I guess from all the nationalists, Portuguese history isn't going to be very pleasant?
Not as such. Just a cadre of young, socially challenged ideologues who are very active online and think that Portugal should be referred to in everything.
Perhaps a Scandinavian analogue to Grimm's Fairy Tales is written, popular enough to make those creatures more well known.
This sounds like a very promising idea. TTL's version of Hans Christian Andersen may have a much darker bent in characterising the mythology of Scandinavia...
In OTL, outside of Tolkien what factors led to dwarves,trolls and elves becoming so well known outside Scandinavia?
Scandinavian folklore was spreading in the anglosphere well before Tolkien. For instance, the first recorded English translation of the Three Billy Goats Gruff (and their troll) was in the mid-nineteenth century. Still, while some of them may have been well known before Tolkien, in their modern conception, they basically are known as they are because of Tolkien and those who've plagiarised, er, been inspired by him.
Hi, I'm new here, but I've read the timeline from start to the as-of-the-present finish. Like the others who have read it and provided feedback, I am blown away (and as an Aussie, it's nice to see the Great Southern Land get its own epic timeline).
Merci. It is sometimes easier to write about a continent I live in, too.
I also wonder if the Native Aururians, given their incredibly diverse and alien cultures, will also have their own version of "Mayincatec". That is to say, when talk of these weird new religions and cultural practices makes its way back to the old world, rather than do the research, fiction writers will simply create an amalgamated Aururian culture that caters to their reader's desire for simplicity and excitement over accuracy.
It's an entertaining possibility, and I could certainly see fiction writers blurring the lines between the cultures without too much effort. Similar things are known in OTL, after all.
Still, Aururia is never going to be a "great unknown land" in the same way that the interior of the Americas were. The first travelogues appear within a handful of years of first contact, and there are even Aururians in contact with European colonies outside of Aururia within a generation. These Aururian contacts will continue, in some form, thereafter.
So while popular culture may well blur things a lot, any decently well-read European, or student of "oriental studies", will be aware of the distinction between the major cultures.
A collection of folklore could be one way, we did see some collection of them in the early 17th century.
So here we could some different aspect on popular creates and some less well known becoming popular.
These look quite promising. I especially like the potential of the nixie to become a "deal with the devil" motif, huldra for their potential for both attractiveness and nastiness, and sea munks for their oddity.
Hmm. It could be kind of amusing to see trolls take up the cultural role in LoRaG that elves have in OTL. One more thing to confuse the unwary interdimensional traveler...
Trolls as stylish but vicious at heart? (A lot like cats, really.) Tempting...
I would kill to read stories based on these. So refreshing.
Writing a whole story along those lines is probably more than I'd be able to focus on, but some excerpts may be possible.
Settling the OTL Canadian Prairies from the east requires a railroad, really. Sure, there were a few Ontarians who came west before that, but not very many.
And the cost of building a RR across the Canadian Shield north of Lake Superior is such that it will ONLY happen as a political move if Rupertsland and Ontario (or whatever they're called iOTL) are part of the same political entity.
Would an alternative be getting there via the Great Lakes, culminating in Lake Superior, and then travelling west from there (RR or otherwise)? Or alternatively, a railroad via Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northwest from there, rather than north of Lake Superior?
In addition to GETTING there, you'd like to be able to ship produce (wheat, whatever) to markets. It's really tough shipping it east, again before a RR.
Sans a direct railroad, something like wheat would presumably be uneconomical to export out. Other commodities may be able to survive the trip of shipping and portage, though (Mesabi iron ore, for instance).
As for getting people south from Hudson's Bay. Good luck with that.
True; it would be quite a walk.
OTL French kings asserted lots of power, but couldn't actually wield it. The same was true in most European countries; there was a profusion of local and regional authorities and laws which the crown couldn't just revoke at will.
Kings who tried got into trouble. The smarter ones didn't press their luck.
Quite true that the rhetoric wouldn't always match the reality. Even kings who proclaimed themselves as absolute monarchs couldn't get away with everything they wanted. (Not even the Sun King, OTL.) While not accepting any
de jure limits on their power, a monarch who wanted to stay in power knew what the
de facto limits were.
Still, there was a gradual trend of political centralisation in France even before Louis XIV, and I would expect that trend to continue. Sure, a weak monarch wouldn't get away with as much, but every strong monarch would accelerate the centralisation trend.
