#oh our king and noble are getting into a fight over the ethics of what we're doing? fuck that. we're having kids

[spireclangen]

Kingdom Spire; Moons 0-2

[narcisocacoplex]

Ascendance of a Bookworm and the Multiversal Marketplace of Ideas

Something that fucking stuns me about contemporary isekai as a genre is the way that it handles cultural transmission from one world to another. There’s a very consistent formula (as with all things in standard-issue isekai), and it all hinges on this fascinating system for deciding what gets to filter in from Earth through the protagonist and what is handily discarded when it would become an obstruction.

Consumer goods and services penetrate through the protagonist into the fantasy setting most easily. The single most consistent thing that isekai heroes reinvent in their otherworlds is cuisine. Almost universally contemporary Earth cooking, whether it’s Japanese, Chinese, or Italian (it is very rarely anything else), outperforms anything the locals produce, if only out of sheer novelty.

This sort of thing often forms the basis for the isekai protagonist’s horizontal monopoly—I’ve lost track of how many of these books I’ve read where an overwhelming portion of the plot is dedicated to the hero managing human and material resources as their multiple intersecting businesses proliferate like a cancer across the setting. It turns out that more than being a world savior, isekai readers fantasize most about being an entrepreneur living for the grind—albeit freed from the trouble of having to come up with your own ideas, as you can just re-hash the achievements of thousands of years of human endeavor instead and take the credit. Call it the McFly approach.

What’s peculiar is that less tangible and/or economically exploitable things don’t penetrate or are actively stripped away in the transition from life on Earth to life in the fantasy world. The most obvious point that comes to mind has to do with basic political and ethical conceits like the right to the most basic forms of self-determination. Isekai protagonists are indescribably quick to roll over for and get cozy with flavors of aristocracy and totalitarian power that the global public has been consistently taught not to trust.

Consider, for example, Ascendance of a Bookworm. I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve seen argue that Bookworm’s one of the standout isekai titles, and I can see why: it’s extremely committed to realizing an in-depth fantasy setting that’s not neatly explained with Dragon Quest allusions; the protagonist has an interesting array of flaws and limitations; in spite of the level of power on which the characters operate, it consistently creates convincing scenes of tension and peril in multiple dimensions; and the story is driven by a legitimate interest in something larger than the narratives the author has already consumed. This much is all great.

But the thing that strikes me about Ascendance of a Bookworm—the thing that keeps me from liking it at all—is that all of this craft and effort is sunk into a narrative about how there is no escape from serfdom. Myne starts at the absolute bottom rung of society, and through a conjunction of hideous self-neglect, total accident, cosmological convergence, and internecine political infighting, arrives at a position of frighteningly far-reaching authority. As Rozemyne, the archduke’s adopted daughter, she makes decisions every damn page about how her vast entourage will spend their lives in service to her agendas. Huge swathes of these books are just characters talking about how they’re going to move around various subordinates and, critically, which subordinates can be put in positions where lives won’t be at risk because of a failure to communicate across inviolable class boundaries.

While Rozemyne frequently shoots herself in the foot because she still takes as a given from time to time that people deserve to be treated like human beings and not disposable chattel, it’s never really up for consideration whether any of the societal structures that create this profound alienation should, perhaps, be changed.

And it’s not like dramatic social change isn’t a subject the story explores! Rozemyne’s whole objective in this story is to establish a thriving printing industry and universal literacy so she can go back to the standard of living she was used to as a Japanese bibliophile. She’s radically altering the cultural and industrial landscape of this other reality; it’s just that she’s not interested in changing the parts where, if you’re an aristocrat, people will act weird if you don’t murder peasants that look at you funny.

It ends up feeling kind of sinister, like the narrative is trying to convince you in slow, small steps that hey, maybe the problem here really is with Rozemyne not being willing to walk all over people as much as she could given the latitude afforded her (it’s worth noting that in many regards it’s the only latitude she’s got; the nobility are just as bound by bizarre, self-destructive social contracts as every other social class—it’s just that they can take it out on the people beneath them), and she’s already buying orphans in bulk from the church to staff her printing operation.

