#(but to be entirely clear cousin incest is still v much seen as incest in inuit culture)

[tyrannuspitch]

okay let me tell you a few facts about this historical novel i'm reading.

inuit mythology is canonically Real

one of the first inuit myths we're told is one of sibling incest and rape

norse mythology is also canonically Real

the inuit pantheon has apparently been misunderstood in norse culture as the jotnar, and therefore, loki was born among the inuit pantheon

even though it's not in the myths, this writer has taken things a step in the marvel direction to say that loki was actually *raised* among the aesir, *by odin and frigg* (though it is not explicitly called as a father/son relationship)

a point is also made of loki's gender variance and bisexuality

the narrator is a third gender inuk who is compared to loki and is the unknowing subject of loki's favour

this narrator has a complicated family situation involving reincarnation and adoption by an aunt, meaning they were raised alongside a boy they call their brother, cousin, and nephew simultaneously

partly because this narrator's family was so incredibly isolated during their adolescence, there was nowhere to direct their hormones and they had an uncomfortable, unresolved mutual crush situation with their brother/cousin

the apparent endgame love interest for the narrator is a norseman formerly devoted to thor

this norseman is noted to look like thor (constantly talking about his red hair and beard, strength, rage, etc)

the narrator only spend time with and ultimately falls in love with this guy because he is useful in their quest to rescue their missing brother/cousin

the love interest spent the first few months of knowing the narrator calling them a nickname he also used for his dead younger brother

there was a weird sexual tension moment where the narrator thought they were onto something and then the love interest went "oh you remind me so much of my brother"

let me just reiterate that the main couple are loki-aligned and thor-aligned and one of them has overt canon incestous feelings and the writer made mythological thor and loki More Like Brothers On Purpose

so i hope you will understand me when i say that i am GENUINELY worried that at some point this book is going to reinvent incestuous th*rki from square one

#jaws music. #in fairness. the fucking long game here would be kind of funny #but on the other hand....... ms brodsky. mercy. please #it doesn't particularly bother me to read about incest when it's not a relationship i have pre existing investment in btw #like i don't like ppl Taking family relationships and Making them incestuous #but if it just starts off that way im just like. oh thats unfortunate! turns the page. #and to me norse mythology and marvel are v distinct things #but still. god. have i been cursed. #still the beasts pursue me. #ALSO ftr absolutely not saying the inuit thing of various familial titles due to reincarnation is Weird or Bad #just saying that given all the rest of the context the author choosing to make a character's sibling status ambiguous is... A Choice. #(but to be entirely clear cousin incest is still v much seen as incest in inuit culture)

[dwellordream]

“When the unhappy Louis VII and Eleanor settled again in France, the king listened to his respected counselor Suger, who advised him to forgive and forget, and to resume a normal married life. The character of the couple’s marriage had changed, however, and the partnership that it had been before the crusade could not be revived. Eleanor no longer had any role in governing the kingdom, and the post-crusade period of her marriage marks a decline in French queens’ influence in royal governance that would continue after her departure from Louis’s side.

With the death of Abbot Suger in January 1151, no one at court could give the king sound advice about his marital situation, and some courtiers worked to turn his mind toward setting aside his wife. Eleanor herself had no desire to remain married to Louis; her wish to separate from her husband had remained fixed ever since he had taken her away forcibly from Antioch. Giving birth to a son would have done much to rehabilitate Eleanor’s reputation, causing the French to overlook ugly gossip that had reached them from Antioch, but perhaps Eleanor was not utterly disappointed at the birth of another daughter, realizing that her failure to give birth to a son was likely to push Louis in the direction of a divorce.

The king had matters of state as well as his unhappy marriage to occupy his mind, and he had to give attention to the security of his domains. The expanding power of Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou presented a serious threat, upsetting a balance of power that Louis had worked to achieve in northern France. Geoffrey of Anjou’s wife, Matilda, the only surviving legitimate child of King Henry I of England, had been left a childless widow in Germany on the death of the emperor in 1125. Her father had summoned her to England to be groomed as his heir, and had browbeaten his barons into acknowledging her as his successor by 1127. 

The English king then looked for a suitable husband for Matilda, settling on Geoffrey le Bel, count of Anjou. She was Geoffrey’s elder by a decade and her strong personality and powerful sense of her lofty status as the German emperor’s widow ensured a stormy marriage. Yet she would bear her much younger and unloved second husband three sons, Henry, Geoffrey, and William. In 1139, Matilda had sailed to England, launching a struggle to wrest the kingdom from her cousin Stephen of Blois who had seized the throne on her father’s death. Matilda’s fight for recognition as Henry I’s heir would lead to civil war in England and Geoffrey’s invasion of Normandy. 

…The seventeen-year-old Henry Plantagenet would soon take up the claim to England’s Crown that his mother had been pursuing since 1139 against Stephen of Blois. Should Henry become king of England, his combined power as king, duke of Normandy, and heir to his Angevin patrimony in the Loire valley would present a vastly increased threat to Capetian dominance within the French realm. Faced with this challenge from Count Geoffrey and his son in Normandy, Louis VII responded by supporting the claim of Eustace, son of Stephen the English king, to the duchy and investing him with the ducal title, resulting in war on his Norman frontier against his Angevin foe. 

