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Towards the end of each year, as fireplaces are lit and hot cocoa is made, Americans have made it a tradition to revisit their favorite classic holiday books, movies and songs.
And though ghost stories may seem out of place in present-day American holiday celebrations, they were once a Christmas staple, reaching their peak of popularity in Victorian England.
A Dark, Spooky Time of Year
Like most longstanding cultural customs, the precise origin of telling ghost stories at the end of the year is unknown, largely because it began as an oral tradition without written records.
But, according to Sara Cleto, a folklorist specializing in British literature and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, the season around winter solstice, has been one of transition and change.
“For a very, very, very long time, [the season] has provoked oral stories about spooky things in many different countries and cultures all over the world,” she says.
Furthermore, spooky storytelling gave people something to do during the long, dark evenings before electricity.
“The long midwinter nights meant folks had to stop working early, and they spent their leisure hours huddled close to the fire,” says Tara Moore, an assistant professor of English at Elizabethtown College, author of 'Victorian Christmas in Print' and editor of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories.
“Plus, you didn’t need to be literate to retell the local ghost story.”
Effects of the Industrialization Revolution
It was in Victorian England that telling supernatural tales at the end of the year — specifically, during the Christmas season — went from an oral tradition to a timely trend.
This was in part due to the development of the steam-powered printing press during the Industrial Revolution that made the written word more widely available.
This gave Victorians the opportunity to commercialize and commodify existing oral ghost stories, turning them into a version they could sell.
“Higher literacy rates, cheaper printing costs, and more periodicals meant that editors needed to fill pages,” Moore says.
“Around Christmas time, they figured they could convert the old storytelling tradition to a printed version.”
People who moved out of their towns and villages and into larger cities still wanted access to the supernatural sagas they heard around the fireplace growing up.
“Fortunately, Victorian authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and Arthur Conan Doyle worked through the fall to cook up these stories and have them ready to print in time for Christmas,” Moore says.
Industrialization not only provided tools to distribute spooky stories, uncertainty during the era also fueled interest in the genre, says Brittany Warman, a folklorist specializing in Gothic literature and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. She adds:
"Interest was driven by the rise of industrialization, the rise of science, and the looming fall of Victorian Britain as a superpower.
All of these things were in people's minds and made the world seem a little bit darker [and] a little bit scarier.”
Stories Find a Wide-Ranging Audience
Telling horror-filled holiday tales continued to be a family affair in England, even when they were read rather than recited.
“We know from illustrations and diaries that whole families read these periodicals together,” Moore says.
The popularity of Victorian Christmas ghost stories also transcended socioeconomic status, according to Moore.
They were available to read everywhere from cheap publications to expensive Christmas annuals that middle-class ladies would show off on their coffee tables.
Their broad audience was reflected in the stories themselves, which sometimes centered around working class characters and other times took place in haunted manor houses.
“These upper class settings were intended to invite readers from all classes into an idealized, upper-crust Christmas, the type todays’ fans of Downton Abbey still enjoy as entertainment,” Moore adds.
Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol has forever linked the British author with the holiday season, but his contributions to Christmas in Victorian England — including the tradition of telling and reading ghost stories — extend far beyond Jacob Marley’s visit to Scrooge.
In fact, Cleto says that Dickens played a “huge part” in popularizing the genre in England.
“He wrote a bunch of different Christmas novellas, several of which involved ghosts, specifically,” she says, “and then he started editing more and more Christmas ghost stories from other people, and working those into the magazines he was already editing. And that just caught like wildfire.”
Dickens also helped shape Christmas literature in general, Moore says, by formalizing expectations about themes like forgiveness and reunion during the holiday season.
American Christmas Traditions: More Syrupy Than Spooky
Although countless trends made their way from England to America during the Victorian era, the telling of ghost stories during the Christmas season was not one that really caught on.
A Christmas Carol was an immediate best-seller in the United States, but at the time of its publication, Dickens was arguably the most famous writer in the world and already wildly popular.
The novella’s success in the U.S. likely had more to do with Dickens’ existing (massive) fan base than it did Americans’ interest in incorporating the supernatural into Christmas.
“American Christmas scenes and stories tended to be syrupy sweet,” Moore explains.
"There were a few American writers of the period trying to put Victorian-style Christmas ghost stories into American culture,” Warman says, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.