This is not helped by the most persistent fantasy elements of the setting. “Mana” in Bookworm is, on its face, a fantastical gloss made to legitimize the divine right of kings and the great chain of being. People have limited but varying capacity for mana, which is both trainable and heritable; the people bred for high mana capacity rule the country because their expanded mana reserves let them pump blessings into the surrounding environment, improving crop yields. Literally every noble is a miniature Fisher King, and when nobles withdraw their support from whatever fiefdom’s getting shafted, it withers and the people who live there suffer. This may be cruel, Rozemyne opines, but It Must Be Done to remind people how order is kept, however much she may not like it. Human survival in this setting hinges on the nobility’s generosity with their mana, and if there’s another option, it’s not really up for consideration.

I think periodically about how, as dense and thoroughly realized as this setting is, there’s really only one “nation” that I’ve seen so far in this series. There are rival fiefdoms, internal struggles, and cultural variations from region to region, but nobody’s really “foreign.” Everyone speaks the same language and follows the same broad set of customs. I wonder, when these thoughts come to me, how someone from a different nation in the same world might think of the culture represented in Ascendance of a Bookworm, and the thing I keep circling back to is “oh, those are the people who can’t do without owning other people.”

Part of the thematic messaging of this series, however inadvertent it may be, is how quickly a contemporary Japanese person adjusts to these expectations, even if they might make an effort to be as lenient as possible in most cases.

But pasta and hardbound books—those our hero will fight tooth and nail to introduce to this world.

[woodrokiro]

Hollowed (fic) Part Three

Fandom: Bleach

Pairing: IchiRuki

Summary: They call her a miracle, but he looks at her as if she’s normal. It scares her. Fantasy/Futuristic/Zombie kinda?AU. Read Part One and Part Two.

As a kid, Ichigo imagined this place to be heaven on Earth. 

High up on the mountain, heavily secured by both stone walls and the near entirety of the militia, containing the smartest doctors and scientists dedicated to fighting the Hollowed--these are details that can allow more luxuries than one in the Valley could ever imagine.

He believed the walls to be just adorned in gold, gardens and fields bursting with fruits and vegetables to last years, doctors that can aid without having to wait until it’s officially deemed “safe” outside, and its people walking the grounds like they were on Cloud 9.

And… Yes, it’s incredible how privileged these people are to be living within such a structurally secured community. There are, indeed, ancient tapestries on the walls that must be hundreds of years old from the Old World at least, and he is disgusted with how plentiful the food is here compared to what is provided to the Valley.

But there’s… Something heavy in the air here.

The constant fog of the mountain has clearly taken its toll on the castle, as he notices mildew and mold in quite a few corners of stone. It’s crumbling, some trees outside bend to the ground as if too tired to pick themselves up, and it’s so fucking cold like good God, this is the place everyone says will be humanity’s saving grace?

And it’s not just the place itself: everyone walks with order, with a restrained purpose that never deviates within the day. There wasn’t much joy back where he was from either… But Jesus. He smiled at the maid that showed them their rooms the first night and she nearly bolted out of the room. There is a dark look in everyone’s eye, a near-obsessive work ethic as if they’re terrified  that today someone will call them lazy and have them kicked back down the mountain. 

Of course, the level of comfort at which you sit in your job depends on your station. 

 The caste system here nearly dictates that the militia is king, the scientists are nobles, and the “service” (cooks, farmers, housekeepers) are the bugs beneath everyone’s feet.

And Yamamoto is God. 

Blame it on him being from a normal (albeit, more dangerous) village, but he hates this hierarchy bullshit. 

---

“The more I see of this place, the less I like,” he tells his group their first night with crossed arms. “What, just because they have more access to weapons and protection they’re better than us? What makes that old guy in charge? Why did that Hinamori chick just near run out of the room? And what was the deal with that...” he motions wildly with his hands, trying to express… He doesn’t know. “You know. The girl in the really fancy dress, what’s her deal?!”

He sees Karin rolling her eyes, and Uryu sighs. “Kurosaki, we don’t have a choice. Obviously we’re allowed here on some favor from your father, but these aren’t people we want to rock the boat with. It’s a thin line between being a reluctantly welcomed guest and a happily thrown out one.”

“While it’s clear that Ichi-nii is having issues expressing himself here, I agree with my brother,” Karin cuts in. “On the other side of that coin: why did they allow us in? There have been people with more vying for a position here for years. Protection like this is worth all the gold and silver and food in the world. What was with our dad’s sword that made it so easy? Something’s fishy here, and I don’t like it.”

