Yes, but in The Sharing Knife they are apparently do not have the pinch-points that lead us to identify them as separate lakes, it’s more one large inland sea.
My understanding is there used to be multiple lakes but the geography changed as a side effect of the battle with the first malice.
Yep, that was my impression, too. Part of the whole “wow, that war really eff’d things up and we’re in the post-apocalypse recovery period” thing.
And of course, Gandalf criticizes Saruman for figuring that out:
'“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”
'“In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Was the Sharing Knife actually based in NA culture? I got that the general setting was “American frontier, but fantasy,” with the Lakewalkers as stand ins for native Americans, but did the Lakewalker culture actually draw from native cultures or beliefs to a significant degree?
Eh… there are some things that seem vaguely Native NA with the Lakewalkers, like leather clothing, tents, bows, etc. but honestly a lot of old cultures used that sort of thing. And the Farmers definitely had a 19th Century frontier atmosphere to them. Probably best to think “inspiration” rather than “drawing from”.
One possible drawing is the plunkin, which may have been inspired by the wapato, a staple food of Northwest Indians. Way back in the 90s (before the first book was published), I mentioned wapato* on the Bujold mailing list, which she did follow. Wapato grows in shallow water and was harvested from small boats, the same as plunkins. The two are not identical, of course, but I think there was a definite inspiration there.
*Sometimes called Indian Potato, as if potatoes were an Old World plant.
Gandalf was clearly not a spectroscopist.
Except LotR is not set in Europe, either. And pipeweed may or may not be tobacco.
So? He also used guns, the telephone, motorcars and listened to radio.
LotR is not in Europe.
I concur but some were certainly magically aided.
The geography is different, but culturally it’s a mythical past of Europe. AIUI, Tolkien’s idea was to give England a mythology. And the Shire may as well be 19th century rural England.
LOTR is set in a mythological Europe. The “new world” plants came from Númenór, a land far to the west. It was definitely not meant to represent America, though, being a relatively small island, and uninhabited before Men went there.
I don’t know if Anachronistic is the right term for this, but the alien invasion video game series Resistance: Fall of Man is an alternative history where the US is a lot more isolationist, starting from diplomatically solving the Spanish-American War to not getting involved in World War 1 to even being heavily hesitant to trade with the European powers in the 1930s. In addition, there’s no great depression in 1929 and Hitler and Stalin never come to power and FDR gets voted out in 1940 for being not isolationist enough.
The weird thing about this timeline is that isolationist America still develops an Atomic Bomb and tests it in Alaska in 1944 of all years. How exactly a heavily isolationist country that wouldn’t have the benefit of fleeing Jewish scientists from Europe nor does it have a giant war or FDRs insistence to help fast track an atomic bomb program. Nor does having an Isolationist America help out with the fact that England helped jump start the atomic bomb project in the first place by giving America their own early research in the matter.
Obviously whoever wrote the back story really wanted the atomic bomb to appear but didn’t bother realizing how no WW2 would actually completely detail that program.
And taters o’ course.
Dammit. Too late.
IIRC the first episode Game of Thrones had mural in the background of the house in Pentos were Daenerys and Viserys were staying that depicted sailing ships armed with cannons despite gunpowder not existing in the setting.
Rereading this just now, I was reminded of the scene in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies where the hoity-toity aristocrats were being served tea al fresco just before a battle. The sugar was in the form of prefect, snowy-white cubes.
IIRC, the process for making white sugar wasn’t invented until after the American Civil War. Until then, it was brown and came in small cones wrapped in paper. You had to grate the cones over your cup or whatever to get a spoonful of sugar.
When it comes to the upper class and tooth decay, I know Elizabeth I had horrible teeth by the time she was middle-aged because of her love for marzipan. And George Washington had just one tooth left when he retired from active service.
In re latent racism in Britain and the British Empire, Canada gets a lot of good press as a result of being a haven for escaped slaves before the American Civil War. (What choice did they have? Slavery had been abolished in the Empire long before the Emancipation Proclamation.) However, discrimination and segregation were very real things until fairly recent times. Even native-born Canadian blacks were denied things like seats at the theatre/cinema regardless of the ticket they’d purchased.
The 2021 video game Call of Duty: Vanguard is set in World War 2 and at one point a British character yells RPG!!! as a German soldier fires a panzerfaust at their tank.
This is one of those layered anachronisms
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The RPG-2 was invented in 1954 by the Russians, while the most common RPG the RPG-7 was manufactured in 1961.
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The Germans didn’t use RPGs as they both didn’t exist and also were Soviet weapons, so in fact someone seeing a German firing a rocket launcher at them would most likely just tell ROCKET or some such.
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I heavily suspect yelling RPG was one of those things people yelled in 90s movies that then entered into greater pop culture, as I feel in the actual military yelling ROCKET makes far more sense in fewer syllables.
So 90s dialog about a 60s weapon in a video game set in the 1940s.
The day I hear anyone in a movie or TV show set before the last few years use the term “game-changer,” I’ll pick up my cable box and throw it out the window!
Jesus, how I hate hearing that inane and much over-used phrase in just about everything now, from commercials to documentaries! 
If people knew what DD breasts really look like, they wouldn’t joke about them, because to the surprise of many, it’s more average than most people, especially men, would realize.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but there’s a blooper in “Hurt Locker” and I have no idea if it’s deliberate or not. Early in the movie, an American soldier spots an Iraqi man with a video camera, and says, “He’s probably going to put this on You Tube.” Not possible, because that movie is set in the fall of 2004, and YT didn’t launch until early 2005.
Also, in “127 Hours”, the main actor’s facial hair never changes.
I thought bazookas were RPGs?
The current processes.
White sugar wasn’t unknown in the Middle Ages, just really, really expensive.
I think their point is the actual term “RPG” wouldn’t have been common currency.