Washington Irving made a similar and earlier attempt, slipping the supernatural into Christmas-themed short stories published in 1819 and 1820.
Warman theorizes that America’s reluctance to embrace the Christmas ghost story tradition had to do, at least in part, with the country’s attitudes towards things like magic and superstitions.
“In America, we generally had a bit of a resistance to the supernatural in a way that European countries didn't,” she explains.
“When you come to America, you come with a fresh start. You come with a secular mindset and the idea that you were leaving the past behind. And some of these spooky superstitions were thought of as being part of the past.”
Another reason telling spooky stories never took off as a Christmas tradition in the United States was because it became more firmly established as a Halloween tradition, thanks to Irish and Scottish immigrants.
“That really impacted culture here, because they brought with them a concept similar to Halloween and that became, for America, the time period for ghosts,” Warman explains.
Traces of the Tradition
Other than A Christmas Carol, there is another piece of pop culture that reflects the Victorian Christmas tradition: a single line from a song written and released in 1963 by American musicians.
First recorded by Andy Williams, the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” lists 'scary ghost stories' as one of the highlights of the holiday season.
Although it’s unclear why the writers of the song (Edward Pola and George Wyle) included the tradition, Cleto says that it’s possible that the lyric is a reference to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
“It's only the one text,” she notes, “but it's such a big deal here in the US and the UK, and is pretty much all that Americans know about Christmas ghost stories in isolation.”
#Christmas#Christmas Ghost Stories#Victorian Era#1800s#19th century#Victorian England#oral tradition#written records#Sara Cleto#winter solstice#folklore#British literature#spooky storytelling#Tara Moore#steam-powered printing press#Industrial Revolution#ghost stories#Brittany Warman#Victorian Christmas#Charles Dickens#A Christmas Carol#Jacob Marley#Scrooge#Halloween
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( using written mediums like text/email is also a good safety measure when you have to communicate with abusers outside of work settings - if you don't have that un-editable transcript, it's much easier for them to forget, misremember, or actively lie about what they and you said )
Do Not Let HR do this to you. It is not illegal to talk about wages in the work place. I did and got a 12% raise!
#captioned#we said a thing#sy#exploitation#abuse#written records#written communication#text-based communication#gaslighting#hanging mention
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'The cage is open. You can walk out anytime you want. Why are you still in there?'
#Homelander#The Boys#my art#for the record - I hated the 'You could have broken out of here any time you wanted' line#not because I thought it was poorly written#but because I found it painfully accurate#'If it was so bad why didn't you just leave. If you hated it so much why didn't you just tell me to stop.'#rot in peace Babs. I'm glad you didn't get any Fudgie
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Excerpt from The Song of Roland, translated by Norma Lorre Goodrich (Medieval Myths)
#THIS HAS BEEN A PET PROJECT. I FUCKING LOVE THE SONG OF ROLLAND#song of roland#clay does art#so. okay bear with me#the song of Roland / chanson de rollanz was an epic poem written in the 11th century about the real battle of Roncevaux Pass in#the 8th century.#so 11th c ? we are smack in those middle ages#and its old copies were recorded as illuminated manuscripts#yet! it is technically an epic!! its an epic poem!!!! I don’t believe there were many written between Roland and the Aeneid (19 BCE)#in the west?#so like . WILD COMEBACK!!#this comic (?) is me playing with this idea of both muddling and clarifying the reality (8th c. real battle. he died.)#with the context of the poem (11th c. chivalric code. this was the hamilton of the time I must assume)#the translation from old french (flows better in modern English than it does in modern french apparently?)#and me. making it a scrolling comic. inspiration from real armor of the 8th century#although 11th c manuscripts armor them like they’re contemporary#I did hand lettering! as a manuscript would be!!#but my composition is wildly different than theirs#I could go on ! but I shant. ty for reading#no id#< I do not. know how . I would do this one#long post#kinda
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please god i need to know what U think of the whole “jadebloods are all female!” thing because i got into homestuck in 2019 around the time of friendsim and (retching) Lanque so i always assumed they were explicitly intended to be an all-female caste. however, re-reading the comic this year, i couldnt find a mention of it other than virgo and the Space aspect being really feminine, but i think kanayas journey with motherhood is more kanaya-centric than All-Jadebloods centric??