“Maybe Lord Yamamoto remembers your father as a friend, Ichigo? Or he just suddenly realized that there were some jobs open? There were these extra rooms already here, after all…” Inoue’s voice is hopeful, and Yuzu next to her nods enthusiastically in agreement. 

But Karin won’t budge. “Nah, these guys are military, the same ones that were supposed to protect us all these years and failed so miserably they escaped up here. There’s no way there are noble intentions here.”

“The point is, we can’t be too careful here… Or at least reckless.” Uryu shoots a pointed look at him, and Ichigo has a not-so-rare urge to throw him out the window. “We have to lay low for a bit and keep our guard up. Kurosaki, it’s clear Yamamoto’s got some sort of an interest in you. He arranged some meetings with you in the coming days, yes?”

Ichigo shifts. “Well, yeah, but that could be just because he’s setting up a position for me--”

“All the rest of us are to report in the common hall for our positions tomorrow. You’re the only one actually meeting with him.” Uryu raises an eyebrow. “See what kind of information he gives you. Take note on what he needs from you. But remember: you have to follow his rules on his time. That’s the only way we’re going to know a little better on how this place works.”

The group sits in silent contemplation until Yuzu sniffles. “And then what?” Her voice is shaky, and her watery eyes break Ichigo’s heart. “After we figure out the system… Then where do we go? What do we do?”

Ichigo is about to say something falsely cheerful to comfort his sister before Chad in his corner clears his throat. 

“We survive,” he finally says, and that has to be good enough for all of them.

---

And three days in, Ichigo still has no clue what Yamamoto’s got in store for him.

Although the messages he has received each morning since their arrival says that he’ll be meeting with the old man, he finds out it’s more like he’s meeting with generals and captains who represent Yamamoto, or something.

Powerful people are fucking weird.

In any case, he’s certainly not been twiddling his thumbs. A General Ukitake gave him a tour of the grounds, focusing more on the military section--and Ichigo guesses Yamamoto wanted to see if he was true to his word on using a sword, because then he was forced to spar with a few of the soldiers.

Mostly easy fights, if you ask him--although one bald guy and an angry redhead kind of gave him a rough time--but Ichigo just barely avoided a battle with a Captain Kenpachi, who grinned maniacally and demanded a battle “as soon as the old geezer puts you back here.”.

(Ichigo’s pretty sure at this point he’s going to be put in a military position, and it fits. But he would really really like to not be in that captain’s squad.)

There’s been a couple of actual meetings with the old man, but nothing of substance: each lasts an uncomfortably long ten minutes, with Yamamoto staring at him for long periods of time before peppering in casual questions about his village, his group, and his father.

It’s bizarre, but Ichigo decides to follow Uryu’s advice for once and go along with the whole thing. He bristles at Yamamoto’s question concerning his mother… But otherwise, he answers them as honestly as he can. 

He’s not given the worst job, he supposes. 

Actually, nearly none of them are. Uryu--while resenting the military system as much as he did--snagged a spot at the wall with his bow, and he mentioned they might give him a position within science, what with his family’s medical background. Chad scored a position in weaponry, and while he doesn’t have any previous experience (that Ichigo knows of), Ichigo’s confident he’ll do great. 

The girls are in the service, and Ichigo feels… Conflicted about that. 

He gets the icky feeling that it’s weirdly sexist (even though Yuzu really is talented in the kitchen… BUT HER GENDER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT), and can’t help but feel it as demeaning to his sisters and friend. The service is treated bottom rung here, after all, and if someone even remotely tries to mess with one of them…

Not to mention Karin is absolutely miserable. 

But he knows she grits her teeth, does her job alongside Yuzu and Inoue and everyone else for the sake of being remotely safe for once in their goddamned lives. If she can suck it up, so can he.

The longer Yamamoto has him wait for his job, the more nervous it makes him. That’s all. 

---

On the fourth morning after the others have headed to work, he receives a message to go directly to Yamamoto’s quarters. 

He’s escorted by a few soldiers--which is weird, considering the ease of which he’s been going place to place the last few days--and the old man is sitting patiently at his desk, hands clasped together. 

