I have a PhD in English and I specialize in Old English (medieval, c. 500-1100). Lover of books, art, history, and all things set in outer space. I write about video games and comics for Vault of Culture and have taught courses on global medieval lit, sci fi, comics, medievalism, and the History of the English Language.
“I’m a rare book librarian. I get to touch books every single day. My colleague and I have a joke that we are Defenders of Wonder. A physical book assigns a sense of reverence to the content inside. It’s the same feeling you get when you look at a painting or hear a piece of music. And I think that’s something worth defending. And just like a book gives reverence to it’s content, I think the library gives reverence to books. The building itself is a masterpiece. So many famous thinkers have come here to study and write. Just being here connects you to that lineage.”
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting
and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm,
a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
...And a union supporter. I remember being at a UK media convention when Himself stopped by on a flying visit, and remarked (being one of very few stars then to do so) that he was a supporter of the Writers’ Guild and the strike we were then on. It made a lot of us happy (at a time when a lot of production companies were trying to usurp the narrative by casting us as power-crazed and greedy)...
Mr. Malcolm’s List, is directed by first-time feature filmmaker Emma Holly Jones and costarring Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as the titular hero. In the film, which you can get an exclusive first look at below, Dìrísù plays the dashing Mr. Malcolm, a wealthy and elegant suitor looking for a bride who meets all the qualifications he has on his list. Pinto plays Selina Dalton, a woman who helps her friend Julia Thistlewaite (the charming Zawe Ashton) get revenge on Mr. Malcolm after he rejects her for falling short of his lofty criteria.
nobledeeds-and-hotbaths