on one hand, it makes sense given that alternia has very real gendered oppression, so what’s better for that than CATHOLICISM?? on the other hand, i always saw kanaya as being transfem coded, because it connects so well with roxy yknow.. homestuck fans love to insist that certain characters just have to be cis women (kanaya, jade, roxy)
(as an aside; was “long hair was butch on alternia” a one off joke? i like speculation about alternia’s fashion opposing earth, lol)
most all of our basis for explicitly gendered interpretation of Alternia comes from act 6 intermission 3, where Aranea tells us that "jade 8loods were also an almost exclusively female caste". so the door has always been open for there to be "some male jadebloods". but it's a mistake to view this as having anything to do with any kind of "biological sex". the whole idea of biological sex among trolls is a smoke screen. the jadebloods' assigned gender at birth is "jadeblood". this is what makes them a feminised caste.
Caliborn doesn't have a clue what biological sex is. Aranea will tell you that there are boy cherubs and girl cherubs, but for your own sanity you need to cast this idea out of your mind: cherub sex takes place between good and evil cherubs - which is determined by their blood - and anything else is just roleplay. Caliborn's attitude toward sexing is that the ones he likes are boys - that's all the thought that goes into it. and that's the mindset we need to be aware of when we delve into understanding troll gender. there are some trolls who have breast tissue and some who don't, but they aren't "mammaries" in any sense, so there's no reason to believe they're actually sexual characteristics of any kind; maybe this is what Lord English chose to base his gender schema on, but the idea that this means there must be "male trolls" and "female trolls" is completely imagined for the narrative convenience of the human reader.
when we read that there are "male-dominated" highblood castes and therefore by implication female-populated lowblood castes, it's not by some coincidence of biology: the highblood castes are male-dominated BECAUSE they are highblood castes. each caste has a role to play in Caliborn's Alternia, and just as the highblooded roles are those of patriarchal domination, the lower castes must take on roles of feminised submission; and in the case of the jades in particular, this means breeding duties. the fact that this also comes with the expectation to wear makeup and pretty clothes is just more roleplay.
so tl;dr what i think of "the all jadebloods are female thing" is that it is very obviously true but in a way more 5 dimensional gender studies way than anyone else tends to mean when they say it
my pet "long hair was butch on alternia" headcanon - which is a joke but in the way all headcanons about alternia should be jokes of some kind - actually kind of relates to this lol. bc i figure that if gendered expectations of female trolls includes working in disgusting underground caverns filled with genetic material, it's going to be practical to keep your hair close to your head where it won't get dirty, in much the same way the feminist image of the short-haired woman became popular in the west during and after world war 2, wherein a lot of women had to start wearing their hair close to their heads to avoid scalping themselves in the factory machinery they suddenly had to start working with. hence kanaya dedicated to her assigned feminine role and wearing her hair short vs. porrim rebelling against it for feminist reasons and thus wearing her hair at a length that would be totally impractical for wading through gene pools.
#i had someone get mad at me once for saying this bc it implied vriska was butch or whatever.#which idgaf about. any further interpretations you make about the other girl trolls based on this are out of my hands#anyway i wont apologise for making this so long bc im sure at this point it's what you all want out of me when you ask this stuff LOL#homestuck#for tha record. i have written articles about each caste on the mspa wiki. all my sources r there you dont ALWAYS need to do your own rsrch
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"Not gonna lie, we're doing pretty well already But yes, oh my doctor said There's a lot of room left to grow"
seonghwa, matz (2023)
#ateez#atz#atzedit#atzsource#seonghwanet#park seonghwa#seonghwa#matz#*#actually i very much favour seonghwa in matz#i thought he would be out of his element#and i didn't really expect much#but learning that he was responsible for matz sounding the way it does#having written over 100 lines for his verses#having recorded 424 versions of the song#seonghwa has been the most delicious surprise so far#what an absolutely fascinating human being#his persona dichotomy on stage is so#it's layered. there are definitely layers to him#but like#the same way there are layers to the universe you know#such an amazing idol and professional