It’s like he’s going to get punished.

And he has no idea what Yamamoto has on him (probably something his old man did, screwing him over even after probable-death, the fucker), but Ichigo prays to whatever god might still be out there and care about humanity that the world can do whatever it wants to him, just leave his friends and sisters be--

“I’ve assigned a guard job for you, Ichigo Kurosaki.”

He stares blankly at the old man. 

“That’s… It? After all this time?”

Yamamoto smiles in a way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yes, well, we do apologize for the delay. There were some… Precautions that we had to take before getting you to this position. We wanted to make sure you were a right fit.”

“Oh… Okay. So am I at the gate with Uryu, or--”

“No, no. None of that.” A gnarled hand waves the thought away. “This is a private guard position. Very important. Tell me, do you remember seeing our Lady Rukia the day you arrived?”

Ichigo tries to think of the female faces he caught in the crowd, and then remembers the woman in the ornate garb. “The one dressed in all the… Dressed really nicely?”

“Yes, that very one. She is dressed to reflect how precious she is to us. We call her our ‘Prized One.’ Tell me, have you ever played chess? You might call her the queen of our board.”

“... I’m not sure I follow--”

“You don’t need to.” The response is sharp, so swift that Ichigo almost startles. Yamamoto glares hard behind his hands at him, before suddenly relaxing. “Just know that your job is to guard her. You will be going with her where she goes, watching the entrance to her rooms. We have enemies that would very much like to take her, and that… Would be devastating to our cause.”

Ichigo’s having a hard time biting his tongue on all the questions bubbling up. What the fuck is up with this girl? 

Instead, he asks: “So, in terms of guarding her at night… I suppose what I’m trying to say here is, will I be her only guard? I hate to tell you I can’t be awake twenty four hours, sir.”

The old man chuckles dryly. “Of course not, my boy. Nothing of that sort is expected. We have a rotating staff at night while she sleeps; but you will be her primary guardian. In return, your group will be made of good use here.”

Ah. There it is. 

“So you’re blackmailing me, eh? I knew it was only too convenient that you took on my friends and sisters so easily.”

“Not at all. They have all been mastering their duties beautifully. This is just… Insurance, you might say. If you do your job, they will keep theirs. You would be wise to take it; others have not had such an offer.”

“So why me? What’s so important about this job, and why does it have to be me that does it?”

“You’ll learn, as I’m sure your friends have told you, that it’s better not to question this institution. Just trust that this is a job I consider you capable of, and leave the decision making to us. Now,” Yamamoto slides a sheet of paper from the corner of his desk to himself and begins to write on it. “Go to the Northwest Hall, fourth floor. If you get lost, there will be service persons that can lead you the right direction. They’ve been made aware of your new position.”

The old man doesn’t even acknowledge Ichigo’s leaving as he writes further.

[afriendlyirin]

Yo-Kai Watch 1 review

Reposting this because I ran afoul of the link bug. @staff​ Fix your website.

Tumblr is a hellsite and I do not respond to comments here. Go to the blog post at Dragon Quill dot net if you want to comment.

I recently tried out the first Yo-Kai Watch game, out of curiosity for what the rest of the mons scene is doing.

My most important takeaway is that anyone who says Yo-Kai Watch is trying to copy or replace Pokemon has clearly not only never played the game but never played any other mons game either and probably thinks Pokemon has a copyright on the genre. The two franchises share a target audience, but otherwise they could not be more different. Yokai talk and are presented as distinct characters, yokai cannot be commanded, and most shockingly of all, the protagonist isn't silent!

As for the game itself, it is a godawful grindy mess that can barely be called a game. But it has some interesting ideas, and I enjoyed the creature designs.

There is basically no gameplay in this game. Yokai fight automatically according to a basic AI with no input from you, so you can quite literally win battles by doing nothing. (There is even a speed-up button to facilitate this.) The only actions you can take are to use items, cure their status ailments through an action-command minigame, activate their supermoves, and swap out your active and reserve yokai. However, the game is so easy that you'll rarely have to do any of that outside of boss fights. Supermoves can basically clear a regular encounter in one use, but regular attacks will usually hand you victory pretty quick too.

The befriending mechanics are even worse. I did not think they could make Pokemon's mechanics worse, but wow, after playing this I am amazed at how much I took for granted.