Without triggering a massive uprising? The crown would have to be very strong already to confiscate most of the wealth of the nation's ruling class without a fight.
The Great Reduction happened in OTL (in 1680). What it entailed was the Swedish crown reclaiming lands which had been "donated" to the nobility, mostly since the 1630s, to pay for Sweden's wars. It had a considerable amount of popular support, since the large aristocratic families were seen as too powerful.
The ATL Great Reduction is in fact smaller than the OTL one, since not as much land had to be sold to pay for Sweden's wars in the first place. (The monarchy has more lands with personal rule.)
The Swedish crown gets away with the *Great Reduction precisely because it is already more powerful than OTL, holding wealthy lands through its personal rule (most notably in Silesia), and because at this point the Swedish legislature (Riksdag of the Estates) still has
some power. The Riksdag would become more ineffectual during the early eighteenth century.
ISTM that this narrative, plausible as it sounds, lacks causation. It's entirely plausible that the Aururian impact shifts the political development of Europe toward more absolute monarchy. But there's no explanation of how it does so.
The underlying causation isn't explicit in this article because it's something which ATL people usually see as a given.
What happened was that the Aururian plagues exacerbated a trend which was seen in much of seventeenth-century northern Europe in OTL. Population reductions led to an expansion of noble power at the expense of the peasantry, and a simultaneous expansion of power of the state at the expense of the nobility, seeking to turn them (in effect) into large landowning capitalists rather than feudal lords.
The nobility often accepted the increase in monarchical power for a time, since the aristocracy were also gaining power over the peasantry. Of course, after a time there would inevitably be clashes between monarchy and nobility. Sometimes the monarchy won (e.g. Denmark) while in other cases it lost (e.g. Poland).
In OTL, this trend showed up in a number of countries (e.g. much of Germany, Russia, Denmark) because of the population reduction caused by the seventeenth-century wars. ITTL, the broader population reduction of the Aururian plagues combines with the still-serious Twenty Years' War to create an earlier and broader trend across much more of Europe.
This leads to a gradual push toward absolute monarchy in large parts of Europe, though not quite
every state. The Austrian Habsburgs, for instance, don't turn into absolute monarchs, even notionally. The Dutch Republic continues throughout this period, too.
And an English monarch, explicitly claiming and holding absolute power? Abolishing Parliament? Very tricky.
Tricky, although the Stuarts had been trying to introduce the divine right of kings since James I. This was the culmination of that trend. Getting it adopted would, of course, require winning a civil war.
And, strictly speaking, the English monarchy has been granted the right to raise taxation without needing Parliament's consent. Parliament had not become a permanent institution by this period, since it was called when needed and subject to dissolution by the monarch at any time.
Also, at the risk of getting ahead of the tale, the Absolutist period in *England is largely the personal accomplishment of James II, who had exceptional personal abilities and the fortunate starting position (i.e. his father winning the *English Civil War) to make absolute monarchy work, to a reasonable standard. While he exercised absolute power, he did so in a way which kept opposition divided, and which didn't raise too much popular discontent, e.g. the foreign wars he pursued (and raised funds for) were popular ones. After his death, his successors were lesser men...
The power of the crown might be sustained through royal weakness by an inner council of hard men - but then the king himself isn't really absolute anymore, is he?
There have been very few absolute autocracies in history, and even fewer have survived their founders. Look at the USSR after Stalin.
Certainly, not every state in *Europe which calls itself an absolute monarchy is so in practice. That was even arguably the case in most absolute monarchies in OTL, where there were still constraints on the monarch's power (aristocrats, clergy, and/or others).
That said, the trend is still to create an aristocracy which are bureacratic landowners rather than feudal lords with the ability to revolt against the crown. After absolutism is officially proclaimed in any given state, where a monarch is young, feckless or otherwise weak, the trend will broadly be for an
éminence grise (or several) to wield true power rather than to explicitly revoke absolutism.
Until the whole institution of absolutism is challenged, of course.
It did in OTL, in 1680. That said, it was done with the support of a large parts of the Riksdag of the Estates (a Riksdag that had *not* been emasculated into a simple rubber-stamp) there, including parts of the (lower) nobility.
In ATL Sweden, the Riksdag had not yet been emasculated by 1675, though the greater personal estates of the Swedish monarchy meant that the kings did not need to rely on it as much. The popular support for the Great Reduction was still mostly there ATL.
