Other Journals I Read

"History is written by the victors" is a familiar adage, and it holds a lot of truth in it. But as an analysis of who specifically is writing the history, and what they're out to do, it falls a bit short.

First of all, we should acknowledge that history -- like many intellectual fields, and perhaps more than some -- really does involve standing on the shoulders of, if not giants, then at least the ordinary-sized people who came before you. Until we invent time travel, there's no way to go back and get fresh primary data on, say, the Battle of Marathon; we have a limited number of ancient sources on any particular topic, and some of those sources are probably based on their fellows, narrowing the pool even further. There are also histories we only know about because a later historian mentioned, summarized, or outright quoted those in the course of writing their own work. Archaeology can fill in some gaps, but not all of them, and not of all kinds. When we're extremely lucky, a document turns up that contains a previously unknown fragment of somebody's history, but that's rare.

So who are the giants whose shoulders we're standing on?

Some of them are, to put it bluntly, dilettantes. Some guy (it's usually a guy) with time and money decides to write a history of his current era, a past one, or -- if he's feeling really ambitious -- a sweeping account of everything up to the present moment, at least in his own land, or maybe the whole region. Or the whole history of the world! If he's writing about the more distant past, he assembles all the previous histories he can gets his hands on and synthesizes them into one narrative, maybe with the aforementioned summaries and quotations. But what does he do when those sources disagree? If he's a rigorous fellow, he'll note the disagreements and perhaps offer his own judgment on which one is more reliable. If he's not, then he'll just choose and not tell you . . . or even make up his own answer, based on his philosophical convictions and what "makes sense."

But while the dilettantes can be interesting, where I find this actually fruitful for worldbuilding is the more official end, where the Powers That Be get involved.

It's not uncommon in history, but vanishingly rare in the fiction I've read, for there to be a royal chronicler of some sort whose job is to record the events of the monarch's reign. This can be anywhere from a tool of governance ("let's look up how we handled a similar situation before") to an exercise in ego-stroking -- with those two options not being mutually exclusive! It can also be a tool of legitimization, when the chronicler's job extends past the current reign into the events that came before. A history of a dynasty burnishes the credentials of its current scion; if the dynasty is new, this may be even more important, as the chronicler lays out the arguments -- genealogical, supernatural, or what have you -- that justify why the current guy ought to be on the throne.

. . . and yes, this does sometimes mean that "history" ought to have sarcasm quotes around it. A chronicler's job is not always to record fact, but rather to create a historical narrative that favors his employer. Someone who refuses will rapidly be out of a job, imprisoned, or even executed -- and the latter two fates can also befall the dilettante who writes an unfavorable account.

But not always! While it's often true, especially in older eras, that history is written to flatter those in power, there are some fascinating exceptions.

The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty from Korea are a truly astonishing historical resource, covering nearly five hundred years in nearly nineteen hundred volumes. But even more impressive than their scale is their completeness and integrity, thanks to a well-regulated system. There were eight historians tasked with recording current affairs; the king was always accompanied by at least one and forbidden to conduct official business without a historian present. Then, after he died, those daily records and other sources like administrative accounts were compiled into an official version whose drafting and revision were overseen by ministers and scholars.

What's truly gobsmacking here is the information security they practiced. After the official account was finalized, all its sources were destroyed, to prevent information from leaking out via other routes. Sounds like a recipe for flattering revisionist history, right? Except that even the king himself was not permitted to read the official history. Only authorized historians could do so, and if they spilled anything about what it said -- much less tried to change it -- they faced serious punishment. They had so much editorial independence and legal protection that it led to a famous incident still remembered more than six hundred years later: when King Taejong fell off his horse and tried to order his accompanying historian not to record that event, not only did the historian note the fall, but he also included the order he ignored.

Furthermore, the Veritable Records existed in multiple copies held in different locations -- a security measure that's the only reason we still have the earlier volumes, since all but one copy were destroyed during the sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Making those duplicates was of course aided by the existence of printing presses: by the time the Veritable Records began, Korea had movable type. Doing the same thing in, say, eighth-century Europe would have been wildly more difficult.

If similar security measures had been taken with the text known as the Secret History of the Mongols, we might not now have the massively frustrating gap left by someone literally cutting pages out of it. The last bit of text before the hole has Genghis Khan saying "Let us reward our female offspring" -- and given that other records allow us to piece together the scale of power and influence his daughters wielded, it's a tantalizing lacuna. I await someone with the proper Mongolian chops to give us the alternate history we deserve, about one of them rising to become khatun over her father's mighty empire!

Given the interest right now in "dark academia" as a subgenre, I'm a little sad we don't have more stories about this process of making history and all the tensions around it. Whether it's the discovery of some fragmentary text that undermines the official narrative, a royal chronicler balancing a commitment to truth against the desire to keep his head on his shoulders, or a Joseon-style historian defending a priceless archive against political attack, I feel like there's real potential there!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/05/22/new-worlds-the-annals-of-history/)

Up front, I should say that "the language of flowers" is mostly bogus.

That's not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that's how our brains work.

Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine's Day. But come wedding day, you'll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.

Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it's extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits -- an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you're flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.

Or perhaps it's the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you're not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it's been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it's deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)

Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I'm not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than "it's been true for a very long time." And even if we do have a potential answer -- e.g. I've heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies -- that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.

But you may have noticed me using phrases like "one of the qualities" or "a variety of qualities." Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.

The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked -- but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.

Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they're working with the same message. I've seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we'd have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking "Do you have Horton's Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow's Floral Lexicon -- drat, I don't have that; I'll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow -- just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don't want you thinking I'm telling you to die --" It seems unlikely.

Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady's love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be "aimed" via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)

Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway's The Language of Flowers -- an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic -- lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I'm dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal "touch me not." On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn't.

As usual, though, what's realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West's City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people's time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there's attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.

And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone's garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Gw6tIH)