So, because yokai get to be treated like people, you don't recruit them by shoving them in capsules until they're too tired to break out. Instead, they have a random chance of approaching you after a battle and saying they like the cut of your jib, so they'll agree to be summoned by you any time you need them. This is very cute and raises far fewer questions than Pokemon's version. It is also absolutely terrible as a gameplay mechanic. You can do exactly three things to improve your chances: Throw food at them during the battle, use a yokai with a special ability that makes befriending more likely, and, very rarely, if the battle drags out long enough, you might get a befriending bonus as one of many possible random drops from an event that occurs in the middle of battle. You can only feed a yokai once per battle, you will only know if you've befriended them after the battle is over, and you can only befriend one yokai per battle (out of a possible three). There is absolutely nothing you can do to actively pursue befriending; there is no action you can take in battle that makes it easier like Pokemon's status effects, you cannot keep burning items to increase your chances, you can't even drag the battle out because yokai will attack automatically. To make this even worse, you can't even easily farm encounters like you can in Pokemon, as yokai only appear in specific spots and only one can appear there at a time (if one appears at all!). If you fail to befriend one yokai, you may not encounter it again for some time. (This was the case for me with Happierre, who the game seems to expect you to get quite early, but I never could because he only appears in one very tiny location and if you whiff it, good luck finding him again. Ugh.)

The yokaidex also has really baffling organization. Instead of being numbered by order of encounter like in Pokemon, each type of yokai has its own separate section of the list, and they're ordered seemingly arbitrarily. Your starting yokai is smack dab in the middle of the list, and I don't believe it's possible to encounter entry #1 until the second area. Yokai are also grouped by "family" like in Pokemon, except that the evolution mechanics here are extremely bizarre and inconsistent; usually you have to fuse two specific yokai (or sometimes, a yokai and an extremely rare item you may never even know exists cuz random drops lol), except very rarely you can just level them, not that the game tells you which is which. The game in fact encourages you to constantly replace your team because yokai all have tiered power levels like in Shin Megami Tensei, so you have no reason to keep an outdated yokai in your party long enough for them to evolve through level in the first place. It's just an absolute mess. What was the logic behind this, seriously?

To add insult to injury, they apparently looked at event pokemon and said, "You know what our mons game needs? More of those." There are an absurd number of yokai who can only be obtained through extremely rare in-game events and gacha machine results, and an even larger number who can only be encountered in the postgame. Seriously, I finished the game without even seeing more than half the total yokai. Why??? I genuinely could not believe the final boss was really the end of the game, just because I had barely scratched the surface of the dex.

So yeah. As an RPG, this was a huge disappointment, and as a collection game, it was a constant exercise in frustration and futility. I know Pokemon has lots of room for improvement, but wow, it's like they surgically removed everything it managed to do right.

As for the plot, it's more involved than most Pokemon games, but only just. Every quest is: Something happens that is obviously yokai mischief. "I know this is crazy, but hear me out: Could this incredibly weird and abnormal thing happening in a game called Yo-Kai Watch be happening... because of yokai???" says Exposition Fairy. You walk five steps/talk to someone who is very obviously possessed. "Aha, my Yokai Senses are tingling! A yokai is doing a bad thing!" says Exposition Fairy. "Oh, no, that's bad, we need to stop them!" says Generic Video Game Protagonist. And then you beat the yokai until they stop doing bad things. Repeat times 100.

Seriously, every single freaking time the protagonists are COMPLETELY SHOCKED that a yokai is once again the reason this NPC is literally covered in evil purple smoke because what is subtlety. Why do fantasy stories do this. Why. Stop wasting my time.

And yes, there is an uncomfortable undercurrent of "the spooky goblin man made me do it". Literally the tutorial quest is the protagonist's parents having a fight, and you solve it by beating up the "makes couples fight" yokai that's taken up residence in your living room. It's... okay for a simple kids' story, I guess, and maybe it comes across differently in a Japanese context, but yikes.

Then all of a sudden at the very end you learn that the Yokai Evil Chancellor, who evilly took over after the Good and Noble Yokai King died, is responsible for all the yokai acting up, so you go into the yokai world and beat him up to the tune of a Power of Friendship Speech™ and I could not care less because I was introduced to the guy five minutes ago. So we can't even expect RPGs to have moderately better writing than action games anymore.

