#Dwj

[ksfoxwald]

If you didn't notice this map is just Europe upside down I beg you to take another look.

Fantasyland, from Diana Wynne Jones' excellent Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

[inafieldofstarflowers]

Listen, I love Howl’s Moving Castle (the movie) and it is a stunning commentary on love and war and friendship BUT it can never top the sheer joy I get from the chaos of Howl’s Moving Castle (the book) with the Lettie Hatter confusion and the snippy arguments between Sophie and Howl and the moment when you realize that Howl is just frOM WALES, the country on EARTH ?? Who is avoiding his school work by being a wizard in another world ?? Iconic, relatable, no notes.

[bubblesandpages]

Can't believe we're getting non-weird fantasy-core covers

[chavahlahdraws]

redid it again for portfolio

[daffodil--lament]

id forgotten that chrestomanci and the castle spend the first half of the book playing 5D "figure out this mini enchanter's intentions and keep him from lashing out with violent magic" chess meanwhile Cat is walking around like "i wonder why it's quiet in this place. i hope gwendolen doesnt get mad at me today. i hope i dont have to drink cocoa at breakfast tomorrow. it's too bad i cant do any magic." unaware king

[vronoch]

chapter six, in which howl expresses his feelings with green slime [1/3]

[pawnmower]

Howl be doing the craziest things trying to impress her

[lookbellaitsaworm]

I love Howls Moving Castle so much because DWJ wrote about being an under appreciated, minorly agoraphobic eldest daughter becoming more independent, and about how our loved ones often see the most secretive parts of ourselves even when we think it’s too monumental to ever reveal to them, all in a story about a body-part-jigsaw-puzzle

[no-where-new-hero]

Pls tell me your reasons in the tags!

[randomshenaniganery]

My Latest Attempt with Howl Pendragon

[somnambulent-directives]

I can't stop thinking about post-hmc flower shop Howl and Sophie

Starting off their mornings picking flowers together and arguing about which ones would look nicest together

Howl still flirts with customers (he tones it down a bit) to get them to buy more, so Sophie decides to make it even and flirt with the male customers to see who is more effective. She outsells Howl within a week.

Howl installs a secondary hearth at the back of the shop so Calcifer can hang out with them when he's in the castle

Michael gets a discount on bouquets since he's basically family, but he abuses that privilege so often to get flowers for Martha that Howl and Sophie force him to start getting his own flowers from the Waste

At first, Howl stopped offering his services in towns since he's both the royal wizard and works the flower shop with Sophie, but he low-key misses it and runs a side gig out of the shop when Sophie's not there

When Howl is out and customers aren't there, Sophie finds herself talking to bouquets when she's bored like she used to talk to hats. One time she tries to use it to her advantage by telling an arrangement, "you are going to start cleaning up after yourself in the bathroom." She intends to give it to Howl at the end of the day but she accidentally mixes it up with another one she had predicted was going to "finally take a hard-earned rest." She can't get Howl off the couch for the next three days.

People figure out Sophie's flower spells and start requesting arrangements that will bring them fame and wealth. Sophie spends the next two weeks sternly telling every single flower in the shop "you are going to be ashamed of yourself and learn to mind your own business." Howl wonders why they've lost half of their regular customers.

Howl convinces Sophie to come to Wales with him again so he can properly introduce her to Neil and Mari. When Megan hears her children calling her "Auntie Sophie," she is furious that Howl didn't invite her to the wedding. Howl and Sophie quickly realize they forgot to have a wedding.

Howl sometimes sneaks away from the shop when he finds some particularly lovely arrangements leftover at the end of the day and lays them on Mrs. Pentstemmon's grave. He never tells this to anyone, but Sophie figures it out. On those days when he disappears for an hour or so and comes back looking sadder, she makes sure to tell his bathroom spells and potions to be extra soothing for the evening.

Howl picks up a book from Wales on flower language and creates elaborate arrangements to send messages to Sophie. At first, she doesn't catch on and only grumbles about him wasting their stock. She finally realizes what he's getting at, but Ingary's flower meanings are very different from the ones Howl intended. He is left frantically trying to explain why he's accidentally been giving Sophie floral messages offering sympathy for the death of her husband.

[liviatrivia]

a wild sophie appeared!

added a freckles version lol

more sophie doodles under the cut

[etirabys]

did you guys know about courtly love??? because I didn't

My introduction to courtly love was reading a Diana Wynne Jones novella that made no sense unless you know what courtly love is. After crawling confusedly through ancient Livejournal reviews to piece together what the story had been about, I took away that it was a weird medieval knight thing where you talk a lot of guff to a (married) woman without ever expecting it to turn into more than what it is.

The first chapter of CS Lewis's The Allegory of Love explains the concept much more thoroughly. His account is pleasantly bonkers. I now relay it to you. (Note: not only am I skeptical of parts of his account, I read it while sleep deprived, so salt liberally.)

First, a sketch of the relationship:

The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life.