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I've been itching to draw folk costumes for a while now so i figured i'd jump on the international Miku trend! These Mikus are from Ternopil, Ukraine; and Tula, Russia - one for each side of my family <3
Here are the sources I used for each costume:
TERNOPIL -
youtube
TULA:
#hatsune miku#international miku#ukraine#russia#traditional clothing#folk costume#ternopil#tula#i don't know all the details about my family history or origin besides the general area each side comes from or used to live in#we can only go so far back because i come from a long and consistent line of serfs and peasants who weren't really in any written records#but in general my mother's family comes from western ukraine (specifically the ternopil region)#and my father's russian family comes from around the tula region in the south of russia? sorta?#besides that his jewish family lived in the pale of settlement in belarus today. so maybe i'll make a shtetl miku later#for now tumblr pls accept this humble offering#idk how to use a drawing tablet and i dont really want to learn. i like my colored pencils ;-;#back on my bullshit#Youtube
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i love this bit SO MUCH. it's so fucking funny all of these jokes are fantastic to me and the delivery is perfect
#mike written all over it#my new non-stick cookware and psychic makeup. OKAY#con-stick nookware#🤨 are you really martha stewart? 🙁 yeah#we have a new record out!#YELL 000-MICK3Y#REALLY GOOD#1997 tv special#the monkees#peter tork#davy jones#micky dolenz#justus
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#tvedit#filmedit#dcedit#thepenguinedit#the penguin hbo#oz cobb#thebatmanedit#colin farrell#gifs#*#the way he pats her hand!!!!!!!!!!#i've written how he loves his parents old records!!!!!!!!!! kill me!!!!
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Yeah we're all totally normal about minsung.
#guys i SCREAMED#I've been playing non stop while freaking out on youtube#honestly god bless youtube music#best tool for a stay when a skz record drops#minsung#!!!!!!!!!!!#gays keep winning#idc what u have to say#the cheesiest sweetest cutest love song written by han sung by minsung#it's EVERYTHING#lee know#han jisung#han#skz record#want so bad#skz#stray kids
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I always though Mal's mom was meant to be like "Eleanor" but they stuck an M at the start honestly, Sobbing Emoji. But "Maleanor" also makes me feel less insane since in that scene where she's just handed egg Malleus to Lilia and went to battle, it sounds more like Lilia is saying "Maleanor" than "Meleanor" (Japanese accent pending). Mayhaps they went more with what it sounded like the characters were saying :0 (we don't talk about Doodle Suit to Paint The Roses)
the transliteration of her name is Marenoa (マレノア), which is what all the voice lines are saying! all the Draconias' names start with マレ (Malleus' grandma is Maleficia/マレフィシア) as a nod to Maleficent. :D it's almost certainly a take on Eleanor, which is Erenoa (エレノア), but her name is written in English at a couple points, and I was pretty surprised to see it was Mel instead of Mal!
and, like, that's fine, it wouldn't be first Twst romanization that's tripped me up (like Keito for Cater, I know that's something to do with the loanword specific to playing cards(?) but it's just not how my brain wants to read it). but now Eng has given us Maleanor! and someone else said it was spelled inconsistently between Maleanor and Maeleanor??????? so WHO KNOWS it's a SPELLING FREE-FOR-ALL
I AM torn on which I want to use, because Mel just sounds so cute to me (and is what I'm used to now), but...the Mal consistency is kinda too good to pass up. alas, alas, truly these are the most difficult conundrums of our times. 😔
#twisted wonderland#twisted wonderland spoilers#i...am unsure if maleficia's name gets mentioned pre-part 6 so i'm gonna go overboard on the spoiler tags just in case#i-i just want to be careful okay#twisted wonderland episode 7 spoilers#twisted wonderland book 7 spoilers#twisted wonderland episode 7 part 6 spoilers#twisted wonderland book 7 part 6 spoilers#well if nothing else i'm happy i can stop calling him revaan. that was getting too silly.#and seeing baur finally twigged the reference for me (somewhat embarrassingly late)#me: (looking at a crocodile man whose name is literally written bauru) HMM I JUST DON'T KNOW#(i assume they went with 'baur' instead of 'bauru' to make it more of a reference and less...literally the name of a municipality)#(and also a sandwich according to wikipedia?)#(no actually he should have been bauru that would've been incredible) (sandwich grandpa)#i might call artistic license and use something like 'the briarlands' instead of 'briarland' though if it ever comes up#(it looks like we're going to be leaving the pre-valley timeline soon so it probably won't) (but i just want it on record)#i actually do like it being more unique than just 'briar country/kingdom' but i think the plural adds more of that ~fantasy flair~#...also this is how i find out that trey's magic name is different in eng?#(wow i really do not pay attention huh)#'paint the roses' IS the actual translation of his magic (薔薇を塗ろう) so it's not...COMPLETELY different at least?#i...guess they went for the more immediately obvious reference...? weird
