Hail, Caesar!
So, after reading the first post, I know what you're thinking: how can I, too, become somebody whose idea of a good time is reading 700-page history books about eastern-Hungarian barley harvest statistics in the late Middle Ages?! I know - it's an exciting thought. But you don't just get here overnight. It takes time to become a nerd on this scale.
Anyone who has known me for more than thirty seconds probably knows that I love Lord of the Rings, and almost everything to do with Middle-earth (the "almost" only being necessary now due to the unfortunate existence of the Hobbit movie trilogy... shudder). For a long time, the very idea of cracking open a history book was about as exciting to me as watching Nascar - unless you like Nascar, in which case, insert your own analogy here.
I think the only way to explain my transition from a hobbit-lover to a history-lover-who-still-loves-hobbits-very-much-and-would-probably-be-a-Brandybuck-if-he-lived-in-the-Shire, is with one word: annoyance. I have a distinct memory, sometime in the summer of 2008 or 2009, of becoming extremely annoyed by the fact that my knowledge of history was woefully incomplete. My chief source of irritation lay in the fact that although I could list a long series of "Famous Historical People," I couldn't tell you a single thing about them. Napoleon. Cleopatra. Julius Caesar. Captain America. Yes, I knew who they were, and could probably tell them apart from Michael Bolton in a pinch (though no guarantee - I am WAY too young to know who Michael Bolton is, but I hear he's pretty rad), but I really didn't know who they were, in the real sense, the Mufasa sense:
(Yes, I bought The Lion King on DVD as an adult, and so what if it is one of my all-time favourite movies even to this day. You try watching this without ugly crying.)
Anyway, one day I decided that I was sick of not knowing who Julius Caesar was and that I was going to do something about it (I am not making this up - do normal people have these thoughts?), so I strode into the nearest Chapters, kind of like this:
and did a slo-mo walk straight to the History section (this was back in the First Age when Chapters actually sold books and not just pillows with inspirational sayings like "The journey of a thousand miles begins with buying this overpriced pillow" and "The key to wisdom is to put this thing down and buy a doughnut instead" and stuff like that).
All the Tolkien books cried out to me as I walked past the Fantasy section, but I was like, "Sorry guys, but there are other fish in the sea, you know?" (But actually, they don't know, because they're books and books don't even know that there IS a sea, because they don't have eyes and can't read the maps. Books are so overrated).
When I finally got to the History section, I pretty much just scanned the shelves until I saw a book that looked like it was about Julius Caesar. It was called Rubicon: The Last Days of the Roman Republic, and the back said that it would talk about Caesar and Pompey and Cleopatra and a bunch of other fun-sounding boys and girls. Mostly, it looked like it didn't assume too much background knowledge, and wow, that Aragorn GIF is really starting to get annoying with those doors opening OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. Who writes this thing???
To make a long story short, I took the book home (after paying for it) and started reading it. It was a bit of a slog at first, but once I accepted the fact that there weren't going to be any elves or talking spiders or blue-hatted men jumping through the woods singing things like Ring-a-dong-dillo! and Hey, come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties! (OK, I know Tolkien was a genius and taught at Oxford and all, but really? Really???) I actually loved it. It answered all the most important questions I had about Caesar (ie. Why did his mom name him after a salad?) and even some of the smaller ones (ie. was a Roman general, wanted lots of power, was not super popular with the Senate, something about "Beware the Ides of March" and what in the world is an "Ide" anyway? Is it a skin condition?).
Thus began my 10-year-long-and-still-running fanaticism for history. It's been a long journey from Rubicon to medieval harvest statistics, but I'd do it all over again.*
*Except for that one book I read by a Minnesotan professor which shall remain unnamed, but basically just consisted of lists of grave goods from early medieval archaeological digs in continental Europe and went almost entirely like this: "Grave A contained thirty-three red brooches; Grave B contained 97 green brooches; Grave C contained three-hundred and seventy-two turquoise paper weights shaped like pretty seahorses" and so on. Give me the elves again, please.
Anyone who has known me for more than thirty seconds probably knows that I love Lord of the Rings, and almost everything to do with Middle-earth (the "almost" only being necessary now due to the unfortunate existence of the Hobbit movie trilogy... shudder). For a long time, the very idea of cracking open a history book was about as exciting to me as watching Nascar - unless you like Nascar, in which case, insert your own analogy here.
I think the only way to explain my transition from a hobbit-lover to a history-lover-who-still-loves-hobbits-very-much-and-would-probably-be-a-Brandybuck-if-he-lived-in-the-Shire, is with one word: annoyance. I have a distinct memory, sometime in the summer of 2008 or 2009, of becoming extremely annoyed by the fact that my knowledge of history was woefully incomplete. My chief source of irritation lay in the fact that although I could list a long series of "Famous Historical People," I couldn't tell you a single thing about them. Napoleon. Cleopatra. Julius Caesar. Captain America. Yes, I knew who they were, and could probably tell them apart from Michael Bolton in a pinch (though no guarantee - I am WAY too young to know who Michael Bolton is, but I hear he's pretty rad), but I really didn't know who they were, in the real sense, the Mufasa sense:
(Yes, I bought The Lion King on DVD as an adult, and so what if it is one of my all-time favourite movies even to this day. You try watching this without ugly crying.)
Anyway, one day I decided that I was sick of not knowing who Julius Caesar was and that I was going to do something about it (I am not making this up - do normal people have these thoughts?), so I strode into the nearest Chapters, kind of like this:
and did a slo-mo walk straight to the History section (this was back in the First Age when Chapters actually sold books and not just pillows with inspirational sayings like "The journey of a thousand miles begins with buying this overpriced pillow" and "The key to wisdom is to put this thing down and buy a doughnut instead" and stuff like that).
All the Tolkien books cried out to me as I walked past the Fantasy section, but I was like, "Sorry guys, but there are other fish in the sea, you know?" (But actually, they don't know, because they're books and books don't even know that there IS a sea, because they don't have eyes and can't read the maps. Books are so overrated).
When I finally got to the History section, I pretty much just scanned the shelves until I saw a book that looked like it was about Julius Caesar. It was called Rubicon: The Last Days of the Roman Republic, and the back said that it would talk about Caesar and Pompey and Cleopatra and a bunch of other fun-sounding boys and girls. Mostly, it looked like it didn't assume too much background knowledge, and wow, that Aragorn GIF is really starting to get annoying with those doors opening OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. Who writes this thing???
To make a long story short, I took the book home (after paying for it) and started reading it. It was a bit of a slog at first, but once I accepted the fact that there weren't going to be any elves or talking spiders or blue-hatted men jumping through the woods singing things like Ring-a-dong-dillo! and Hey, come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties! (OK, I know Tolkien was a genius and taught at Oxford and all, but really? Really???) I actually loved it. It answered all the most important questions I had about Caesar (ie. Why did his mom name him after a salad?) and even some of the smaller ones (ie. was a Roman general, wanted lots of power, was not super popular with the Senate, something about "Beware the Ides of March" and what in the world is an "Ide" anyway? Is it a skin condition?).
Thus began my 10-year-long-and-still-running fanaticism for history. It's been a long journey from Rubicon to medieval harvest statistics, but I'd do it all over again.*
*Except for that one book I read by a Minnesotan professor which shall remain unnamed, but basically just consisted of lists of grave goods from early medieval archaeological digs in continental Europe and went almost entirely like this: "Grave A contained thirty-three red brooches; Grave B contained 97 green brooches; Grave C contained three-hundred and seventy-two turquoise paper weights shaped like pretty seahorses" and so on. Give me the elves again, please.
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