Thanks for the textile geeking. I just did a search and found that urine was indeed used for the bleaching process:

http://linenireland.org/history/industry/

Thanks for the clarification on the retting process.

Erin,

Well, Lord Voldymort is more of an Evil Overlord with his Death Eaters as his Legions of Terror. The Legions of Terror have been laying pretty low, however, but the only kills of theirs that I’d count are the ones he directly orders, not the ones that they do for their own amusement. Barty Crouch Jr. offed Barty Crouch Sr. more because he was in to patricide–and miffed about years of being under the Imperious curse–than because Voldymort wanted it. And Sirius Black… Well, we haven’t seen the body, so his deadness is debatable–he stepped into a door into the underworld, after all. And if there’s anyone who could claw his way back, it would be Sirius Black.

Other than that, there’s that unpleasant werewolf guy who killed a child off stage, but from the sound of things, he’d be doing that even if Voldymort died next Tuesday, so having a serial killer in your retinue, while evil, doesn’t count as a personal kill either.

Anyway, the huge stockpiles of corpses in the last book were likely personally killed by Voldymort, so I’ll go with my contention that he’s just been coasting by on his laurels for a while. Admittedly he was busy trying to come back from death and so wasn’t really going about his Evil Plot as efficiently as he might, but now that he’s back from death, I’d be happy to see him kill Uncle Vernon as part of a plot to get to Harry.

You don’t need urine to make linen. You ret (the word is related to ‘rot’) the stalks either out in a field (dew retting) or a stream or pond. The rotting flax fouls the water, though, so there were prohibitions against retting flax upstream of pastures.

You might, however, use urine to clean linen; it’s a free source of ammonia, and was used in the laundering process from Roman times onward. In Pompeii, public urinals were used to collect the urine, which was then used by the local fullers to clean fabric. Stale urine was used to “full” (i.e., slightly felt) fabrics, as in the waulking process for tweed in 19th c. Scotland, and also was used in the dyeing process for woad and indigo.

Speaking of nasty things, I believe I’ve read that dung (dog, horse and cow) was used to process leather in medieval Europe. That sounds way nastier than urine, frankly.

Do you think that a story works if the bad guy is ruthless to his own people and bends them to his will (making them do all of the dirty work of killing innocents, etc.), but the reader never actually sees him hurting any innocents himself? Does #2 apply to such a bad guy?

The whole Lord Voldemort issue has me thinking. The reader doesn’t see Lord V hurting or killing many innocent people. Instead, it’s his gang of Death Eaters that cause the deaths, destruction, and mayhem. It seems to me that Lord V is responsible for the evil deeds that his DEs wreak upon others. So could we chalk up all of those deaths to him? Or do we really need to see him personally vaporize a Dursley or two to drive the point home?

Compare that with the lavish beauty of the costuming for LotR or even Pirates of the Caribbean–those films people took their time. And actually, the Beastmaster tv series did a lot better in having outfits people might actually wear and a bit more in the way of villagers and cities.

I’m talking about the stuff that’s not part of the story but that the audience expects to see because the default assumption is “fantasy has bad worldbuilding.” That’s what the Ebert quote means.

The process for making linen isn’t any happier: urine to rot the flax stalks and free up the fibers. Leather and lace both start out with pee.

I really can’t imagine wrestling anything in a vat of urine. That’s one foul job. yiiiiick!

Here, just found a photograph:

http://www.bigshots.com.au/RWP/Morocco/MorocTP/004Fes.htm

That’s the way it’s been done for centuries and how the famous Moroccan leather is made. It also mentions how the smell not only pervades the tannery but the entire district.

If you have that much leather, it has to come from some place. If you’ve got nomadic tribesmen, they get the leather from the cities who have the tanneries and which are a market for their sheep, goats and cows.

I think you’re overthinking this. The trouble is that stories and especially the worlds they’re set in are told by inference and implication. If you have bread, it is assumed that somewhere there’s a wheat field, somewhere there’s a watermill, and somewhere there’s a bakery. However, if you characters are barbarian swordsmen or even crusading knights who’ve been riding across the steppes for nine days and someone suddenly pulls bread out of their backpack and they chow down on it, I expect a few broken teeth since it’s not like they passed a bakery or anything.

Tolkien solved this problem for his hobbitses by giving them magical elven powerbars for the quest to Mordor, but the point is, he explained what these things were and where they were coming from and moreover knew that they’d need them because Mordor didn’t have any bakeries let alone KFC.

Anyway, yes, with a pre-industrial society, especially if you show anything rural, you’re going to be showing some farming somewhere. Look at LotR. Merry and Pippin have been stealing from a farmer’s crops. Sam works professionally as Frodo’s gardener, and at the end of the book where he throws the magic Elven dirt in the air, everyone talks about what a fine harvest it was that year and how there was such nice beer after it. No, we don’t actually see the pigs or cows or even the barns, but we have enough in the way of farm fields and other bits of agrarian life shown to suggest that if you go that way, you should likely find a barn with all the usual in it, and one expects Sam has a gardening shed with various hoes and flowerpots.

It’s all part and parcel of the trouble of writers assuming horses run like cars (they don’t), too many princesses and not enough chambermaids, and various troubles you get when the closest anyone’s been to a farm is seeing their high school’s production of Oklahoma.