I was planning on writing a post about the etymology of the name Bisclavert, which was the name of my recently published short story about a medieval werewolf, based on the story of the same name by Marie de France.
I was surprised to find that the spelling I had used was actually a variant, and a less common variant at that! So what I have done is actually to go and change the name of my story to Bisclavret (The Werewolf) just to make things a bit clearer! I thinks its pretty obvious the story is about werewolves so hopefully that won’t spoil anything for anyone!
Back to the main purpose of explaining the etymology of the word, I found that this is actually pretty unclear. Marie de France in her lai tells the reader that:
‘Bisclavret’ is the Breton name, the Normans call it ‘garwaf’.
The usual old-French word for werewolf seems to be garou, and forms part of the more modern phrase used in France now of loup-garou. But, according to Widsith’s help blog post, it seems very unclear as to where you get the werewolf meaning from the Breton bisclavert. The closet word in Breton is “bleiz” for wolf, but even that is not very close.
Perhaps Marie used a bit of artistic licence herself and made the word up anyway?
I have just been reading some old Nemesis the Warlock stories (one of my favourite 2000 AD characters when I was a kid), and I’m also reading Dan Simmons’ Endymion at the same time. I suddenly had a moment of clarity and readlised that I had been picturing the Shrike as looking a lot like Nemesis the Warlock ever since I started reading the Hyperion Cantos. Without the sword and the cape though!
It’s funny isn’t it how you can use visual cultural references to visualize characters from text-based fiction. Another way of seeing the Shrike might also be the alien from the Alien films. Although for me the Shrike is a bit more spikey and less slobbery than Ridley Scott‘s alien, so perhaps Nemesis works better?
Someone has actually created an image of the Shrike. This is from Wikipedia, and was created by Nojhan:
I just came across this new title from Subterranean Press. Hard-Luck Diggings is a collection of Vance’s earlier fiction, when he was trying to break into the writing industry. One could wonder therefore what the quality is like, but according to these reviews quoted by Subterranean it seems pretty good:
First up, from SF Site:
“Jack Vance is a familiar name to most SF/Fantasy readers. Now, as his writing career seems to have drawn to a close, he is getting a welcome new shot of recognition, driven by a memoir, a tribute antholology, and some interesting new collections of his work. Hard-Luck Diggings is the latest collection, and it is different from the others in not really selecting a representative group of his stories, nor a themed set, nor the best. It is instead a choice of some of the more interesting works from his first decade or so of publishing.”
And, from SFCrowsnest:
“As you would expect from a master of the genre, none of the stories in here are a disappointment… Subterranean Press are apparently planning a further Jack Vance anthology and for any author with such a long and distinguished career, I consider this a valuable service.”
From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review): “Even these early tales make it clear why Vance is still one of the most revered, read, and taught of science fiction authors, highlighting his blending of genres, forward-thinking and prophetic science, and careful craft.”
After some positive experiences distributing free short stories with Feedbooks, I thought I should take a look at the other widely used option for self-publishing ebooks: Smashwords.
Smashwords is much more orientated to authors who want to get paid for their work. Therefore it seems to attract longer pieces as well – I guess it’s hard to convince readers to pay for individual short stories. It also seems to be a place where one might be able to distribute short story anthologies or even individual issues of magazines, something I think Beneath Ceaseless Skies do.
As with Feedbooks I decided to publish one of my older short stories with Smashwords. The experience is interesting – it’s a lot more complicated in some ways – you really are asked to make sure the formatting is spot on and to include things like copyright statements if you want your work published on Amazon or the Apple iBookstore. I think this is good in a way as it encourages you to be more professional about your work, but it does take longer than Feedbooks. Also for Apple and Sony you require an ISBN, which you can ask Smashwords to provide for you. Now I think if you were deadly serious about self-publishing being your future, you would be better off getting your own batch, as presumably you would also be organizing your own printed books then this would be a good idea. But for the purposes of my experiment I just went with Smashwords’ free ISBN option. After all I want to get my story distributed as widely as possible with as little fuss as possible.
What I found quite good was the author support provided by Smashwords. For instance they make revenue per sale quite clear for each distribution method, they also show you exactly how your book appears on search engines, and provide lots of Social Media buttons too. You can also submit your blog url and Twitter username to provide updates in your profile. All in all they seem committed to providing authors with a professional and positive experience.
The story I have published with them is called Bisclavert and you can buy it for $0.99 or sample the first 6 or so pages free.
You might have heard that there’s a new Culture novel from Iain Banks coming out later this year (October 2010). It’s called Surface Detail and here’s the info about it on his site at the moment:
Surface Detail
It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
It begins with a murder.
And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.
Lededje Y’breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture.
Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful – and arguably deranged – warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war – brutal, far-reaching – is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it’s about to erupt into reality.
It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the centre of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether.
More on the App
But there is also an interview with Iain about Surface Detail on his new iPhone App. So what extra information does he give away?