They also make the very confusing decision to have a voiced protagonist, despite not giving the protagonist any personality or backstory or agency or anything that would justify giving him a voice in the first place. He is a completely ordinary kid with a completely generic protagonist personality. He either says exactly what I was thinking, in which case I'm just annoyed I have to read through redundant dialogue, or he says something very slightly different, in which case I'm jarred out of the experience because SCREW YOU GAME YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME. They don't even have a practical reason for it, because they have an exposition fairy! I thought the entire point of exposition fairies is to provide information a silent protagonist can't, but instead it just means every cutscene takes twice as long because I have to sit through my avatar metalgearing everything the exposition fairy says.

I wonder if they originally were intending to go with a silent protagonist, but changed it at some point for... some reason?

The silver lining here is the yokai themselves. It is... really the only redeeming feature. The yokai all have absolutely delightful designs, and because they don't have to be ostensibly bound by real ecology, they can go completely wild without it feeling out of place. Thanks to the fact they talk and are treated like real characters, I'm not at all bothered by how many of them are human-like, and nor do we have to ask the question of where they're getting their tools and accessories. But the animal yokai are wonderful as well, and despite how varied the designs are they all felt like they had a clear, consistent aesthetic. I really enjoyed discovering new yokai and analyzing all the little details in them.

And yes, I thought the punny names were hilarious. Because the overall tone is less serious than Pokemon, they can have so much more fun with them without it feeling like breaking character. I particularly got a chuckle out of "Heeheel" and "Fishpicable" -- the fish yokai in general were on-point.

Additionally, though the actual plots of the quests are deep as puddles, I did enjoy how many of them used yokai in such varied ways. In addition to stopping yokai who are influencing people to behave badly, there are also quests where you need to bring in a yokai to influence someone positively, such as giving someone the motivation to do something they're apprehensive about or discouraging someone from an unhealthy obsession. Several quests even involve using a yokai you had to stop in another quest. There's even one where you use a yokai to influence someone, only for them to take it too far, requiring you to stop the yokai you summoned in order to put things back to normal. It certainly raises some interesting ethical questions that the game could have acknowledged a bit more than just in that one quest, but overall I thought it was a clever use of the concept and did an excellent job of reinforcing that yokai aren't just a purely negative force, but a part of nature we can coexist with.

So many of the mechanics I complained about really do make sense from a lore perspective -- the game completely avoids the ethical quandaries raised by Pokemon, and I never at any point felt like I was exploiting my yokai partners or doing anything selfish, even despite the same "gotta catch 'em all" element. Yokai explicitly consent to joining your team; you recruit them by paying attention to what foods they like and showing you are willing to make a real sacrifice to provide for them; and there's none of that stasis capsule nonsense either, yokai friends basically give you the equivalent of a calling card and are only summoned when you need them. (You can actually talk to several recruitable yokai who have fixed hangout spots in the city, which I liked.) Similarly, it makes sense that you shouldn't be able to control their every action. These things just happen to be really unfun game mechanics. But it does make me think that Pokemon could stand to take some lessons from this franchise... just not the ones they actually did. Stop trying to steal their aesthetic, Pokemon, your distinct brand is what makes you strong.

[goldeagleprice]

Queen unites Scandinavia – sort of

Coins in 14th and early 15th century Sweden were issued only occasionally and in small numbers, the bulk of the commerce in the Baltic region being conducted with German and English money. This is a silver ortug, we’d call it a penny, I guess, struck in Stockholm for Eric of Pomerania. (Photos courtesy Haljak Coin Auction, Tallinn, Estonia. www.ghcoin.eu)

By Bob Reis

We were talking about Albert of Mecklenburg, a German interloper who was recruited by a faction in Sweden to be a puppet king, ruled perhaps somewhat injudiciously, his incompetence setting in motion other political activities by the other interested power position, specifically the Danish crown, the Norwegian crown, and the Swedish nobles, or rather, some of them.

I find it helpful to think of those movers and shakers back then as big time gang leaders, constrained more by necessity than by legal or ethical considerations. An extreme oversimplification, I know, but still: they were individual people with the asserted right to do whatever they wanted. They were all the time coveting and resenting and scheming and fighting. Our leadership these days somewhat pretends to consult we who don’t lead and to do what they do for our benefit. Back then no, it was personal glory. The peasants are going to live and die for that.