With Abbot Suger’s guiding hand removed, the aged Bernard of Clairvaux, still determined to take center-stage in French affairs whenever possible, intervened to negotiate a truce. The count and his eldest son came to the French court for peace talks in the summer of 1151, giving rise to a new complication in the royal marriage with Henry Plantagenet’s entrance into Eleanor’s life. During the Angevins’ visit, Eleanor’s first meeting with the young duke of Normandy took place, and she renewed her acquaintance with his father Geoffrey. 

The count, so handsome that his subjects called him “Geoffroi le Bel,” had been among the French nobles on the Second Crusade, where he had proven to be one of the more valorous knights. According to some gossips, the French queen knew Geoffrey all too well. Tales of Eleanor’s alleged adultery with Geoffrey le Bel were reported—or fabricated—many years after their meeting in Paris in writings first by Walter Map and later by Gerald of Wales, two courtiers who authored satirical accounts of Henry II’s court. …Of course, no evidence survives to prove or disprove the accusations of either Walter Map or Gerald of Wales, but they were no doubt embroidering on medieval legends and romances in which transgressing the incest taboo figured as a theme.

It seems clear that Henry Plantagenet made a powerful impression on Eleanor and that she found him attractive, his youthful vigor and boldness a seductive contrast to her husband’s meekness. The youth had only recently become a knight, dubbed by his great-uncle the Scottish king, and he had already proven himself “an intrepid warrior in the making,” taking up his mother’s fight for the English kingdom. Eleanor would have found young Henry charming and courteous, for he had received schooling in courtly conduct first at his father’s court at Angers, which has an important place in the history of courtliness, and later in England in the household of his uncle Robert, earl of Gloucester. 

…At age eighteen, young Henry’s height was average, but he had a striking, though not handsome appearance, with a ruddy complexion and reddish hair, robust and powerful looking, with powerful limbs and a broad chest that gave evidence of strength and vigor. Perhaps Eleanor had heard the legend of the Angevin line’s descent from a demon-wife of an early count who always slipped out of church before the elevation of the host, and when forced to remain during that sacred moment, mysteriously vanished into thin air. 

If so, that diabolical ancestry simply intensified Henry’s fascination for her; he appealed to her as an exciting, even dangerous personality compared to the lackluster Louis VII. Contemporaries commented on the favorable impression that young Henry made on the French queen, and her fascination with him may have been a bit too obvious to hostile courtiers. Some modern writers go so far as to declare that Eleanor fell in love with the young duke of Normandy on meeting him in the summer of 1151. Yet her decision to take Henry for her second husband would not be governed entirely by her heart, but by political calculation. 

Since he was already duke of Normandy and heir to the Angevin counts’ Loire valley lands, the youth was a near neighbor to Poitou, and Eleanor would have seen advantages in marriage to him. In addition he was a pretender to the Crown of England, for which his mother had been fighting for years. At the time, however, Eleanor may not have given too much thought to the possibility of becoming queen of England through marriage to Henry; she is more likely to have seen him simply as suitable to rule Aquitaine at her side as duke.

Although Eleanor undoubtedly felt an attraction for the youthful Henry, she may have calculated that should they marry, she—his elder by nine years— could establish herself as the dominant partner, just as she had dominated Louis VII during the first years of their marriage. Despite the introduction of a new threat to his marriage to Eleanor, Louis VII’s talks with the Angevin princes were successful. Count Geoffrey and his son realized that for victory in their struggle against the English king, Stephen of Blois, it was essential to prevent Louis from aiding Stephen, who was claiming Normandy for his son Eustace. 

…Shortly after the two Angevin princes’ visit to Paris, Louis VII warmed to the idea of the divorce long desired by Eleanor, and a decision to pursue a royal separation was reached apparently by mutual consent. It seems that the king was not unmoved by Henry’s gallantry toward his queen or by her receptiveness toward the young duke’s attentions during his August visit to the French court. Observers commented that Louis was “inflamed by a spirit of jealousy” in the last months of 1151. It is not impossible that Eleanor had gone so far as to try provoking Louis’s jealousy by flirting with Henry. Perhaps she hoped by such means to incite her husband to divorce her. 

In such private conversations as those that had inspired the king’s suspicions at Antioch, it is not improbable that she and Henry gave hints to one another of a future together. In any case, warnings from Louis’s courtiers that Eleanor’s behavior was bringing on public ridicule, threatening to expose him as the laughing stock of all Europe, would have made an impact on the king’s thinking. The first steps toward separating soon followed the Plantagenet princes’ departure, and in the autumn of 1151 the royal couple made a tour of Aquitaine that “took on the appearance of a liquidation of the past.”

Louis knew that a divorce would result in the Capetian monarchy’s loss of Aquitaine, but apparently he was reconciled to losing the duchy, for he ordered fortifications demolished and his troops withdrawn in order to make way for Eleanor’s men. The couple held their last Christmas court together at Limoges, then moved on to Saint-Jean-d’Angély early in 1152. After presiding at their last court together, they parted company, with the king heading back to Paris and Eleanor staying behind in her duchy, probably moving on to Poitiers.”

- Ralph V. Turner,  “A Husband Lost, a Husband Gained, 1149–1154.” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England

#eleanor of aquitaine #eleanor of aquitaine: queen of france queen of england #high middle ages #french #english #history #henry ii of england #louis vii of france