read less books now though. (not proud of it at all) I read more textbooks but hardly ever pick up anything else. But that might just be me.. *wonders*

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

I meant to just post the question and watch the debate, but I'm confused. When is it implied that scholarship isn't respected in Sounis? I mean, why have a Magus otherwise? Attolia doesn't have a Magus. Do you mean how Sophos's dad wasn't thrilled with his pursuits? I thought that sort of got cleared up during CofK.

True, we don't know much about scholarship in Attolia, although I do remember being surprised by stuff that Costis knew, and of his mentions of having had a tutor, since his father was a younger son with barely a cabin to call home.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The Magus is a singular position. He has so much power because of what he knows. The king fears him and undercuts him because of what he knows. If many people were scholars, if they knew what he knew, he would not be so intimidating a figure. And as for apprentices, for all the king undercuts him, if Ambiades is the best he can do, and Ambiades barely respects him, and considers it all beneath him, scholarship can't be well respected in Sounis anymore.

We also have some evidence from Gen about the ignorance of the common people in Sounis, though that's more of a lack of access issue.

[drashizu.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. It might be a common characteristic of all these countries that they aren't exactly scholarly havens. The commoners wouldn't be extremely well educated anyway, if this is analogous to Europe of the same time period, but even the nobles don't seem to be particularly interested in learning. This seems to be a society on the brink of the Renaissance, during which time in our world scholarly pursuits became a lot more respected and widespread. It strikes me that the three countries are all behind other places in their world in that regard---Sophos mentions Ferria as having a university, much like the universities of Italy, and wanting to build one in Sounis. That would imply Sounis doesn't already have one.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Neither does Eddis, which we know because Gen wanted to travel across the ocean "to the peninsula" for an education. And given that Dite took the opportunity of exile to attend university, I doubt Attolia has one either. I'm guessing all three are isolated backwaters, with Eddis being slightly moreso. The Medes see Irene as a barbarian queen, and Nahuseresh refers to Attolia as a backwater. Plus, it's implied that all three countries are relatively poor, and that most of the population is agriculturally employed. Not bastions of learning, no.

[elle-winters.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with this ^

It was fun to read all the comments up to this point. But this comment definitely sums it up quite well =]

I wonder how the belief in the gods and legends would play into this

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

And as for brutish, there are bullies everywhere. With a group of young men, as the cousins were, who formed an in group that Gen was not part of, they did what happens constantly in the most civilized erudite places of the world.

And all animal epithets are meant to imply that the group upon whom they have been bestowed are less than human. It's not about saying that Eddisans are lightfooted. It's about saying they're more like goats than they are like proper humans.

[kaijuu-chan.livejournal.com]

That the thing with stereotypes - they always start off with a grain of truth. In some cases, they ARE true; the trick is to not let them cloud your vision of individuals. Gen certainly is not a typical Eddisian (he's not really a typical ANYTHING) so the stereotypes could easily be perfectly valid.

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

It's kind of interesting ... it seems like so far we've just picked up stereotypes about the Eddisians, at least as far as I can remember. Maybe that's because the Sounisians and Attolians are more alike? (when the "invaders" ... before the Medes came, they took over and replaced most of the original people in S and A with their own, but the Eddisians kept their culture, because they were in the mountains and hard to get. That's probably why the Sounisians and Attolians think of them as backwards. They're different. Also, the 3 countries seem to have a history of wars between them (at least up until Mr Annux), which could lead to negative stereotypes.

The illiteracy -- it probably isn't that unusual for most of the country to not be buried in books all the time, in Sounis and Attolia too, since the lower class/farmers/peasants/okloi/whatev don't have much time for school and such. And in Eddis, the nobility seems to be very military minded, so maybe they don't have time either.

[beth-shulman.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment.

I also think that the most cutting insults are the ones based on truth or on memories that someone wants forgotten. So if Gen had hated that he was ignorant in the past, calling him backwards would be a great insult. ("Great" not in a positive way.) And "oafish" is probably what a thief would be frightened of.

[stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's because the Sounisians and Attolians are more alike? (when the "invaders" ... before the Medes came, they took over and replaced most of the original people in S and A with their own, but the Eddisians kept their culture, because they were in the mountains and hard to get. That's probably why the Sounisians and Attolians think of them as backwards.

Okay, this is super-interesting! I've been thinking about it and thinking about it, the idea that the Eddisians are "other" to the Sounisians and Attolians because they kept the old ways when the invaders came - that maybe the stereotypes didn't exist prior to that.

So the Sounisians/Attolians adopted the invaders' perspective of disdain toward the whole peninsula, but just aimed it at the Eddisians. Were the native people among them realizing or not that this amounted to cultural self-hate? This is really interesting. I already said that. But it is.

[(Anonymous)]

>Weren't Gen's reading skills 'rudimentary' before he started living in a library? And don't we get frequent mentions of how hardly anybody (in the government even!) ever goes into that wing?

I always just assumed it was from general disinterest or lack of a reason to go to the library (think about it - nowadays, most schools have libraries but does everyone go there on a regular basis for fun? I mean, I do, but that's just me...)

Since Eddis tends to be military minded, I would guess that maybe their military records and resources are stored somewhere more at hand instead of a far off wing of the palace. Most of the stuff in the library is probably more scholarly, like history, literature, and geography.

These aren't exactly the more readily applicable fields of study in a country like Eddis, which has been shaped heavily by the pragmatism of living in the mountains. Therefore, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't invest too heavily into keep their library (and their scholarly and political records) more up-to-date since they're more concerned with more immediate political-economic-social situations.

[reader-marie.livejournal.com]

I'm way late to this discussion, but in agreement with this comment (and most of the others). I'd also like to add that Eddis is both smaller and less wealthy than the two lowland countries, and that while poverty doesn't have to be a barrier to things like learning, it does tend to limit the opportunities for it. Obviously Gen, as part of the royal family, is fairly privileged in such opportunities, but it might be fair to assume that compared to his peers in Sounis or Attolia he might have had less opportunity and encouragement to pursue a scholarly career.