There you are tilling your field by hand. Here comes the king’s guard, “Come with us,” you don’t say, “My wife’s having a baby as we speak,” or “I broke my thumb yesterday.” You just go. They march you alon and give you a pole or something. There you are, somewhere, trying to kill someone just like you who’s trying to kill you back.

We had been discussing late 14th century Swedish history. Up to now the situation, summarized to a fare-thee-well, was this: three kingdoms, all the monarchs related by blood or marriage, Sweden the backward child of the bunch, Denmark closest thing to the wise elder. Finland was populated by wild tribes according to the general opinion back then. There was a commercial confederation of German merchant towns, the Hanseatic League, that was acting something like later colonial enterprises did: traveling abroad, making trade deals with locals, establishing settlements, eventually accruing mercenaries to enforce their contracts. There got to be a lot of Hansas in Stockholm, and on Gotland island. Their opinions got to be important.

Let me write about Margaret of Denmark, the person who set the stage for the drama of 15th century Scandinavia. She was the last child of the Danish king, betrothed at age 6 to one Haakon, 18-year- old son of the king of both Sweden and Norway, Magnus IV (of Norway) and VII (of Sweden). You see what they’re trying to do there, right?

Various military and diplomatic adventures proceeded while Margaret was growing up. There was civil war in Sweden involving the king and another of his sons. Denmark got involved in favor of the father, but the kid died, and it wasn’t as if Valdemar of Denmark and Magnus of Sweden were friends or anything, so the marriage contract between daughter of Denmark and son of Norway and Sweden was put in a cabinet, the Danish troops sent to help the Swedish king repurposed to poach Swedish territory, such as Scania, separated from Denmark by about 20 miles of water, and Gotland island, the commercial key to the Baltic sea.

Swedish Magnus, being on the outs with Denmark, must naturally now be allied with the Hansa, and a German duke’s boy was found for Margaret, but, they say, the boat she was taking to Germany was driven by bad weather to an island where an archbishop heard about it and declared the German contract illegal, far as he was concerned the original contract with Haakon, son of Magnus, was still in force. Hmm. Anyway, Margaret and Haakon were married the next year, 1363. She was 10 years old. The next year her husband’s father was deposed and driven out of Sweden by Albert of Mecklenburg.

Her father died in 1375, Margaret was 22. She immediately moved to get her baby Olaf elected king of Denmark, herself as regent. The other major contender was a Mecklenburg. Olaf was automatically heir to Norway, and she managed to get him proclaimed rightful heir to Sweden, in formal possession of that interloper, Albert of Mecklenburg.

Margaret’s husband, Haakon, king of Norway, died in 1380, succeeded by her son, Olaf, then 10 years old, Margaret regent. She was well liked by the ruled. Every chance that came up people wanted her to run things for them. But Olaf died in 1387 before his majority. The Norwegians asked her to be regent.

Then she was invited by a Swedish faction to help get rid of Albert of Mecklenburg, which she did, and gave her what she wanted, which was to select the next king of Sweden. Thus did Margaret sweep the table in Scandinavia.

She ruled as regent until 1396/7, in which period she arranged for a nephew, Eric of Pomerania, to be crowned king of all three Scandinavian kingdoms. She engineered a treaty, known to history as the Kalmar Union from the city in which it was announced, that pointed toward a permanent alliance between Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It didn’t last, as we know, but it endured for about a century, and it set a standard for, let us say, perhaps, etiquette in the conduct of political affairs in Scandinavia, a level of comity to be striven for even if impossible to attain.

No coins for this giant of Scandinavian history. Margaret had to find males, or in her case a single male, of proper lineage to sit on the thrones. Eric of Pomerania was born with the name Boguslaw, which is of course Slavic, his Nordic name was in the way of a propaganda exercise to improve his profile. After some years of negotiation he was married to a daughter of the king of England.

What was Eric like? They say he was handsome and outgoing. They also say he was not a great negotiator, and his war making typically did not accomplish his purposes. Disputes in Pomerania and other lands south of Denmark, that is, Germany, did not go well.