Firstly he tells us that the book is 200,000 words long, whereas his longest books have been usually around 180,000 words (Consider Phlebus for example).
There’s everything you would expect from a Culture novels – drones, spaceships and knife missiles. Oh and also some human stories too!
“Lededje Y’breq is one of the Intagliated”. She appears to be the main character. Her story revolves around how she loses her tatooes, refinds themand then falls in with the Culture, via two spaceships: a General Systems Unit and a derange Abominator class warship.
Intagliated means to be tatooed everywhere including internal organs, to pay debt for families past crimes.
Part of story is set in “hells” and involves the Culture’s wars against the “hells” which are horrible after-life places. Not much more about what these are but I am guessing these are some sort of virtual worlds where the dead go?
Another major character is fighting wars in the virtual world and now in the real world. It has been a long war in the virtual world (over 30 years), and the Culture is desperate to stop it spilling over into the real world.
Sexual Morality amongst the English Royal Family and Nobility
It is sometimes stated that the social effects of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century included a breakdown of sexual morals. What is the evidence for this? We can’t do a survey now to find out, but if you look at some of the activities of the English royal family and higher nobility in England in the latter half of the Fourteenth Century, there seems to be a remarkable number of mistresses and second marriages and divorces. In particular it seems that a lot of these are motivated by women themselves who are exerting their freedom – for instance Alice Perrers, Katherine Swynford and Joan of Kent.
The Fair Maid of Kent married for Love?
Edward, the Black Prince and Joan of Kent, were happily married for love (in fact his father disapproved because she wasn’t foreign royalty, and also she has a rather dubious past. Her nickname the “Fair Maid of Kent” was perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to her numerous relationships.
In 1340 she secretly married Sir Thomas Holland, a household knight. But her mother arranged for her to marry William Montagu, son of the Earl of Salisbury, which she did in 1341, despite her earlier marriage to Holland! Holland actually became the couple’s steward, and perhaps he continued his relationship with her. In 1347 he had mustered enough funds to fight a court case at Avignon (the home of the Papacy at this time) to try to win her back. Holland claimed that Joan was held by Montagu against her will and the Pope eventually decided in favour of Holland.
Presumably their marriage which lasted until Holland’s death in 1360 was happy and she really did want to leave Montagu – they had five children together. Yet as soon as Holland was dead she was married to the Black Prince, again secretly. This time there were a few issues to deal with: she was the Black Prince’s cousin and therefore within the prohibited degrees, and the Black Prince was also supposed to be marrying a French heiress, Margaret of Flanders. Supposedly Edward III was furious, but he did help his son get dispensation from the Pope to allow the marriage, so he can’t have been too upset about it. Perhaps he respected his son’s wishes? All reports of the marriage tell us that it was happy and that both parties loved each other.
What can Joan’s story tell us? Well it seems that if the woman wanted to and their chosen party was influential enough, they could marry who they wished and break out of an arranged marriage. But it is also noteworthy that for Joan this happened before the Black Death of 1347 and doesn’t seem to be linked to any breakdown in morals.
Royal Affairs
Other representatives of the royal family seem to be a bit more immoral. In both cases there was disapproval from commentators of the day, and both were adulterous relationships on at least one side.
Edward III had a mistress, Alice Perrers, who he probably started a relationship with even before his wife Philippa of Hainualt died.
And his son, John of Gaunt, started an affair with Katherine Swynford after his wife Blanche of Lancaster died. Katherine was married.
John of Gaunt’s daughter Elizabeth also had a chequered history. She deserted her first husband, was seduced by her second husband, John de Holand, later Duke of Exeter, whom she hurriedly married as she was pregnant. She married thirdly (before 12 Dec 1400) as his second wife, Sir John Cornwall.
Amongst the nobility there were also cases of adultery. Margaret, Countess of Norfolk – had notorious affair with Sir Walter Manny and divorced her first husband Sir John Segrave to marry Manny in 1354.
So from these cases it does seem that the cases of adultery were on the rise in the last half of the Fourteenth Century, but why was this?
What caused this outbreak of Adultery?
Did the effects of the Black Death mean that people were less respectful of orthodox morality? Perhaps attitudes to organized religion had changed? The Lollard heresy was on the rise, and although it didn’t advocate adultery it did criticise the authority of the established Church. Perhaps figures like John of Gaunt felt less bound to the Church’s rules?
Or perhaps circumstance and power enabled Edward III and John of Gaunt to do what they wanted. After their first wives died, they turned elsewhere. They were powerful enough to not be bound by the Church, and in particularly in Edward III’s case they did not seem much to care to maintain a charade of propriety.
As I work through the creation of my character dossiers for Hell has its Demons, I am going to post the life stories for the major characters online. So the next one is now ready. So now you can find out about the history of John Haukwake, the father of Jake Savage, and why father and son don’t exactly get on very well.
