[Kalimac]

Ah, good old Ibn Fadlan - I've never seen 13th Warrior, but I'll always remember him fondly just because he inadvertantly caused one of the most hilarious movie reviews I ever read - the guy writing the review apparently was unaware that Ibn Fadlan was real person ("of COURSE there wouldn't be an Arab in Viking country, that's absurd!") so spent half the review trying to figure out what he was a symbol of, or what the letters of his name might spell if rearranged (maybe it's an anagram?). If he had read even one book about Vikings he would have come across, if nothing else, Ibn Fadlan's account of the ritual rape/murder of a deceased king's concubine; I have yet to see a text on Vikings that doesn't quote the whole thing in every detail. <P>But back to Tolkien - not to throw too much cold water on Ibn Fadlan, but he was coming from a very different culture where different things were valued; frequent washing may have been exalted (as with us) but camping/building/find food wherever possible skills which the Vikings had may not have been so thoroughly developed, at least not for people of his social class. (Though it's probably fair to guess that lower-status Arabs didn't get a shot at much more than one bath a day either, if that). The sort of things he notes were obviously ingrained habit - not the kind of things people would notice about themselves, simply because they're so taken for granted. (How many of us, if visited by an alien who thought that five baths a day AT MINIMUM was the only way to be clean, would decide that that meant that we were dirty? No, we'd think we were normal and he was a little, well, alien). I'd maintain that the portrait Tolkien was painting was more of the Anglo-Saxons as they saw themselves at their absolute best (and let's face it, though Anglo-Saxons and Vikings weren't the exact same things, they were close enough in time and location that their cleanliness habits were probably almost identical), what we're seeing is the stuff the sagas were built around; not necessarily saintly, but leaving out all the background dirt and lice - not to hide anything, but because it's basically irrelevant to the story. <P>It is slightly depressing to think about. Nobody wants to think about Eowyn picking lice out of her hair or the fact that valiant Snowmane probably had fleas aplenty, and that Wormtongue probably didn't bathe terribly often (OK, maybe that part isn't a problem). But when we see the cleaned-up versions in the book, or on the screen, in a sense what we're seeing is truer than if they showed us everything that Ibn Fadlan saw. After all, if EVERYONE is like that, it rather cancels it out, doesn't it? <P>The Elves are a sticking point, that's true - but we're not seeing the story from the Elves' perspective (just as well, probably) so it's not that major a problem. As for Aragorn and Boromir, *sigh*...but you can't travel months, let alone years, in the wilderness and not have things like that happen to you, it's the natural order of things. I imagine you'd get used to it sooner rather than later, especially if everyone around you was the same.<p>[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: Kalimac ]