His most lasting project was the institution of an enforceable toll system on the only entrances to the Baltic Sea, the revenues going to the crown, that continued until the 19th century, reducing the power of Danish nobles and crimping the potential of Sweden and Norway, as well as burdening the German Hansa League, leading to war with the Hansa and rebellion, first in Sweden, then in Norway. Long story short, he was deposed by the noble councils in all three of his countries. He “retired” to Gotland island, where he made a living as a toll collector (or pirate., depending on your point of view) for 10 years, then went back to Pomerania to sulk, where he died in 1459.

Eric did issue coins, apparently in all of his domains, that is: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Pomerania. There may be other issues from lands he held ephemerally during his wars. In my web search I found a Hungarian coin that referenced him in its description, though I did not dig deeper on it. In Sweden there were ortugs, the local version of the penny, struck in Stockholm. I saw two types: one an English style facing portrait, the other a three crown shield displaying the union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Reverse type was an “E” on a long cross. Prices I saw are in the $100-$300 range. They seem to be scarce.

Eric’s replacement, in all three countries, was a nephew, Christopher, of the Neumarkt counts palatine, which is to say, nothing special in the royal candidate field, except he was a relative, known to history as Christopher of Bavaria. He was meant to be a puppet, but he managed to do some things in his few years as monarch of all of Scandinavia, such as establish Copenhagen as capital of Denmark, and defeating a peasant rebellion there, after which he established serfdom. In Sweden there was famine. He died, I read, “suddenly,” in 1348, his widow marrying his successor in Denmark.

There is, for me, a kind of absentminded, get to it later feeling to 14th century Scandinavian coinage. At that time they were making $5 weight gold coins in France and England and the Low Countries, and big silver groats, and lots of pennies. In Germany there was coinage all over the place. In all three Scandinavian countries it was more like, here’s a coin, another one there, a lot of nothing, then another isolated coin issue of low output and limited circulation. It was like they’d put out a coin to prove they could, meanwhile the commerce was being done by Hanseatic Germans with Hanseatic German coins.

I went looking for coins of Christopher of Bavaria, but I didn’t find any.

This whole 14th century Scandinavian scene has for me a backwater feel to it. Like, oh, Somalia might be to Egypt, or Honduras to the USA. The money and power are here, not really caring about the periphery, “there,” even though peripheral events occasionally affect things in the center, from time to time drastically. Center thinks, can’t do much about “there” anyway, this is generally proved over and over again in history. They gonna do what they gonna do anyway.

I think its fair to say that the monarchs and their governments in 14-15th century Scandinavia, with the outstanding exception of Danish queen Margaret, were undistinguished at best, variously incompetent mostly.

Christopher of Bavaria was succeeded by one Karl Knuttsson, who had a connection with the various branches of the Swedish royals so ephemeral that its not, in my opinion, worth describing. You had to have some kind of personal relationship with some former monarch to be allowed to try for a crown. Lars Petersson of the next farm over was not eligible. The only way he could have been would have been for an ancestor to have been knighted by a previous king, then further honored with a hereditary title, then the family would have had to marry into some piece of the royal family. Otherwise forget it.

That’s why people were going around then with fake genealogies from some far away land, maybe they could marry well and off to the races.

Remember how the prince of Monaco became a prince? He signed a letter to the king as “prince,” the royal letter reader let it pass, poof! He’s a prince.

Karl, let’s call him Charles, because in English that is typically how the so-named kings of Sweden are styled, has two numbers by which he is referred: VIII and II. This is because Charles IX of the early 17th century adopted his number based on a fictitious history of Sweden that included a number of monarchs of various names not found in any real records. Bunch of Charleses, Erics, Olafs. So if Charles IX added some numbers to his name because of a fairy tale and MADE IT OFFICIAL, well, that’s the way it is, and other innocent monarchs are going to get their numbers changed too. We don’t know if the Charles who was king of Sweden after Christian of Bavaria thought of himself as Charles II or just as Charles, but to us, today, he is Charles VIII.

We’ll discuss him and his paltry coinage next time.

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  More Collecting Resources

• The Standard Catalog of World Coins, 1601-1700 is your guide to images, prices and information on coins from so long ago.

• More than 600 issuing locations are represented in the Standard Catalog of World Coins, 1701-1800 .

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