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just read this snippet in a vanilla fic where character A sneezes and character B unthinkingly lends them their jacket. only, A realizes after the jacket is on that it's feverishly warm, and they lean over and feel B's forehead... 😵💫
what lack of self preservation would you need to have to lend someone your jacket so unthinkingly when you're the one with a fever?! also to feel someone's fever through the residual warmth of a clothing article?? the scene will not leave my mind
#for the record the fic is not a sickfic and this goes unacknowledged and unexplained for the rest of the fic#why did the author write that in?????????? what purpose did the mention of his fever serve narratively??????#idk but it's very very hot to me 😭#(...if anyone read my latest fic yes a is ti//ll and b is i//van in the fic i'm referencing. which i hesitate to link outside of dms bc#it is written by a vanilla 😭 but i fell asleep thinking about it and now i'm awake thinking about it again)
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lol I did it first
#invincible spoilers#invincible#i understand production times and the script would have been written and everything recorded ages ago guys#but still makes me laugh a bit#glad they gave her more to do in the levy confrontation#not sure how I feel about 'she totes evil in all other dimensions too' but I mean#whatever I doubt we're going to get any follow up on that from her end#tho alt marks running into her and still being mamas boys w her around would be hilarious#like oh want me to kill this guy for you mom? : ) oh haha honey no lets go uh... keep them alive so they can suffer instead?#Debbie Grayson#Angstrom Levy
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Sorry for the watermark, but I just had to snip this absolutely adorable moment from "Into the Light" from the 2019 Tokaigi concert. To me, it almost looked like a private little dance between them; like Marina did a little curtesy, and then Pearl a little bow, like she was inviting Marina to dance . . . but then, given the conversation that followed the song, I think it was actually a little pantomime of how Marina tried to introduce herself to Pearl when they first met (when she didn't speak Inkling yet), and Pearl invited Marina to come with her so she could show Marina Inkling culture (despite not speaking Octarian herself)!
Well, regardless of what that adorable little bit was, things certainly did get kinda intimate for a moment there 🩵🩷
#splatoon#off the hook#pearlina#pearl houzuki#marina ida#video#also the fact that ''Into the Light'' makes Pearl remember how they first met is so interesting#considering that canonically Pearl writes the lyrics for all of their songs#while Marina composes the music / mixes the songs together#the Japanese name of the song is ''Friend from Faraway'' as well so honestly#Pearl wrote that song *about Marina*#it's the Pearlina song written by Pearl herself :')#(the factoid about Pearl writing all their songs comes from the Marina interview in Splatune vol. 2 where Marina says#that she leaves all the lyrics to Pearl and just does the music / composition parts after Pearl gives her the lyrics for them to record)
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If you need a serotonin boost today, picture this: iii and iv hearing Euclid for the first time and seeing how it all ties together and how the song has callbacks to TNDNBTG and the absolute geniusness of the whole thing. Them in complete awe just like us fans were when we first heard it, knowing Vessel and ii cooked with this song. They were probably even more excited as they are musicians and part of the band
#whether they found out while it was being written or recorded or when the entire album was finished#anyway hope this helps :)#worshitposting#sleep token#sleep token vessel#sleep token ii#sleep token iii#sleep token iv
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made a weird dog
#oc#monochrome#me when there's a creature that exists between two states and watches beyond more than that:#its cool with this for the record its having a lot of fun#based super loosely off the concept of coyote from gunnerkrigg court. friend of mine wanted me to read it and i. dont like it that much but#i wanted to give it a shot bc i hate all the other webcomics they like ;-; unfortunately i still dont like it that much. it is badly writte#like materially. the reason i dislike it is because it is not well written and unlike them i came up in an era where i could read stories#like that in webcomic format that were well written#a couple ideas bit me though. as you can see#dog#sort of a fox? i guess?#also obviously goes without saying but Extremely Derivative Obviously Not My Own Original Ideas]#favorite
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