I have a suspicion that trouble with FA is about to flare up again

[fpb]

My older friends will remember the long war I had with a previous generation of FA moderators. Now I have lost my temper again, spectacularly and on their threads, and I suspect that it will make trouble.

I just read a chaptered fic (you will understand that I have no intention to increase the author's hit count, so we'll forget the name and title) which contains the following passage (behind lj-cut):
"Precisely," Caitlin smiled thinly. "And if it sounds horrible to you, think what a mage would think, coming from a community where you had magical privies that made the waste disappear, mud resistant robes, cures for most diseases known to the Muggles, a non-existent infant mortality rate, nice clean stone buildings for everyone, house elves that kept everything sanitary using magic and a standard of living not far off what you're both used to. I'm telling you, the phrase 'filthy Muggles' wasn't abuse back then, it was a fact. Of course the mages of the day felt they were superior - why wouldn't they? The poorest mage lived better than a Muggle king. Salazar was only different in that his attitudes were more extreme and professed more openly. He wasn't interested in saving Muggles from themselves, and he certainly didn't want their children around, with their insistence in only one god, and eternal damnation for those who didn't follow him, and that magic users not sanctioned by their High Priest in Rome were going straight to Hell. Actually can't say I entirely blame him on that score," she said with a grin.

Luella had to admit that being told that your magic was evil on a daily basis would probably annoy even the most patient of mages.

"But that doesn't mean being a Muggle-born makes you inferior!" she responded.

"Well, of course not," Caitlin replied. "Times have changed, and so have Muggles. Most love the idea of magic. That weird Middle Eastern crucifixion cult has lost its hold on their minds. And perhaps most importantly, they've discovered science, and it's given them power equal to ours in a way. No, Luella, in no way do I think Muggles are inferior. But back then, Salazar had some good points, and a lot of mages agreed with him, up until the point where he started secretly advocating the extermination of Muggle-borns, and the banning of mage-Muggle marriages, or at least severely restricting them to suitable candidates. That was when he crossed the line, and that's when war broke out, and Salazar got thrown out of Hogwarts. Battles were fought, alliances were made and broken, and a particularly nasty bloodfeud ensued that endures to this day. Salazar, I might add, lost, although his House stayed. Enough of them repented or stayed loyal to make it worthwhile keeping it. After all, Salazar Slytherin was still a Founder. But from then on, Slytherin House was seen as different, marked out by its past. At best, a house to be wary of, at worst the source of everything evil. Dark mages from Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff are overlooked or explained away as having had a traumatic past. Dark Slytherins have always been blown up into terrifying figures of absolute evil. Their Dark Mages are seen as one-offs, aberrations. Ours are seen as typical Slytherins. Until the 1970's, we Slytherins have always put up with the prejudice and just got on with our lives. We dealt with it by consoling ourselves that our house may be evil but at least we were the talented ones. That's why we're noted for our ambition: we start out automatically disadvantaged and work twice as hard to catch up. We've all got something to prove. We've been hated but we get by....

I found this not only offensive but a genuine instance of hate speech, including evident racist overtones (apparently being "middle eastern" is bad) and a loathsome misrepresentation of historical fact. I let the author know in the comments thread, and added a warning against this fic in the thread where I had originally found the link. Now it all depends on whether the moderators think this is, a), flaming, and, b), not justified by the evident and contemptible hate speech in the fic. Either way, I really do not think I intend to retract a single word.

Comments

Re: The beliefs and actions of (a) character(s) are not automatically those of the author.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is not actually the case. I suggest you have a look at what was routinely done to teachers of heresy such as Gottschalk. It is rather true that, until the great reforms of the mid-eleventh century, the Church of Rome had been reduced to the plaything of the Roman nobility. This was a by-product of the general situation of Western Christianity, which was desperate: for a century and a half - from the collapse of Charles the Great's premature empire to the great victory of the Emperor Otto over the Hungarians - there was no part of the Christian West, not even the mountains of modern Switzerland, that was not constantly under the threat of Arabic, Viking or Magyar raids, or pagan Slav encroachment. Between 950 and 150, Hungary, Croatia, Denmark, Norway, the British and Irish Vikings, Iceland, Sweden, Poland, Bohemia, and Russia converted to the Christian faith; all, except Russia, to the Roman rite (and even Kiev, then capital of Russia, received an Irish mission). This pacified and enormously strengthened the West, and was immediately followed by reform at home and advance abroad, including the Crusades - caused by the collapse of an overextended Byzantine Empire at Mantzikert (1071) and after.

But what about Bob

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

But Gottschalk was a theologian and a noisy itinerant preacher. He was upsetting the apple cart.

My point is that the everyday people pretty much could and did believe what they wanted because the Church was engaged in a trickle-down theory of conversion (opposite what it practiced in the early days). Monks went to the warrior-kings like Clovis, not Joe farmer in the field, or Bob carpenter in the workshop. Between 950 and 1050 all those places you list may have become *officially* Christian, but there is a difference between that and truly Christianizing the population.

I would say of those places, the Hiberno-Norse ("Irish Vikings") probably experienced the most complete conversion, since it was coming from the ground-up (from the influence of thier already Christian neighbors*) rather than the top down. Iceland, Denmark and Norway are definately a different story. The concept of "Christ on land; Thor at sea" is well documented (see, for instance, Helgi the Lean in the Landnamabok) and demonstrates both the considerable ambivalance about Christianity in areas where the elite made professions of faith, but nobody bothered to check with the laity, and that nobody was bothering to check with the rank and file in either a positive (teaching) or negative (punishing) sense.


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* It's interesting that Russia (and Bohemia as well, although you didn't mention that) received an Irish mission. I really think that for a number of centuries, the Faith was stronger in the Isles than a lot of other places in Europe.

Re: But what about Bob

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Good points on the whole, but remember Ranulphus Glaber's description of "the earth covering itself with churches like flowers in springs". The eleventh century, at least in the core western lands, is the period of massive local church building and the rise of the parish system, and this was powered largely from what you call the bottom-up perspective. Remember, too, that the Scandinavians had been in touch with Christianity for centuries. As I reall, the archaeologists discovered evidence of a Christian church in the Danish trading harbour of Hedeby, dating to about 800AD.

Re: But what about Bob

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Two more points. First, the "top-down" and "bottom-up" perspectives you describe in northern Europe were hardly mutually exclusive. You have to remember the dimension of the societies in question. You are not talking about a large state such as the Byzantine empire, not even about a confederacy of vast provincial landholders such as underlay the Frankish states. In England in the seventh century, in Scandinavia in the tenth, a king was the local boss, and he and his comitatus pretty much exhausted every man of importance in the kingdom - and most kingdoms were barely as large as a modern county, and not as populous. Once the royal family has been converted, the comitatus will become converted out of personal loyalty and individual influence; after all, they had been as much responsible for choosing the king as the king for choosing them, and their loyalty and affection was mutual. (Remember the speeches after the Ealdorman's fall in The battle of Maldon, written almost certainly by an eyewitness: the personal emotion, the direct and uncomplicated love for one's lord, can be felt.) And once these men had converted, pretty much all of society had; everyone was bound to them as they were bound to the king, by economic and personal links that strongly encouraged them to agree.

And the fact that the Landnamabok takes the trouble of mentioning Helgi the Lean's peculiar double religion hardly proves that it was common. One of the rules of textual interpretation is that common things are not mentioned, and uncommon things are. Why is that the practice of this one settler, out of dozens, is mentioned? Probably because it was unique, and remembered as such.