The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

Here's the big deal of Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North - the thing that distinguishes (or at least elevates) it from any academic, critical work on myth and folklore: 'The first thing readers of this book must do is refrain from imagining that they know precisely what a troll is. While in the nineteenth century Icelandic trolls were taxonomised ... in a thirteenth-century narrative a troll has no such clear identity, not even within the human psyche. Trolls do not constitute a race or a species. The first step when considering the troll sighted on the ridge is to avoid the idea of a clearly demarcated group. ... Thinking like a nineteenth-century scientist will not further one’s understanding of the medieval troll. Furthermore, it might be useful to resist the glossarial impulse to treat medieval Icelandic words as concepts that are carefully defined as they are used. ... How could these men understand a troll? They accept ...

 Both a necessary antidote to the conventional wisdom of consumer-focussed technocratic interventionism in the DRC and a dense mass with little readability for at least this non-specialist,  I don't find I have much to say about Conflict Minerals Inc . It taught me a lot of stuff I didn't know before. On the other hand, most of that isn't stuff I'd be particularly comfortable gamifying for popular consumption; for deeper thought from somebody with much more knowledge of the issues, see this post . So instead here's a brief little trick it inspired me to come up with, virtually setting-agnostic except that it needs a hex-map. The book includes a lot of maps of factional control in particular years, like this: Each then has a key with scores to hundreds of groups listed in (very) brief. This kind of massive overlap between factions, with several sometimes overlapping in one area (more if you were also to try to map the power of the state) hasn't been adequately a...

I set myself a challenge this year to read a big and/or complicated book for pleasure every month and produce a blog-y thing about it. In January, I read Tim Harper's Underground Asia , and then proceeded to make so many notes that it took me until today to get a post out of them! Oops !  If you're playing a character in a port built around a giant mysterious adamantine pillar in the middle of the ocean, I may well be stealing ideas from here, so feel free to read the intro/review and the game-system stuff at the end but be aware that you might spoil yourself if you read the middle sections. Introduction and Short Review TL;DR: How revolutionaries (first Anarchist, then Marxist, then nationalist) began to undermine imperialism in Asia, 1900s-30s. Fantastic read if you're good at remembering lots of names. Underground Asia is a marvellous work of the kind Allen Lane/Penguin History seems to manage on the regular: pop-history enough to be a snappy and enjoyable read, well-cit...