| abstract
| - So said LP Hartley at the start of his novel The Go-Between. Any prospective time travellers should also add the following: "make sure you get your shots before you go -- and don't drink the water. Also, pack your own toilet paper!" The fact is that while we like to think that the past was just like the modern day but with funny hats and folk music, many of the things we take for granted just weren't common -- or even available -- back then. Ye Goode Olde Days comes into play when a historical or quasi-historical work makes things much nicer than they would really have been. Usually it stems from only partly Doing The Research: they might get the big stuff right -- authentic plate armour, the right kind of architecture, all that -- but the details of life in the past can be lost. So the farm village has nicely kept gravel paths, and everyone in the medieval village lives in a lovely half-timbered house with two bedrooms and a stone fireplace. The Renaissance maiden never gets mudstains on the train of her beautiful gowns, the Roman Senator has magnificent pearly white teeth, there's no infant mortality unless the plot requires it, no one ever needs to empty a chamberpot, and horses never take a dump in the street. It falls somewhere between subtle nostalgia and outright hilarity when dealing with ages closer to modernity, like the Roaring Twenties being an age of wild parties and shiny classic cars for everyone and not just the upper classes, poverty, unemployment and pollution from coal-burning industry and railroads aside, or the Stalinist Soviet Union being a nice place where people happily work, drink, have fun and never have to worry. Wishful thinking about life in the past is also prevalent in fantasy literature, in which noble knights ride great distances to save beautiful damsels, who are never remotely bothered that their rescuers presumably smell of sweat, grease, and horse. The Other Wiki has a term with close meaning - Disneyfication. Something to keep in mind is that neither The Dung Ages nor Ye Goode Olde Days is "more" accurate than the other. The reality is that while hygiene was not good by modern standards, and living conditions were not what we'd call "comfortable" (what with the lack of air conditioning, flush toilets, and weekly garbage pick-up); neither did most people walk around barefoot, caked in filth, eating rotten food and living in tumble-down huts made of sticks. Many supposedly modern conveniences are thousands of years old: the Romans had central heating, for instance. Because it is an Acceptable Break From Reality in entertainment-- the average viewer prefers looking at good-looking people when they aren't watching a documentary, and most actors and directors aren't quite willing to subject themselves to a completely realistic version of history -- please don't add examples that are just "[Character] had clean hair/white teeth/clear skin/shaved legs/etc." Strong aversions are probably examples of The Dung Ages. See also Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be. Not to be confused with complaining about how things were better in the good old days. Examples of Ye Goode Olde Days include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)