This seems to have been both literary trope and a real-life interaction pattern (of which the former came first). A specific example in Arthuriana:

It is only later that [Lancelot] learns the cause of all this cruelty. The Queen has heard of his momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril[, a humiliating cart he rode into the city where she was held captive, to rescue her], and this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her sufficient to annihilate all the merit of his subsequent labours and humiliations. Even when he is forgiven, his trials are not yet at an end. The tournament at the close of the poem gives Guinevere another opportunity of exercising her power. When he has already entered the lists, in disguise, and all, as usual, is going down before him, she sends him a message ordering him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himself be unhorsed by the next knight that comes against him, and then takes to his heels, feigning terror of every combatant that passes near him. The herald mocks him for a coward and the whole field takes up the laugh against him: the Queen looks on delighted. Next morning the same command is repeated, and he answers, ‘My thanks to her, if she will so’. This time, however, the restriction is withdrawn before the fighting actually begins.

So, huh. How did this cultural script come to be?

Courtly love as a literary trope began in 11th century Provence. Here's Lewis's sketch of that time and place:

We must picture a castle which is a little island of comparative leisure and luxury, and therefore at least of possible refinement, in a barbarous country-side. There are many men in it, and very few women—the lady, and her damsels. Around these throng the whole male meiny [i.e. attendants], the inferior nobles, the landless knights, the squires, and the pages—haughty creatures enough in relation to the peasantry beyond the walls, but feudally inferior to the lady as to her lord—her ‘men’ as feudal language had it. Whatever ‘courtesy’ is in the place flows from her: all female charm from her and her damsels. There is no question of marriage for most of the court. All these circumstances together come very near to being a ‘cause’; but they do not explain why very similar conditions elsewhere had to wait for Provençal example before they produced like results. Some part of the mystery remains inviolate.

So that's the material background – a lopsided gender balance. But more fascinating is the cultural background where the passion and devotion of romantic love – a passion/devotion Lewis claims simply did not exist as a mode for men to treat women in Europe before courtly love was invented – could not be channeled into marriage because such a stance is incompatible with the social role of a husband:

The same woman who was the lady and ‘the dearest dread’ of her vassals was often little better than a piece of property to her husband. He was master in his own house. So far from being a natural channel for the new kind of love, marriage was rather the drab background against which that love stood out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.

In fact, courtly love's rightful predecessor is not heterosexual love but the love of a vassal for his lord. (I am quite skeptical of this as a claim about reality, but less skeptical of it as a claim about literature.) Reiterating a sentence from the first quote in this post:

The whole attitude [of a knight in courtly love with his lady] has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’.

CS Lewis on that feudal relationship:

We shall never understand [the affection between vassal and lord], if we think of it in the light of our own moderated and impersonal loyalties. We must not think of officers drinking the king’s health: we must think rather of a small boy’s feeling for some hero in the sixth form. There is no harm in the analogy, for the good vassal is to the good citizen very much as a boy is to a man. ... He loves and reverences only what he can touch and see; but he loves it with an intensity which our tradition is loath to allow except to sexual love.

So it's that relationship that courtly love remixes into heterosexual romance. Courtly love ennobles the lover – there's a religious parallel here for sure. And it is necessarily adulterous because marriage is not a matter of personal passion, because distance is conducive to recreational idealization, because the lack of potential sexual consummation is pleasantly purity-coded in a Christian society, and because a wife, being a knight's inferior, cannot ennoble him. So, finally, Lewis says bluntly:

The love which is to be the source of all that is beautiful in life and manners must be the reward freely given by the lady, and only our superiors can reward. But a wife is not a superior.

Coming back briefly to Diana Wynne Jones's The True State of Affairs: I understand much better now the behavior of the protagonist's love interest. He's a bored would-be king in captivity who decides to make the other visible prisoner his midons. He expects her to understand the convention he's following. Why shouldn't he take her on as a concept like this? She, also bored and deprived, benefits from his gifts and minor heroics. He wants an ennobling influence. And besides, isn't idealizing a beautiful woman you never intend to make a move on fun?

[chavahlahdraws]

warmth 💫

[daffodil--lament]

charmed life's ending is so funny to me because, without even going into the fact that it's confirmed the scary intimidating enchanter cat's been terrified of the whole book is straight up a government official and the attack on the garden was basically a january 6 esque coup run by magic libertarians who are mad that they arent allowed to colonize and exploit other worlds -

without even going into THAT, janet is like "hey ive just decided that i want the girl replacing me to have a better life, which means I'm never ever going to see my parents or home ever again"

and cat is like "ive just discovered that im possibly the most powerful enchanter on this or any other world despite being like nine years old, and also that the only person i had to care for me in the world kept me in the dark about my magic, stole it from me, killed me at least four times for her own petty gains, and was actively aiding in my being ritualistically sacrificed before she abandoned me"

and the family is like "damn that sucks. anybody else craving chicken? it's past our lunchtime"