For some crazy reason I seem to have not spotted some of the videos contained in the protected section of the Iain Banks iPhone App. I have now corrected the original review so please go there to see the whole listing.
It seems that these videos are unique to the app at the moment – can’t find them on YouTube for instance or on a Google search for Iain Banks videos.
I am currently working on a novel called Hell has its Demons. This is based on story called Bird Talk, which was recently published in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. I have been aiming to write a few posts to talk about Bird Talk and promote the story, and this lead me to consider how much the story has changed going into the longer novel format. The plot of course is much expanded, but I have also developed the characters and setting considerably too.
Firstly the character names change: Roger stayed as Roger, but his surname changed from Draper to Sotil. My thoughts being that as Jake emerged as his partner in crime, I wanted to use their surnames to allude to their very different characters, so Jake is Jake Savage, and Roger is Roger Sotil. My hope is that they will be a demon fighting duo, whose characteristics complement each other, thus I would like to have a subtitle for each book of A Savage and Sotil Aventure (sic). “Aventure” is a Chaucerian style spelling of Adventure to add to the fourteenth century of the books.
Another name that changed was the name of the town, from St. Dunstan’s to St. Brett’s. St. Dunstan was an actual saint and I was concerned that using that name might bring with it too much baggage. Also by creating a fictional saint, I could then weave elements of that saint’s fictional history into the story. St. Brett felt like a good English name to me, and also there’s a link with the Angl0-Saxon term Brett Walden (meaning King of Britain), which would also add further to the saint’s mythology.
But more than that the actual character’s have developed quite a bit. The weak, foolish, lovestruck Roger Draper, a chantry priest in “Bird Talk” becomes a more esoteric character. Still obsessed about magic and still not very realistic about the world. but on another level entirely. I decided that he needed to be more of an outsider and also to have more knowledge and authority. In effect he is called in to solve a problem by the Abbot of St. Brett’s, so he must have some experience or knowledge that helps. So instead he is an Oxford don with knowledge of astrology and magic, well-known for his unusual views. As well as being an expert on magic, you could say he’s also slightly insane.
Jake started off as a veteran of the French wars who had fallen on hard times in St. Dunstan’s and become a beggar. In “Bird Talk” he is a character who knows a lot more than one would expect and is actually more intelligent than Roger, in fact he gets them all out of the mess they’re in. We don’t get to know much about what makes him tick though.
What happened to Jake when I expanded the story for the novel? Like Roger he had to come from outside, but I wanted to have one of my main character’s having a real emotional investment in the town and people of St. Brett’s. They have to care about what’s happening there. Jake was my man and this brought about the major change to the lead female character Margery.
Margery became Isabel because the name Margery was much too un-sexy. And she stopped being the spoilt daughter of the town’s leading merchant. Instead she became the one-time lover of Jake and now wife of Jake’s father John, having rejected Jake. So providing lashings of emotional baggage for Jake and her to work through. She’s still into magic though and this time her life will hang in the balance as she’s accused of witchcraft.
UPDATE
“Bird Talk” is also now available to purchase as a separate story via Smashwords and Amazon.
Edward III pursued a deliberate policy of drawing the nobility closer to the royal court and so make them more reliant on royal patronage. This was a reaction to the chaos of his Edward II’s reign, which had seen the country devastated by rebellion and civil war.
The nobility, and to an extent the gentry who relied on the magnates for access to royal patronage, needed such links to the court as their own incomes from land fell and as wealth became more concentrated in the central authority, as a result of the increased use of taxation and customs duties. In effect the only way for the nobility and gentry to improve their station and counteract the decline of their traditional income was to connect themselves more closely to the court. Thus they lost a degree of independence and relied more upon their influence at court. Given-Wilson in The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity points out that this was particularly the case in England: ‘The highly centralised nature of English government placed a vast store of patronage in the hands of the king, and there were very few checks on the way he dispensed of it.’ This, coupled with attempts to control feudal violence, meant that, in order to gain influence, the nobility tended to express itself less through warfare than through lifestyle, that is clothing, building, and feasting. Indeed during the fourteenth century the court became more and more a model for the lifestyle of the nobility, dictating the latest fashions. For the nobility to enjoy the patronage of the crown they too had to adopt such fashions.
This process might have been more or less important at certain stages of the period, depending on the nature of the king, but it was an important factor throughout the later Middle Ages. The nobility, if they desired to be successful, were drawn more and more into the court sphere as the crown established itself as the central authority of the state. The court, as Juliet Vale points out in Edward III and Chivalry, ‘was perhaps the area of greatest social mobility outside the church.’
Ultimately this lead to the even more sophisticated court fashions during the reign of Richard II (who invented the handkerchief!). You can read more about how aspiration of court fashions was mirrored in the literature of the period in my book The Court in English Alliterative Poetry, 1350-1450.
I just came across this new title from Subterranean Press. 
and here’s the info about it on his site at the moment:
