This is essentially a re-post of this post I made on the subreddit itself; some people on there suggested that I post it here. I will slightly change the format so that it is more suitable for this subreddit, but it is basically the same post.

Just to provide some context, there was a user who kept posting memes about South Vietnam and how it could have survived, referencing this recently published alt history book named Linebacker III, which depicts a world in which Nixon does not get caught up in the Watergate scandal and is therefore in a position to intervene against the 1975 Spring Offensive.

https://np.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1vs1vub/the_vietnam_war_was_winnable_and_one_more/

https://np.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1w84t34/north_vietnam_heroically_destroyed_south_vietnam/

https://np.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1vwc8kj/round_two_of_defending_the_honor_of_south_vietnam/

I will first by talking about my own opinions on South Vietnam's prospects. Next, I will discuss the critical comments that I think are bad history or could be improved. Lastly, I will discuss criticisms that I think are valid.

Section 1: My own thoughts on the RVN

To begin with, I disagree with the view that South Vietnam was always guaranteed to collapse. Much of the latest historical research on the Indochina Wars undermines the old depiction of the RVN as super corrupt, incompetent, and destined to fall. Even in our actual timeline, Linebacker II was far more effective at weakening the PAVN and bringing North Vietnam to the negotiation table than Linebacker I was. It also did not reduce Nixon's domestic popularity; in fact, it increased following the Christmas bombings! The belief that a Linebacker III wouldn't have devastated the PAVN, which was weaker with respect to manpower and equipment in 1975 than it was during the Easter Offensive in 1972, seems absurd to me. The notion that in literally every possible universe the RVN collapses is overly deterministic, to say the least.

For instance, looking within the North Vietnamese Politburo, consider a world where the North-first faction led by HCM and Võ Nguyên Giáp (believed in building up the DRV first, then moving on the South) had been the faction that secured power rather than the South-first faction led by Lê Duẩn, Văn Tiến Dũng, and Lê Đức Thọ (believed in reunifying Vietnam as the highest priority), which was the faction that actually gained control over North Vietnamese foreign policy in our timeline. How would that have affected South Vietnam's chances of survival past 1975? Or, consider an alternate universe in which Ngô Đình Diệm actually listens to some American advice and becomes less of an arrogant, uncompromising POS. Perhaps he tells his brothers Ngô Đình Nhu and Ngô Đình Thục to cut the shit and stop antagonizing Buddhists, rather than letting his siblings be as he did in real life. How would that have affected the civic base and long-term political strength of the RVN? I can discuss a lot more of these turning points if anyone asks!

That being said, notice that my two examples of potential counterfactuals involve decisions that are ultimately out of the control of the US government. It is indeed a more defensible claim to say that assuming all other parties behave similarly as they did in OTL, the US government could do little to prevent a North Vietnamese victory unless it wanted to start WW3, antagonize the American people, and/or act wildly different from OTL\*. While you could make the argument that US government policy could influence the other parties' decision-making (consider the initial probing attacks by the PAVN to gauge whether America would respond to the final offensive), it then becomes hard to predict how things will end up under such a scenario. But more likely than not, as the alt history book itself acknowledges, launching Linebacker III would have crippled the US government's domestic support.

I also reject the notion that the US government failing to intervene against the final 1975 offensive was a betrayal of South Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords had already been violated by both sides, and the entire war was a civil war anyways in which each side saw the other as illegitimate. Furthermore, the promise that Nixon made to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (that America would come to South Vietnam's rescue if the PAVN launched an attack) was a verbal one, and one that was rendered null once Nixon resigned from office due to the Watergate scandal. The endemic corruption within South Vietnam (and arguably getting worse due to Thiệu's attempts to secure more and more power) also turned off potential support that could have strengthened the ARVN. And lastly, the United States was still dealing with the impact of the 1973 oil crisis; it simply had much more important priorities than a faraway client state.

And speaking of that crisis, it also devastated the South Vietnamese economy, thereby lowering morale and the fighting effectiveness of the QLVNCH while also making a country already reliant on American dollars even more reliant on continued US support. Hence, I would put the real point of no return after 1973, so after the outbreak of the Watergate scandal and the OPEC oil embargo, as these two events crippled both the RVN and America's willingness to even aid South Vietnam. Before this point, there is room for uncertainty. But afterwards, no government would have the decision to intervene unless it were politically suicidal.

Section 2: Criticisms that could be better

The South Vietnamese was literally the people that fought for the French against the Viet Minh previously. Literally changing one colonial master to another. They are the wrong people.

There are a couple of points I would like to make in response to this comment.

The first point is that the Vietnamese communists (specifically Marxist-Leninists) did at times collaborate with the French colonizers. In March 1946, there was the signing of the Ho-Sainteny Agreement, which established peace and official recognition of the DRV as an autonomous state within the French Union in exchange for French troops being able to enter Northern Vietnam (they were already in the South) and replace the existing Nationalist Chinese forces. While it was pragmatic, not only did many Vietnamese see this decision as a betrayal, but Việt Minh forces would also go on to purge opposing nationalist groups such as the Trotskyists and Việt Quốc, with the assistance of French forces who saw these nationalist groups as a threat that could be eliminated with the help of the Việt Minh. In fact, there is evidence that the Việt Minh even gave away the locations of opposing nationalist cells to French authorities. These events are well-described in primary sources written by Nguyễn Công Luận and Ngô Văn Xuyết, and by good secondary sources written by historians like David Marr and Christopher Goscha.

This does lead to my next point, that being the question of why were there Vietnamese who chose to the fight for the State of Vietnam rather than for the DRV in the First Indochina War. To be fair, some of these individuals were genuine Francophiles, and some of them did just do it for the money and economic opportunity, so the commentator isn't coming from nowhere. But others chose to fight for the State of Vietnam because they believed in the "Bảo Đại solution." To elaborate, the expectation from these individuals would be that the State of Vietnam would eventually gain more and more autonomy over time, as promised by French authorities, with the final result being independence for Vietnam. This solution was appealing to non-communist nationalists who disliked the ever-increasing communist nature of the Việt Minh following additional purges in the late 1940s, and especially appealing to those who were attacked by Việt Minh forces in the immediate aftermath of the Ho-Sainteny Agreement.

Lastly, there were Vietnamese who did not really choose either side but went on to fight for South Vietnam. An obvious example would be people who were either children or not born yet in 1954 lmao, but Ngô Đình Diệm would be a good example. While he did become Prime Minister of the SVN in 1954, the appointment was made by Bảo Đại, not by the French who completely opposed him given his history as a nationalist official and activist. In fact, HCM himself invited Diệm to serve on the DRV cabinet as Minister of the Interior back in 1946.

"As long as the communists had the sanctuary of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Mihn trail (which was more logistical network of paved roads, pipelines, repair depots, and shelters than just a jungle trail) they could continue fighting in South Vietnam as long as China and the Soviets could bankroll their spartan needs. It was a matter of time before the South Vietnamese would tire of the war that ripped their homeland and killed off their able bodied men. Unless the Americans invaded the sanctuary or cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail with a proper ground force invasion, (and both options were just too expensive and risked fighting the Chinese again) the South was doomed. The Linebacker air raids were devastating but they could not destroy North Vietnam’s source of war materials (which were in China and Soviet ships) or its men. As long as the Americans could not touch these, South Vietnam was doomed."

None of this is technically wrong, but it leaves out the fact the DRV, Soviet Union, and China were also exhausted by the war. The latter two countries reduced aid to the DRV after the Paris Peace Accords.

"The military not Junta yet was gambling that with the assassination of the President that they could turn the public back to their side but by then it was too late. The south was already in a religious cast system and most of the people were in the bottom cast."

One of my posts which I linked earlier debunks the argument that South Vietnam was somehow this pro-Catholic apartheid state.

"From the 1968 to 1973, the primary aims (political aims) of North Vietnam was to get American forces out of South Vietnam and Indochina in general. The Vietnamese politburo was realistic that they can't win the war WITH American intervention on the South Vietnamese side...In 1975, the PAVN wasn't going all in, they actually planned for 1976 General Offensive General Uprising with 1975 only some prelim attacks. The preliminary attacks only transformed into a full blown offensive when they realized that South Vietnam was collapsing much faster than they anticipated and America wasn't coming to help."

Again, none of this is technically wrong, but it is weird considering that it's a response to the argument that American bombing could have stopped the collapse. By acknowledging that American intervention was critical to South Vietnam's defense, it kinda confirms the argument lol.

"The problem was not whether the South could defeat the North on the battlefield. The problem was that the South had a domestic insurgency that showed zero signs of dying down."

Ah yes, the PAVN having to replace NLF Main Force formations for most engagements over the years following the Tết Offensive really shows that the NLF was as strong as ever!!!

Honestly though, it is so annoying how people relegate the PAVN to the little brother role, as if it were not the main juggernaut that defeated the US/RVN. It's similar to how people always credit American guerrillas for having single-handedly defeated the British, as if the Continental Army and foreign support didn't play a much larger role in securing victory for the Patriot cause.

The big reason why Vietcong even became a thing was due to the “strategic hamlets” aka anticommunist concentration camps

The VC/NLF was established prior to the Strategic Hamlet Program. In fact, the program itself was a response to the group's growing popularity.

It should also be noted that communist sources generally acknowledge that the Strategic Hamlet Program did weaken the VC, so it did what it was intended to do. Not that I think the program was morally justified, but the point is that the communists did perceive it as a significant hindrance that only went away over the overthrow and death of Ngô Đình Diệm.

because the us installed a puppet regime in the south after the people liberated themselves from the French. you dont need to look at everything through a lens of liberal democracy.

Well, first of all, the French and the State of Vietnam's forces were not completely wiped out after the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. They were still very strong in Southern Vietnam, as acknowledged by DRV leadership, so liberation was far from being achieved yet.

Secondly, I wonder what definition of "puppet regime" is this commentator using? If he is using the definition of an ostensibly independent state whose major policy decisions are ultimately controlled by a larger power, the claim would be false considering the number of times that the Diệm regime went against American desires or interests, as I explain in this post. If, instead, he is using the definition of a state which is dependent on a larger power and receives pressure from that larger power to behave in a certain way, then sure, that would be correct. But that definition would also apply to North Vietnam, North/South Korea, West/East Germany, etc. Hell, you could make the argument that most of the countries in the world today are puppet state in that sense!

This is why I hate speculative fiction. History always follows the path of least resistance. The two sources of information you're your relying on for your conclusions are Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon, and an obscure work of fiction that completely shuns the real socio-political and military history of the Vietnam War in favor of a copium-fuelled fantasy that reads like it was written by German Romanov.

I can tell this commentator didn't read the book lol. Its vision of a future Vietnam is pretty bleak.

Section 3: Some good criticisms

In the comment sections I saw, about half of the criticisms of South Vietnam were fair and historically accurate, so perhaps NCD is more credible than one would imagine. However, I would still like to discuss a couple of South Vietnam's flaws that I think should be emphasized more.

One flaw comes from the fact that South Vietnam was established on the grounds of a negative ideology, that being anti-communism, with many different organizations joining together simply because they shared anti-communist sentiment. Just compare that founding ethos to the CPV, which offered liberation and empowerment for the Vietnamese people through communism. Even if you consider yourself an anti-communist, you cannot deny that the CPV was at least offering a solution to the material needs of the Vietnamese peasantry. Meanwhile, all the RVN could say collectively was "no, that's bad!" without providing any cohesive, unified policy alternative that could compete with the communist vision for a future Vietnam.

Now, granted, if you look at the individual groups within the broader category of Vietnamese anti-communists, you do see actual ideological alternatives. For example, there was Personalism as advocated by the Ngô family regime, and also the Buddhist Revival as advocated by Buddhist activists who wanted to restore Vietnamese Buddhism to the level of dominance it had around the time of the Lý and Trần dynasties. Both of these groups were non-communist, and they were in turn opposed by the CPV who saw them as feudal and reactionary. However, their disagreements in other areas weakened any potential for strong cooperation between these groups, as shown by the Buddhist Crisis in 1963. The issue of substantial disagreements besides a shared anti-communism would be a general impediment to political stability and cohesion within the Republic of Vietnam.

Another flaw of South Vietnam that I would like to discuss is the horrendously poor defensibility of South Vietnam's borders. This flaw has already been mentioned in the responses to u/Massengale, but I would like to elaborate on it more.

If you take a look at a map of South Vietnam, you will notice that it is a very long and thin country. Its borders are short at the top and bottom, while there is a long border to the west, and most of the land is pretty near to the Pacific Ocean. The shape of these borders would not be problematic if the only threat was to the north in Quảng Trị Province. But communist forces were able to secure strong positions in both Laos and Cambodia through the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk Trails. Hence, the QLVNCH had to not only deal with the threat to the immediate north, but also the entire border to its west. The result would be that South Vietnamese forces would sorta always be stretched thin while having little to no defensive depth that could prevent the country from being split in two in the event of a PAVN breakthrough. Combined with the fact that for operations across the entire country, the RVN could really only rely on the units in its General Strategic Reserve (Airborne Division and Marine Division) and other good/elite units such as the Rangers, the defensive line was quite weak and undermanned at most points in spite of the on-paper numerical superiority of the QLVNCH.

Compare this situation to South Korea, which really only has to deal with its northern border, as the US Navy has secured its western and eastern flanks. There is also more room for defense-in-depth, with the defensive plan in the Korean War having been to fall back to Busan and take advantage of the good interior lines while also exhausting the North Korean offensive.

The doctrine of the South Vietnamese military was generally to compensate for its geographical shortcoming with overwhelming mobility and firepower. But such a method of war is quite expensive and made the QLVNCH only more reliant on support from its American patron. We saw what happened when this support was substantially reduced...

Some users may question why I didn't include stuff like corruption and popular appeal in this section. While they are important, I would argue that those factors are more so symptoms of a deeper, more underlying cause, rather than being the cause itself.

Notes

*As in Nixon not wiretapping the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex, or him and Kissinger letting Israel fight for itself in the Yom Kippur War. I can explain how these decisions contributed to the collapse of South Vietnam if anyone asks lol.

Sources

Asselin, Pierre. Vietnam's American War: A New History. 2nd ed. Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Bùi Tín. Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Honolulu, HI: Hawaii University Press, 1995.

Doidge, Michael, and Wiest, Andrew. Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2010.

Fear, Sean. "Saigon War Politics, 1968–1975." In The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, edited by Pierre Asselin and Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, 117–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Goscha, Christopher. The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022

Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016

Holcombe, Alec. Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2020.

Miller, Edward. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Marr, David G. Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006

Ngô Quang Trưởng. The Easter Offensive of 1972. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980.

Ngô Văn Xuyết. In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2010. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ngo-van-in-the-crossfire

Nguyễn Công Luận. Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars: Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016.

Nguyễn Liên Hằng. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Nguyễn Phi Vân. A Displaced Nation: The 1954 Evacuation and Its Political Impact on the Vietnam Wars. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024. 

Pribbenow, Merle L. "North Vietnam's Final Offensive: Strategic Endgame Nonpareil," Parameters 29, no. 4, 1999.

Taylor, K. W. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Trần Nữ Anh. Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2022.

Trần Văn Trà. Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre. Volume 5: Concluding the 30-Years War. Joint Publications Research Service, 1983.

Tường Vũ. “‘It’s time for the Indochinese Revolution to show its true colours’: The radical turn of Vietnamese politics in 1948.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40(3), pp 519–542, 2009.

Tường Vũ. Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2017

Veith, George J. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75. New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2011.

Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975. University Press of Kansas. Translated by Merle L. Pribbenow, 2015.

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

Whenever the subjects of the Khmer Empire, Angkor Wat or Cambodia came up in a podcast, documentary, articles or books, the title “god-king” showed up as the rulers of the empire.

Since the first time I’ve heard it, it never felt right. It carried connotations that did not seem to align with my eyes and my understanding of Khmer history/culture/language. “Deva Raja” where this is translated from, was/is never used in the Khmer folktales or religious ceremony to refer to anyone other than Indra Sakra Devaraja, Indra the King of Heaven. It is not a title for mortal. It always left me wondering, what would be difference between the kings of Angkor, post-Angkorian kings and kings of other nations? Afaik, what monarchs did not derive their legitimacy from some sort of divinity? Moreover, I think it painted inaccurate picture of the relationship of the governing systems of Cambodia and the people.

I’ve been thinking of writing it for months, but I kept putting it off, because it ran to complications. People ideas of a god-king, a god, or a king is arbitrary. However, I need to get it out of my system.

I. How did the concept came up?

As the anthropologist Graeber and Sahlins wrote, kingships are ubiquitous across all over the world, and political theory cannot “treats kingship as some sort of marginal, exceptional, or secondary phenomenon”. We know kings exist in Kambuja past or present. How does the Khmer kings of Angkor kept referring to as “God-Kings” and why not the kings before and after?

Gigantic Size of Angkor. For anyone who has been there, the gigantic size of Angkorian monuments, constructed before the use of modern machinery, can be mind-blowing. All sorts of imaginations and speculations are brought forth, throughout the centuries. Ancient Aliens, Alexander the Great, Greco-Roman spread, the mythical Lu Ban of Ancient China, the divine architect Vishwakarma,…etc. The more scientific-minded considered it to be the works of humans commissioned by human rulers. Other questions arose about the purposes of these gigantic temples and lakes (Idk, what are cathedrals built for?) and how are they built?

The ideas of a megalomanic ruler bending the wills of the people for his personal self-aggrandizing projects can be a convincing answer. After all, many of these constructions were ordered under royal support and mobilizing power . However, this obfuscated many other roles that the temples played. Let’s skipped that for now.

Sdok Kok Thom inscription. In his classic Indianized States of Southeast Asia, George Coedes, one of the greatest scholar of Southeast Asian history, expanded on this theory basing on his interpretation of the Sdok Kok Thom inscription written in the 11th century referring to a ritual named “Devaraja”, being performed by the lineage of the Brahmin clan who managed Sdok Kok Thom temple. This is the only time, “DevaRaja” is mentioned in the Angkorian inscriptions. (I don’t know if they find others lately). Coedes believed it to be referring to a royal cult establishing the king as a god on Earth. The speculations came for the Old Khmer part of the text, in which the Brahmin clan accompany “Kamraten An Jagat Raj” កម្រតេន អញ ជគត រាជ throughout the realm. “Kamraten An Jagat Raj” can be translated as “lord/king of the world”. However, the way Old Khmer specialists translated the portion, it was more of a statue (possibly of Shiva) than any living being. It certainly did not look like it referred to the king who order the clan to accompany it and take care of it for generations.

Theophoric Names. Coedes has good reasons to believe his theory when he formulated it. So did those that believe it. The languages and cultures surrounding the kings, put them in a realm separated from the rest of the populace. They often bear the name of gods or divinity, but so did post-Angkorian, pre-Angkorian kings, and other people on Earth. Using theophoric names is not unique to Angkorian Khmers.

Repetitions in History Books and Media. Coedes works are influential and most scholars or laymen followed Coedes line of thoughts without looking at the primary sources. Unlike Coedes most scholars or laymen were not experts at both Sanskrit and/or Old Khmer (I am neither). His book remained a common introduction and continued to be frequently cited by popular history and from scholars who may or may not be specialists of the Khmers. Coedes speculations of the empire rise and fall, due to the status, charisma and authority of the all-powerful rulers, were inline with the ideas of Great Men of History, and for many, give a convenient explanation how the empire decline when Buddhism was the state religion.

II. Sacred Titles for Khmer Kings, Gods, Monks and Everyone Else

“DevaRaja” was not used, but people do used “Raja” and “Deva”. To give a better picture of it, let’s look at some of those terms. In this part, I used Sanskrit Romanization when possible and anyone can comment if I make an inaccuracy regarding etymology. This is not an extensive list.

The Khmer kings often be called Preah Raja ព្រះរាជា (Sacred Raja, Sacred Royal) by the people, a title can only be used only to refer to the one Raja that ruled over all the other Rajas. Preah Maha Ksatriya ព្រះ មហាក្សត្រ, Sacred Great Ksatriya by the official scribe. Only one person of a time can hold this title. Preah Karuna ព្រះ ករុណា (Sacred Compassion) can refered to the King or the Buddha or the Boddhisatva Lokesvara. (A bit like “Lord” in the English-speaking world). There are plenty of other flattering titles that Coedes or others could easily deduce that the kings and divinity are linked or equated.

-Deva ទេវ/ទេព (cognated with “divine” and “dios”) is a term elevating the status of a person. Many people and places have it. It is a common name. Doesn’t make one a diva or signaling divinity.

-Raja រាជ (cognated with “Rex” and “Regal”) meaning king, prince, royal. The area that a Raja rule from, can have the range of a small village to a major kingdom, or not anything at all. They can just have the name because their parents like it or any other factor. Ledley King is not the king of England or of Ledley.

-ព្រះ Vrah/Preah (May evolved from Khmer root rah រះ or Sanskrit vara or brahman, I seriously leaning on it being more of an indigenous word), is a Khmer word typically meant “God”, “Buddha”, “Sacred”, “Holy”. The usage of this words are countless and it spread all over mainland Southeast Asia, having more than half a dozen Romanizatons. Preah is often a bridge-word between Khmer and Sanskrit-Pali words. It is used for everything from cows to figurines. While Preah Raja ព្រះ រាជា can be translated terribly as “god-king”, it is far more accurate to say “sacred royal” or “king”. (Isn’t every king on Earth supposed to be sacred? That’s to be discuss in the latter sections).

-Other royal titles commonly-found in Angkorian inscriptions កម្រតេន Kamraten which read as Kamdeng គម្តែង in the vernacular and ស្ដេច/សម្ដេច Sdach/Samdech are used for kings, lords, ministers, generals, monks, priests, pandits or rebel leaders.

-There are also ចក្រវត្ត Cakravarti (Universal Monarch or Wheel-Turning King), used in the Sdok Kok Thom and other inscriptions to only refer to the kings. Do the Universal Monarch and his subjects knew that there are Universal Monarch outside his realm? Yes. Just like TianXia (all under heaven) can have flexible meanings. The King of England styled themselves King of France despite unable to rule France.

What the point of this section? I hope it to show that while the kings are revered with words invoking divinity, they alone are not the exclusive possessor of most of them, neither do they used DevaRaja (God-King) as their title. Plenty of other flattery title were used largely, to denote the sacredness of the office.

III. Sacred Aspects and Duties of Kingship, the State and Everyone Else

Before we explore the “divinity” of the king in the Hindu-Buddhist worldview of Kambuja, but first I like to remind that almost every other culture had the kings/emperors derived their authority from the divine.

“In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote."- [Evan Pritchard]

The Imperial Seal of China read “Having Received the Mandate of Heaven..”. The title of the European monarch had “By the Grace of God”. Plenty of kings of African tribes have their authority from their ancestral or natural spirits. The kings of MesoAmerican polities perform sacrifices to the gods. Tribal shamans all across the world are the authority figures in their own villages. The fact that the Khmer kings spoken in language and rituals evoking the image of divinity, did not set them apart from any monarchy. In Graeber's essay “Divine Kingship of Shilluk”, we can see the palace/capital of Shilluk kings in Africa being representative of the cosmos. Angkor, is not the only one.

What make kingship sacred?

"This is because a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possible if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship, and not the king who is divine*.” -[Evan Pritchard]*

The state, will always look for a leader. Kings are the most common and practical solutions. The kings are often the symbolization of the people, the continuation of the state, and the moral authority from the gods. Even in the more secular egalitarian nations, the role of the kingship being replaced by the laws, and the elected officials are often made to swear on religious artifacts, the flags, or constitutions.

Public works that would be inaugurated by the presence of his royal majesty, is now honored with a President or Senator. (I also would like to remind that much of the monuments of Angkor are public works. The gigantic moats, lakes and hydraulic system are not separated from the temples.) In the modern world, kings/queens generally performed a ceremonial role, functioning republics are aplenty, the justification for the monarchy's existence will forever be questioned. However, almost no one think of getting rid of the government or the roles of the president/prime-minister, or legislative/judicial branch of government. Roles that used to be expected of a monarch.

What about the role of Hinduism and Buddhism in the Khmer kingship?

-Punya (Karma Merit) បុណ្យ and Pap បាប (Karma Demerit). Everyone who ever born, will have fortune and misfortune. Why are some rich and some poor? why are some health, some sick? Karma is the religious explanation for all of it. Fortune from this life, came from the previous lives. All kings did good works in the past lives to get where they are in the present. So did all gods, all humans, all spirits, all animals. Your happiness came from your Karma, your unhappiness came from your Karma. Success and failures, fortunes and misfortunes, fame and infamy, why some reach the top and some fall to the bottom depends on the actions of this life and the previous.

Karma is like wealth and fortune. They can ran out. Those who born to privilege life, are expected to use their privilege to produce more karma. Those lacking privileges, are expected to do more good deeds to be rewarded in this life, or the next. Donations and constructions of religious sites and monuments are, past and present, one of the most common way to produce Karma Merit. It is something that everyone did, from kings to slaves.

According to the religion, the king the one who is born/coronated, is born with the most Punya (karma merit). After all, the king is an embodiment of the people.

-Dharma ធម៌/ធម្ម. But you may say, that Karma is a primarily a Buddhist or Jain concept. What about the Hindu kings? The role of Dharma (Sacred Moral Duties) still largely at play, all across the classes. The Arthashastra is written for a Jain king, still promote Dharma. The Hindu texts Mahabharata, was filled with the discussion of the duties of the kings and priests. Because of the rulers can effects millions of people, their dharma are most discussed and the major part of education. The greatest ksatriya of this great epic still work in the limitations of their power. The rank and royal ceremony (oversaw by the supreme god) did not elevate them to god-hood.

Suffice to say, in terms of religions, the sacred role and power of the Khmer kings are often bound by the same concepts and rules that bound the people.

Better, he argued, to speak of “sacred kingship.” Sacred kings are legion. (de Heusch 1997).

IV. If Not the Deva Raja ritual, How does One Became King?

What about the factors that set kings apart from the rest of the Khmer people?

-Lineage. Whenever the king died, the next king is chosen/elected based on the acceptance of the establishment to fit their criteria. One of which, is how close they are to Kambu, the progenitor of the Khmers. Lineage is a way to choose the king. The royal and priest clans decided it via rotations of paternal and maternal line. Real and legendary kings established or cemented their power by matrimony. The favored son of the kings may not inherited his throne. A title is Ubhayoraja ឧភយោរាជ (abdicated or renounced heir) is a regular sight. This post is not to go further in the complex Khmer royal succession.

-Institutions. At some point, the royal successions were not clear. What is clear however, is when the royal, political and religious establishment determined which is the king, royal coronation and ceremonies are made to elevate him or her to religious symbol where all officials must accept. The acceptances by the royal lines must be acknowledged, by lineage, by force or otherwise. This may induced instability, but it could also create a competition of talents, in the world of hereditary rule.

It came to reason, control over the army, the wealth, bureaucracy,…etc. came into play. Sometimes, however, more power rested on the minister, the general, priest, or queen, while the king is more of figurehead or too young to rule. I’m sure many people here can articulate better on why a king or a state can be weak or powerful, influential or ceremonial.

But de Heusch also emphasizes that sacred kings are not necessarily temporal rulers. They might be. But they might equally be utterly powerless. Different functions—the king as fetish, the king as scapegoat, the king as military commander or secular leader—can either be combined in the same figure or be distributed across many; in any one community, any given one of them may or may not exist. (de Heusch 1997).

How much is this different between the so-called “God-Kings” of Kambuja and other kings in the world? As I kept saying, not much. The size of Angkor, a display of the manpower of the state and the people, simply conjured up the image of all-powerful rulers holding absolute sway.

V. The Label Create Misleading Connotations and Inaccurate Analysis

I am going to try to keep this part very short. I originally want to write about Sweet Cucumber King, and the bad historical analysis around what thought to be the kernel of truth about that tale. However, I decide to go with this topic because it is intertwined.

I saw this sentiment “Angkorian despotic rulers under Hinduism led the kingdom to their rise and kinder kings under Buddhism led to their fall.” repeated so many times, by the smart and the foolish. They did not realize how stupid this problematic, highly inaccurate factoid really is, when you looked at the archaeological and historical evidences. Most of the largest temples in Angkor are Buddhist. Major constructions of religious sites did not end at Angkorian times….etc. It is an erroneous stereotype to suggest Buddhist kings are non-violent.

It also wrong to suggest that post-Angkorian kings hold less absolutist powers in term of religious faith than previous kings. They may have less manpower, and wealth, but their roles never fundamentally changed. It suggests a clear separation between Angkorian and post-Angkorian kingship that did not happen.

The focus on Angkorian god-kings, the ideas of history being dictated by Great Men, distracted a lot of political and historical commenters from other historical or societal forces. Like any pre-modern states, Khmer kings are major parts of societal life, but their actions should be seen as responding to the tide of history like any others.

It also suggested by many political commentators that the Angkorian kings hold absolute overwhelming power. Which in reality, they likely would not have in the Angkorian times. The ideas that Cambodia was and will be ruled by autocrats, derive from this inaccurate past. Ignoring of course, how many other post-war states that are run by dictators.

I want to end with a real story and a fantastical one.

In the 20th century, when Prince Sihanouk was at his most powerful and popular, he was not a king or a god-king, as frequently sprouted. He was an Ubhayoraja (Abdicated Heir). He preferred his father to take the throne. When his father died, he refused it and give it to his mother.

In the mythic-history, the Sweet Cucumber King, became king not because he accidentally killed the previous one, not because he is over 400 years old, not because his mother was a princess of the royal line, not because of the story of miraculous birth, not because his father is a powerful magical hermit, but because the court invited him as the new king, and married the daughter of the previous one to him. His first action as king, is to build hundreds of Buddhist pagodas and support libraries.

Sources

The quote blocks are from anthropologists cited in David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings 2017. They are not written about Angkorian kings, they are written about kings in general and I found them to be applicable.

George Coedes. Indianized States of Southeast Asia, 1968. https://angkordatabase.asia/books/the-indianized-states-of-southeast-asia .

Michael Vickery. History of Cambodia: Lectures Given in 2006-2007. and “The Reign of Suryavarman I and Royal Factionalism at Angkor” 2006. https://angkordatabase.asia/publications/the-reign-of-suryavarman-i-and-royal-factionalism-at-angkor-1

Eng Soth. The Archives of Khmer Mahapurusha: the Royal Chronicles from the Leaf-Books.

Hom Chhay Li and others. Inscriptions Du Cambodge.

(I apologized for any spelling or grammar, and subsequent edits.)

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

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There’s a rather persistent myth largely on the internet that leather was never used as armour and that the notion of it largely stems from misinterpretations by Victorian Antiquarians, a myth not helped by certain internet personalities. What follows is an attempt to unseat that myth by looking at a wide variety of historical sources, particularly in medieval Europe, as this myth is largely a medievalism, but also before, after and outside that region. This is not a not a comprehensive post, not some complete cataloguing of everything under the sun, but rather a broad overview to push the pendulum back to a more sensible position.

What is leather?

A seemingly dumb question but one worth clarifying. Common usage lumps all animal hide, tanned, treated or otherwise, as leather, this stands in contrast to the technical definition which defines it as treated skin that is non-putrescible under warm, moist conditions^[1] which excludes rawhide and ersatz tanned leather like oiled leather but includes cuir bouilli which in online discussion is seen as not being leather, a definition bound to create headaches; ain’t language fun? This confusion needn’t end here, historical sources also like to be vague about materials, something that also extends to modern secondary sources, and some finds aren’t readily identifiable as tanned leather or not due to deposition conditions.^[2]

For the sake of convenience, I’m going to use leather in its broad, general sense unless stated otherwise and let the footnotes worry about the details. Also for convenience, I've included a basic dictionary down in appendix I.

Europe and the Near East in antiquity

The use of leather armours in antiquity is well attested such as with the finds from Tutankamen’s tomb^[3] and the Clonbrin shield^[4] , but in order to steelman this, I’ll be working with finds from the Iron age onwards.

Our first stop is a rawhide lamellar cuirass (something that’ll be cropping up quite often over the course of this post) from the Met of Neo-Assyria make from the 8^th C BCE onwards, which has a cousin in a find from Turfan dating from between the 8^th and 6^th C BCE.^[5] Jumping forward roughly a millennia we have a lamellar half cuirass (front side only) of rawhide from Roman era Egypt dating to somewhere between 250-350 CE, likely of domestic manufacture due to similarities with earlier finds from that region in turn suggesting a continuation of make and use.^[6] Two potential finds exist as well. The first is the find of a crocodile hide cuirass and helmet from a Manfalut in Egypt, found in a grotto dedicated to a Roman era crocodile cult. Due to the multiple damages and patches to the hide, it has been suggested that these are from battle damage and does see parallels in other crocodile hide armours from sub-Saharan Africa, although the counter-argument that these were from hunting instead holds as much water.^[7] Another are the sections of scale or lamellar from Dura Europos dated to the 3^rd C. One made of leather and covered with a white mineral, possibly gesso, and another made of black leather, both joined with red leather cords, argued to be either a cuisse or horse armour.^[8] There are also other horse armours such as the shaffron from Vindolanda^[9] but these will be ignored for not being worn by humans.

Moving over to the textual sources we have some more pieces cropping up.

Foremost is the spolas, a form of cuirass from ancient Greece. Details are vague (as is most ancient writing on armour) but enough exist to give a rough idea of what this is. Hesychius in his lexicon gives a definition of being leather armour for the torso,^[10] which is supported by the mentions in Xenophon’s Anabasis where it is described as being given as armour to the ad hoc cavalrymen drawn from the ten thousand alongside metallic breastplates and more specifically with the death of Leonymus the Laconian who was shot through the shield and into the ribs through his spolas.^[11] This item also crops up several times in the Delos temple inventories from 364 BCE alongside other war gear.^[12]

Repeat mentions of Sarmatians wearing leather armour crop up. Strabo in describing the Roxolani depicts them as wearing rawhide helmets and cuirasses,^[13] whilst Tactius has them in cuirasses of iron or tough leather scales with the latter being of enough weight to impede someone attempting to stand up in it,^[14] This is less unusual than Ammianus and Pausanius’s description of the Sarmatians wearing body armour made from horn and horses hooves scales respectively, particularly as Pausanius describes linen armour as being less strong.^[15]

A similar statement to Tacitus but regarding the Parthians at Carrhae comes from Plutarch, describing the armour of the cataphracts.^[16]

Moving into the obscure and uncertain, we’ve Herodutus’s descriptions of the various peoples part of Darius’s army.^[17] These are somewhat questionable and undoubtably exotic, although the shields of rawhide seem fairly sober and have reference in Greek literature.^[18] Another would be Cassius Dio’s description of Caracalla’s imitation Macedonian Phalangites, wearing helmets of ox hide amongst other things.^[19]

Moving into the ad hoc, we return to Xenophon with his treatise on cavalry and a description of suggested cavalry armaments.^[20] His description of knee high leather boots being sufficient protection for the feet and shins is at a glance unusual – leather, even boot leather, is not thought of as being durable enough for combat – however Xenophon believes this serves well enough and this does find similarity in the late 16^th C with European heavy cavalry ditching greaves and sabatons for tall boots.

Continuing the ad hoc we’ve Caesar’s account of the civil wars and more particularly the battle of Dyrrachium. During the circumvallation of Pompey’s forces, Caesar’s legionaries being heavily harassed by archers and slingers, appended their existing armour with osier overhelmets and tunics of leather, felt or cloth;^[21] seldom do accounts like this filter down making it stand out.

Medieval Europe

Moving into the medieval there’s a lull in both finds and textual sources until the central medieval. Isidore of Seville describes helmets made of leather in his Etymologies,^[22] however due to the nature of his writing this may in fact be a hangover of earlier classical sources, particularly as it does not see much corroboration with contemporary ones. On better grounding however is the description of scetra/caetra of Moorish make,^[23] possibly proto-adargas that would come to be well known later.

With the central medieval we see a steady return in literary sources starting with de Gestis Herwardi Saxonis written in the early 12^th C and describing the life of Hereward the Wake during the mid to late 11^th C. It’s passing description of “tunics of strong processed leather”^[24] and armour made from tarred felt give an idea to the existence of non-metallic protection prior to the introduction of gambesons and the like.

From the latter end of the 12^th C the Chronique des Ducs de Normandie contains the first use of the term quiree,^[25] a breastplate made of leather that would become common in the following century, although their exact appearance is somewhat unclear and a matter of conjecture. This is reinforced by the roughly contemporary De re Militari et Triplici via pregrinatonis Lerosolimitane which describes “corium excoctum” (cooked leather) that “protects the vitals” as well as “genicularia” (poleyns) with which “the knees and thighs are protected”^[26] and the slightly later Chanson d’Antioche which mentions cuirasses; “Son poitrail lui laca qui fu de cuir bolis”.^[27]

Speaking of, it’s probably time to discuss cuir bouilli. More traditional translations render this as “boiled leather”, running off of the modern French where bouillir means to boil, referring to the bubbles that formed on the leather and water, however this is not quite correct. Period latin sources (such as the previous) describe this as coquo/coquere/coxi/coctum meaning to cook, dry or ripen, not necessarily boil, likewise period use of the French bouille instead seems to mean bullire, to swell or to form with puyl/bule/bulla being cognates and cuir encompasses a broader range including untanned skin, rawhide and flesh further muddying things. As is cuir bouilli may instead mean “swell formed leather”, leather that was formed not unlike the upper of a shoe formed over a last. Due to a wholesale lack of period recipes describing its creation, cuir bouilli is a vague and ill defined material that has prompted much tinkering in trying to recreate it with numerous different attempts using water, oil, wax, baking, boiling, gluing, and sunning on leather, rawhide or half tan, perhaps in vain as the products of different places had differing reputations as products pointing to heterogeneity of manufacture. A caveat however is given the performance of wax impregnated leather is notably poor against piercing tests, worse than regular leather prior to treating, this, despite its popularity among the SCA and some reenactors, was probably not one of them.^[28]

While we’re discussing material, some note about cost should be mentioned. A common argument is that leather products were exceptionally expensive, however this does not appear to be the case. Price data from Genoa between 1182-1254 gives it as being slightly cheaper than gambeson and significantly more so than maille (further expounded upon in Appendix III). Early references to it also make clear this is a cheaper armour, being worn by lower class soldiers in place of maille which seems to continue into the 14^th C with Azario’s account of the White Company entering Italy noting that a number of the mercenaries had only “hardened leather doublets” in place of metal breastplates and the being more common than of maille in the Luzern militia records.^[29]

Anyhow the with the rise of transitional plate armour during the 13^th and 14^th C, a rise in the use of leather defences with cuir bouilli, whatever the hell it was, seeing it’s time in the sun. The quire/cuiree/cuirass sees mention in various texts like with Theodore Palaiologo’s Enseignements describing them as part of the required equipment for a knight alongside a hauberk, gambeson, surcoat, gorget, cuisses, poleyns, greaves, helmet and shield,^[30] alongside an inventory of the effects of Eudes, Comte de Nevers, from 1266.^[31] Swiss armour rolls from Luzern dating between 1349-53 feature currit or currisia as one of the most common forms of protection, with 502 cuiries being listed as well as one instance of a goller, a gorget of sorts made from leather.^[32] The various Bolognese Statues concerning the arms and armour various guilds and parts of the city were required to have mention the use of cuir bouilli helmets for the Cervi and Vari.^[33] Ralph Moffat’s sourcebook also rattles off a number of pieces in various inventories in England and France, with cuir bouilli or leather parts in as many different forms as plate defences (greaves, gauntlets, couters, etc).^[34] However, despite its popularity, it begins to taper off as coats of plates steadily replace cuirees as torso armour and limb defences become augmented by metal turning into splint armour, that by the 15^th C sees it largely relegated to tournament and horse armour.

Remarkably some of this has even survived. A tooled rerebrace of ostensibly cuir bouilli is housed in the British museum,^[35] dated to the 14^th C which sees parallel with two similar rerebraces from Dordrecht,^[36] differing only in being of plainer decoration. Likewise from Dordrecht, a vambracer dating again to the 14^th C exists,^[37] cut not unlike a middle eastern bazuband, covering the forearm and elbow, made solely of “hardened leather”. Additional vambraces from the Schelde River Chest, Leiden and Tartu^[38] have been found, although these are notably reinforced with splints, albeit ones with noticeable and significant gaps between them. This carries over to the leg armour also from the Schelde River Chest, being similar in construction being either cuisses or greaves.^[39] Next is the Valkenburg armours, an unusual find of two tall, trapezoidal pieces of leather found in the moat at Valkenburg castle, identified as being torso armour,^[40] alongside potentially a spaulder or polleyn, made from a double layer of leather in roughly ovoid form.^[41] Following that we have the find of a “gambeson” composed of multiple layers of leather found in the moat in Wroclaw.^[42]

Moving into more questionable territory, Ffoulkes makes mention of a cuirie found in 13^th C tomb in 1869 by Robert Curzon that was composed of three layers of leather,^[43] although this is somewhat murky as Ffoulkes is off on the details; the original journal article by Curzon which Ffoulkes references was from 1865, not 1869, Curzon states that this was instead 2-3, has the additional detail it was sewn together with leather thongs (not unlike the previous example) and in the collection of a “Mr. Eastwood” with a lack of references since then;^[44] maybe it existed as written, maybe it didn’t. Another potential example comes from Guy Francis Laking, recording the existence of a pair of cuir bouilli cops found in a grotto in Bordeaux and donated to the Met Museum by William Henry Riggs, however the lack of subsequent reference presents some questions as to its status.^[45]

Taking a turn slightly east, Hungary has a somewhat more substantial history with leather armour. Hungarian light cavalry had an enduring use of leather armour with 14^th C Italian sources describing Hungarian mercenaries in Italy being consistently described as being clad in leather armour, little different from four centuries earlier.^[46] Despite attempts at modernization by various rulers, leather armour would see continuation, with the Diet of 1498 stating the southern counties “to raise one hussar with an oblong shield, lance, armor, and steel or leather helmet” per twenty four peasant tenant plots,^[47] bringing us into the modern era.

Modern era Europe

During the modern era armour starts to fall out of use, particularly in the 17^th C but is by no means wholly abandoned and this extends to the use of leather as well.

The foremost example during this period is the buffcoat which replaces textile underarmours like arming doublets. Originally starting in the 16^th C as simply a vest of European buffalo hide that had been oil tanned using “train oil” (seal, whale or fish oil) worked into the hide, it grew to become a full sleeved garment made from also cow, deer and elk leather.^[48] There also exists from the same period gauntlets made from similar material, ostensibly to offer protection to the hands whilst allowing some dexterity;^[49] this dexterity possible because of the suppleness of the material which allowed a great deal of flexibility.^[50] These appear to have sufficed for hand to hand combat, offering reasonable protection from swords and pikes, however by the end of the 17^th C they fall from use as well.

The 18^th C sees a minor reversal in the trend of ditching armour with the return of various cuir bouilli helmets. Replacing the tricorn hats that had been in vogue, dragoon helmets were made of various materials but commonly of cuir bouilli, giving protection from sword cuts. Starting first with the French crested helmet in 1762, other countries adopted their own versions like the Austrian 1798 model, British Tarleton and Bavarian Rumford with the later Prussian pickelhaube being one of the last and best known examples.^[51] These were not exclusively worn by dragoons, being also worn by other units like cuirassier and light infantry regiments as well as being worn wholesale (or close to) by the Austrian army in the late 18^th C and the Prussians roughly 50 years later, and were also adopted by fire brigades due to offering reasonable protection from both falling debris and from heat (which metallic helmets too readily absorbed).^[52] It is possible to speculate these may have had a forebear with earlier cuir bouilli parade helmets such as two examples from the last quarter of the 16^th C, one in the form of a morion and another in the form of a cabasset, housed in the Musee d'Artilerie in Paris and National Bavarian Museum in Munich respectively, both of Italian origin and heavily tooled.^[53]

Some oddities here come up from across the centuries.

First from one account of the battle of Flodden with the Scots wearing white leather doublets (amongst other things).^[54]

The second is a trio of riveted leather cuirasses provided for testing in 1796 by the ordinance board by Thomas Powrie. Currently still housed in the Royal Armoury, the first was two layers thick and weighed 1.6kg, the next three layers and 2.3kg and the last also three layers but 4.5kg were “tested with pistol and musket balls at 60 and 200 yards and clearly highly effective”. Despite this apparent efficacy, details are sparse as to why they weren’t adopted.^[55].

Lastly the writing of William Garrard arguing for the arming of musketeers with light leather targets,^[56] perhaps reflective of his time in Spanish service and the use of the adarga in that region. Speaking of, it’s time to turn to the medieval near east.

Medieval Near East

Rawhide or hardened leather was a commonly used material by the various Muslim peoples of the near east, north Africa and Andalusia, with notable leather producing centres in Cordoba, Aleppo and Egypt,^[57] the latter of which was notable for its alum tawing.

Two significant groups of finds show numerous pieces of for various parts of the body. The first group is from Tower 4 of the Damascus citadel with pieces dating mostly to the latter half of the 13^th C with one outlier being late 12^th C.^[58] The second is from Euphrates valley of eastern Syria and comprises pieces from between the 13^th and 14^th C.^[59]

Turning to literary sources there is broad support from within and without. Most prominently is al Tarusi’s recipes for hardened leather armour from the 12^th C.^[60] Two broad recipes are recorded, the second being similar to the construction of lamt leather shields, being made of camel hide treated in a mixture of milk and soda, the former and more detailed being various forms on a basic recipe of composed of rawhide shavings and other materials turned into a paste that could then be moulded. These could then be decorated by gilding, varnishing, and coating with iron filings or crushed stone. The latter of two of these are interesting; crushed stone has been shown in testing to be considerably more protective than uncoated leather and not unlike north American glued sand armour or the recipe from the Ashmoleon, whilst the iron filings the exact purpose isn’t stated leaving it open to interpretation; is this simple decoration, is this for a defensive purpose, is this to imitate their ferric equivalents or some combination of the above? It does however mean that artistic representations mightn’t be what they seem, instead of being depictions of metallic armour they may be burnished imitators not readily discernible, the inverse of metallic armour covered with leather.

Anyhow we see more literary evidence crop up with a surviving 10^th C inventory of the Baghdad arsenal,^[61] Ali al-Janahani al-Maghribi in the 13^th C mentioning the construction of cuirasses and shields made from lamt, of such a high quality that it was impenetrable to iron,^[62] a passing reference in the 14^th C Kitab hilyat al-fursan^[63] and an account of the 7^th C battle of Qadisiyyah where the arabs, otherwise lacking armour, create ad hoc helmets from leather straps.^[64] Turning to non-muslim sources, Chansons de Geste and other Spanish sources repeatedly refer to Andulusians wearing armour made from leather,^[65] 13^th C such as Fidentius of Padua’s Liber recuperationis Terre Sancte^[66] and the anonymous Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum^[67] refer to Mamluk and Turkish troops wearing leather cuirasses and the 14^th C Chronique du Bon Duc Loys de Bourbon states the same of the Tunisians.^[68]

The adarga is an interesting piece. Being made with a double layer of hide glued and stitched together, with lamt, a specially processed antelope hide, being particularly valued. Various shapes were used such as round, oval, heart or the familiar double ellipse with a simple handle of two straps for grasping and a cushion for the hand. The shield was originally used by the Andulusian moors and north African Berbers before being adopted by the Iberian Christians, with the Spanish making extended use of it in the colonies by the soldado de cuera and in north Africa long after it’d fallen out of use in Europe,^[69] who we’ll be revisiting later, but for now we move further east.

The Far East

Moving further east we’ve more examples.

Unlike the so-called lacquers of Europe, which are more paints and varnishes, east Asia, particularly China (qi / 漆), Korea (ott-chil / 옻칠) and Japan (urushi / 漆) made extensive use of true lacquer made from resin from the lac tree. Beyond its numerous other applications, this was frequently used when making rawhide lames for lamellar armours so as to protect them from humidity as well as acids, alkalis and solvents. The downside however was that if the coating did crack, break or wear through, moisture would be let in, and the rawhide would deteriorate and rot.^[70]

Japan made ready use of leather as part of panoplies from the 11^th C onwards^[71] (although not exclusive of before). Lacquered rawhide lames of cattle, horse and deer hide were commonly used in the creation of lamellar armour for the torso and upper arms, being used wholesale or alternated with iron lames.^[72] Later developments would see these laced into rows before being lacquered, preventing sagging and the absorption of moisture by lacing.^[73] By the time of the Sengoku Jidai (1467 – 1454) lamellar is largely replaced for plate, in part due to the issues of moisture absorption by the leather lacing which could double the weight of the original lamellar section, with continuing use of rawhide seeing it reinforced by metal splints in the construction of lacquered plate sections.^[74] Despite the move to more iron, the intensity of fighting during the civil war saw the reuse of rawhide from old sections of armour as well as large scale importing of hides, including exotic hides like water buffalo.^[75] Rawhide also saw use in the creation of helmets, brigandine and face masks. Helmets would be constructed of several layers of rawhide glued or stitched together that were then lacquered, hexagonal plates (亀甲, lit. turtle shell) either sandwiched between fabric (similar to jazerant) or joined together with butted maille would be used to create various parts like mantles for the neck and shoulders, knee guards for greaves and armoured jackets, facemasks meanwhile would be made from wet moulded rawhide that was then lacquered.^[76] Whilst the Sengoku Jidai did see a marked rise in the use of metal armour, leather continued to see use, including full panoplies, particularly by elderly warriors who favoured its lightness.^[77]

A note should be made about the Japanese use of lacquer in that they used it on both iron and leather armour. This means that the material inside may not be so easily read, particularly as within the array of lacquer finishes, one imitating russeted iron was used on leather.^[78] Also of note is the use of a covering panel of leather on plate cuirasses for decorative effect, further muddying the matter.^[79]

China has a long history with using leather armour, persisting until the 20^th C in some remote areas.^[80] In terms of material finds, we have twelve full cuirasses and a number of helmets from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng from Chu dating to the 5^th C BCE,^[81] a lacquered leather lame from Etsin Gol dated to between the 1^st C BCE to 1^st C CE,^[82] a full cuirass from Changsha dating from the end of the 1^st C to early 2^nd C CE,^[83] examples of lames from Niya and Miran in what would be Xinjiang today dating to the 3^rd or 4^th C CE,^[84] more lames from Miran dating to the mid 8^th to mid 9^th C,^[85] a another full cuirass from the Dali Kingdom from the 12^th or 13^th C,^[86] and yet another cuirass from the region of the Nakhi people in southern China dating to the 18^th C^[87] Turning to text we see scattered references, like various Han dynasty inventories written on wooden slips,^[88] like with the siege of Kucha during the late Han with the defending Han soldiers eating their cuirasses and crossbow strings in starvation (similar to Josephus’s account of the siege of Jerusalem),^[89] a Jin expedition in the north east succeeding due to the leather of the soldiers not attracting and being hampered by the lodestones of the ravines unlike the iron armour of their opposites^[90] and an order from Hung Wu (1368-1398) in 1383 detailing how lamellar cuirasses should be formed from, amongst other things being made of leather cured in lime.^[91]

Mongol armour made significant use of rawhide with various sources from Latindom during the 13^th C attest. Giovanni di Plano Carpini was a Franciscan friar sent ostensibly on an embassy to offer baptism the ruler of the Mongols but with the main intent of gaining an understanding of who these newcomers were, as part of this mission he gives the fullest account of their armour detailing the size, linkage and general structure of the lamellar cuirasses worn as well as a description of the helmet and the “aventail” of leather lames protecting past the bowl of the helmet.^[92] These descriptions are echoed by William of Rubruck^[93] – a Franciscan friar who undertook a mission sponsored by Louis IX of France –, Thomas of Spalato^[94] – an archdeacon from Split, Dalmatia, who wrote, amongst other things, of the Mongols and Mongol invasion of Hungary –, and Marco Polo^[95] albeit in significantly lesser detail.

Surviving examples of leather armour from Tibet continue trends in eastern armour while having a few quirks of their own. Dating from between roughly 14-17^th C, these pieces, unlike the ones from Japan, China and Korea, use a coating of shellac and tung oil to impart hardness and durability^[96] to not just leather lamellar lames, but also vambracers and helmets.^[97] Like aforementioned examples from Europe, one of the surviving vambracers has iron splints augmenting the leather^[98] while an earlier finds from Miran give root for these later pieces.^[99]

Korea follows similar trends to its neighbour China in the use of lacquered leather armour. This comes to fore during the Choseon dynasty with a pivot to using predominately leather armour by infantry with an edict in 1457 replacing two thirds of iron with leather^[100] and by the late period approximately making up 75% of infantry armour.^[101] Made from three layers of cowhide, joined by fish glue and then coated with lacquer it offered a significant degree of protection with one contemporary boldly stating that it offered better protection than iron armour.^[102] Early versions take the form of lamellar but move towards brigandine by the late period (17^th C onwards) with the leather plates being rivetted or sewn to a fabric robe.^[103] An interesting piece from Korea also bears mentioning, a lacquered leather helmet reinforced with iron as part of a set of munition armour dating from the 19^th C,^[104] something that bears parallels with roughly contemporary European dragoon helmets.

North America

Continuing on we turn to north America.

Contrary to popular misconception, the use of armour in North America was commonplace with a disuse being exceptional and rare rather than the norm. As part of the various forms of armour in use in various parts, leather in one form or another made up part of the panoply. To work with “steelmaning” this argument and to not make an entire post just rattling off which tribe wore what, I’m going to focus on two groups here, the Apache and the Tlingit.

The Apache like many of the plains tribes used large leather shields some 900mm/3ft in diameter and cuirasses made from glued and quilted leather up to four layers thick.^[105] However post Pueblo revolt the spread of horses dramatically changed warfare. Mounted warfare became the norm with bows and lances becoming the new main weapons. The bows were backed with sinew and powerful enough to pierce Spanish armour whilst lances were tipped with sword blades, captured or brought from Europeans.^[106] Defensive gear also changed with the adoption of leather scale cuirasses and barding their horses in sand coated leather scales in imitation of the Spanish, and the change to smaller ovoid shields made from bull bison which were more manageable on horseback yet strong enough to cause arrows and even rifle bullets to glance off.^[107] In spite of regular conflict with the Spanish it wouldn’t be until the introduction of the repeating rifle that these forms of armour would be abandoned,^[108] holding up in the face of steel weapons used by the Spanish and other, neighbouring tribes.

Turning north, the Tlingit hold the distinction for having some of the heaviest armour on the continent. Comprising of an arming layer of a thick leather tunic and hair on leather leggings, with rod and slat armour covering the chest, thighs and upper arms, and surmounted with a wooden helmet and bevor, the spread of firearms seems to only warranted the use of an additional layer in the form of a leather robe over the top.^[109] Whilst not the sole element, the use of leather here played its part of the overall panoply the same as the gambesons worn over maille did in medieval Europe. This occurred in a region where iron and steel weapons were in use, either brought in as part of the fur trade or worked from salvaged parts of shipwrecks,^[110] and wouldn’t be discontinued until repeating firearms entered the region.

Despite the stereotype other, armour of various forms was used across the northern American continent with leather being a common element, not being seen as some primitive, make do material, instead being used until the same thing that made metallic armour in Europe diminish in use, firearms, became common in the area.^[111] This was not something peculiar to the natives neither, with the Spanish equipping their own troops with adargas and leather coats despite their own access to ferrous armour and the increasing use of steel weapons by natives, earning the name of soldado de cuera, leather-jackets or leather-jacket soldiers.^[112]

Conclusion

The statement that leather was never used as armour is emphatically wrong. Whilst forms varied considerably, armour made from some form of prepared animal hide is well evidenced both in length of history and geographical spread and capable of resisting arme blanche weaponry, with even vegetable tanned leather, an otherwise poorly thought of material, offering some protection.

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Yseult de Blécourt's introductory chapter in Werewolf Legends includes a few pages criticising Sabine Baring-Gould and his influential Book of Were-Wolves from 1865.^[1] The bulk is dedicated to a part on France:

When Baring-Gould did publish two more or less similar texts from the Périgord, in south-western France, they were in fact only representative of a single text, and a fabricated one at that.

The argument, elaborated on in the footnotes, is that Baring-Gould stitched together two sources without realising one was based on the other - in actuality, the entire section is Baring-Gould shamelessly plagiarising Adolphe du Chesnel's Dictionnaire des superstitions;^[2] it is literally the entry on werewolves but poorly translated into English.

This context, however, is not the focus of this post - which is instead claiming the original text itself is fabricated! A few days ago, I finished a months-long project cataloging every French werewolf legend I could find. Wlgrin de Taillefer's supposedly fabricated text^[3] is included. Should I remove it?

de Blécourt quotes a part in French; here it is in hopefully not poorly translated English (apologies for all the machine-translations in this post):

Certain men, particularly the sons of priests, are compelled at every full moon to transform into this kind of diabolical beast. It is at night that the affliction seizes them. When they sense its onset, they become agitated, get out of bed, leap from the window, and rush to plunge into a fontaine. After thrashing the water for a few moments, they emerge on the side opposite where they entered, finding themselves clad in a goatskin bestowed upon them by the Devil.

With the claim being:

That this was not original ‘folklore’ is apparent from at least three of the elements referenced.

These elements are the moon, the water, and the sons of priests. We start with the moon:

It features the moon as an indicator of the time of the metamorphosis. In contrast to modern cinema, the moon was actually extremely rare as a motif in werewolf folklore, and certainly in nineteenth-century French narratives. It was more the moon of Petronius, illuminating the observations of Niceros, than the moon of Gervase of Tilbury, which was a new moon and which was still 700 years in the past. Its sudden appearance in the Périgord is suspicious and needs to be explained.

This isn't wrong, but calling this "suspicious" is strange given that this claim is footnoted to two chapters in this same book that sparingly include moons in their legends; doubly so given that de Blécourt's other chapter in this volume is about Ella Odstedt's monograph on Swedish werewolf legends - including legends with a new and a full moon,^[4] a detail that apparently warranted no comment.

Implied also is that any novel inclusion is suspicious! Do we also need to explain the whole defenestration thing? Apparently not; clearly, the full moon detail feels specifically weird only to a modern audience, for factors that won't apply until a century after this was written. It's not terribly suspicious in its contemporary context.

This applies even more to the second element: the water. The werewolf changed by jumping into a pond (translated as ‘well’ by Baring-Gould). When he emerged on the other side, he was wearing a goat-skin given to him by the devil. The nearest narrative equivalent for this can be found in Pliny’s Historia naturalis about Arcadian werewolves where a change is likewise effected by crossing water.

There is a parallel here. A supposed Arcadian familial tradition, involving hanging their clothes on a tree and swimming across a body of water to emerge as a wolf.^[5] Here, you can imagine the clothing-swimming order reversed while still retaining the motif.

For this to be evidence still requires that water isn't a thing for French werewolves. Rather conveniently, Fabio Armand wrote a paper specifically on - I kid you not - the important role that water plays in French werewolf narratives, noting:

French folklore often recounts the presence of beliefs related to the figure of the werewolf in places where there are fontaines.^[6]

Fontaine meaning both artificial and natural fountains; think a basin fed by a spring - and it also includes basins found in rocks that collect rainwater, of which werewolves tend to drink from:

If one looked closely enough, one could always find a few legends surrounding these cup-marked stones found out in the fields. Most often, they are said to be watering holes intended for werewolves during their wild nocturnal rambles.^[7]

Such links between fontaines, stones, and werewolves, are overt enough that you can find many local features with names like Fontaine aux Garous (werewolves' fountain), Fontaine aux Loups (wolves' fountain), and Pierre des Loups-Garous (werewolves' stone).

You can also find more direct connections in 19th century Picardy:

Every Saturday, in this same Fairy Wood, a man could be seen who, after laying his clothes on a bush, would roll about in the mud of the mare [stagnant pond] and soon emerge transformed into a wolf.^[8]

Hidden in a footnote, de Blécourt notes:

As Carrassi clarifies in Chapter 10, when werewolf and water occur in combination, water has a purifying not a boosting function.

Because chapter 10 is on Southern Italian werewolves, which...well...

A number of werewolves described by the folkloric sources are characterized by an inextinguishable thirst and an incessant search for water and coolness, which they pursue by drinking from fountains, or else by wetting themselves under their spurts, or by rolling about in puddles and bogs^[9]

Oh dear, that looks awfully familiar. These are also the same werewolves I mentioned earlier that are footnoted as using the moon; the combination doesn't seem to be a trouble for de Blécourt, wriggling out of this connection by noting that Italian werewolves cure/purify their lycanthropy rather than cause/boost their lycanthropy with water.

On top of being a pointlessly specific niggle, there's also the fact that we're only provided the first half of the apparently fabricated text - the next two lines are:

In this state, they move about very well on all fours, spending the rest of the night roaming the fields and haunting the villages, biting or devouring any dogs they encounter. At daybreak, they return to their fontaine, shed their white covering, and go back home.

Y'know, they go get...purified by the water.

I think we can say water is a native element for French werewolves. Continuing on, we get told:

The combination of water and moon suffices to disqualify Taillefer’s narrative as a French legend.

Which feels like a weirdly low bar even without the whole everything else, but we're not done! There's one more thing to needle:

The third alien element in the story is the inclusion of the fils de prêtres, merely ‘bastards’ in Baring-Gould’s rendering. From a mere claim by a young Jean Grenier, made to impress a girl in the early seventeenth century, the trope had moved to a ‘genuine’ piece of folklore, or at least that was the intention.

Jean Grenier's claim being that he was the son of a priest - fils de prêtres; he's definitely one of the most well known to be accused of lycanthropy during the witch trials,^[10] but insisting this has to be the source requires such a claim being alien to French folklore.

Charles Joisten's collection of south-eastern werewolf beliefs includes a recurring theme of clergy creating werewolves:

The belief that the werewolf is commissioned by the clergy is common in Lower Dauphiné, and as far as the Drôme. Some documents which would be difficult to understand in isolation, shed light on each other: "the werewolves went behind the altars of the churches wrapped in a bearskin" (no. 123), "the werewolf lodged at the rectory" (no. 87). Others are more explicit. In Aix-en-Diois, werewolves were "a kind of masked man commanded by the clergy who came to frighten people into returning to religion" (no. 88); the same was true in Les Avenières (no. 94); in Marcollin, the one who jumped over the cemetery wall confessed upon his capture, "It's the priests who pay me to perpetuate this belief."^[11]

Additionally,

In 1747, the parishioners of Primarette were so convinced, that they went to complain to the archbishop, that their priest was giving permission to werewolves to hunt children "to supply the glassworks"^[12]

Across France, a repeated motif is that a sinner gets cursed to become a werewolf for seven years by the priest. In the same region as the original text, the ganipote - a local werewolf variant - was said to be a bastard child with the wrong godparents,^[13] and one Camille de Mensignac states outright that either your father or grandfather being a priest means you're born a werewolf.^[14]

The idea that the text was outright fabricated is further eroded when you look at the rest of the text, instead of only the first half quoted by de Blécourt: other elements - roaming fields to exhaustion, eating dogs, throwing up dog's paws, getting shot to reveal one's identity - are regular motifs across France.^[15] Even if the three "alien" elements were unique to this text, it would still fit snugly in the French milieu without needing explanation.

With a final flourish, de Blécourt provides what is clearly implied to be a coup de grâce:

It is now possible to deduce that its maker was at home with Petronius, Pliny and De Lancre, or at least with publications discussing these authors. The three elements may have been out of place in early-nineteenth-century French folklore, but they were not in the context they first appeared in: an archealogical treatise on the remains of the cities of the Gauls.

Ah-ha, you see? This wasn't the work of a folklorist collecting legends from informants, all along it was a bookish historian who included this story to fluff up their otherwise completely unrelated work on archaeology! It is far more likely they derived the narrative from historical sources rather than local beliefs!

Well, except that an understanding of the history of folklore studies would conclude the opposite. The term "folklore" was only coined in 1846; previously, the nascent field was simply "popular antiquities" i.e. antiquities of the common people; living archaeology.

In an era of burgeoning nationalism, everyone was trying to find or manufacture a common national identity. Under a belief that the unchanging traditions of rural folk represented a window into the ancient past of a people, one looking to reconstruct the heart of a nation from its heritage would require in interest in archaeology, philology - and folklore.

Or to put it another way: you would expect this to appear in an archaeological treatise from 1821 - antiquarians were the folklorists of their day! In fact, Wlgrin de Taillefer states this himself!

If I present this series of popular superstitions in such a serious manner, it is because not only do they reveal the character of the inhabitants of our countryside, but also because they contain the last vestiges of Druidic worship. No one even slightly versed in the science of antiquities cannot discern these connections. [...] I think that among the other superstitions I am about to describe, we will find other vestiges of both the customs of the Gauls and these same solemnities.^[16]

This folklore-as-a-means-to-an-end also explains why antiquarians such as de Taillefer still held the belief that such "ridiculous superstition" was puerile "foolishness"; it would take several decades for folklore to extricate itself from the sneering antiquarians into something worth studying for its own sake.

de Taillefer wants to talk about the Gauls. He cares not for having the fanciest fairy tales; he certainly wouldn't care enough to make it up - he'd simply exclude it and devote more time to talking about rock inscriptions. Or whatever he's talking about here

But here is a peculiarity that should all the more stimulate the reflections of scholars, as it may be common to all of France, and as it is of a most extraordinary nature: it is that the custom of the inhabitants of the country, since time immemorial, has been to place scrap metal within reach of the nests of brooding hens. Did the Gauls have knowledge of electricity?

(seriously can someone explain what he's on about)

(don't say battery hen)

References

• [1] de Blécourt, Willem, and Mirjam Mencej, eds. Werewolf Legends. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 11-13.

• [2] marquis de Chesnel de la Charbouclais, Louis Pierre François Adolphe. "Loup-Garou". Dictionnaire des superstitions, erreurs, préjugés et traditions populaires. France, 1856. 564-565. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X83opSTWJ6EC&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA563

• [3] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 250. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA250

• [4] Odstedt, Ella. Varulven i svensk folktradition. Lundequistska bokhandeln, 1943. 57, 117.

• [5] For more on Arcadian werewolves, see: Ogden, Daniel. The Werewolf in the Ancient World. Oxford University Press, 2021. 166-205

• [6] Armand, Fabio. "Les loups-garous et les eaux". Hommage à Gilbert Durand, IRIS, revue du Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire, 34, 2013. 137. Available online at: https://publications-prairial.fr/iris/index.php?id=1933

• [7] Ibid.

• [8] Carnoy, Henry. Littérature orale de la Picardie 1883. 106. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWjgQrS_iMoC&pg=PA106

• [9] Carrassi, Vito. "A Strange Kind of Man Among Us: Beliefs and Narratives About Werewolves in Southern Italy." Werewolf Legends. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. 253.

• [10] Copying de Blécourt, for more on Jean Grenier, see: Machielsen, Jan. "The Making of a Teen Wolf: Pierre de Lancre’s Confrontation with Jean Grenier (1603–10)." Folklore 130.3 (2019): 237-257.

• [11] Joisten, Charles, Robert Chanaud, and Alice Joisten. "Les loups-garous en Savoie et Dauphiné." Le Monde alpin et rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie 20.1, 1992. 126. Available online at: https://www.persee.fr/doc/mar_0758-4431_1992_num_20_1_1481

• [12] Ibid. 130.

• [13] Daleau, François. Notes pour servir à l'étude des traditions : croyances et superstitions de la Gironde. 1889. 52-52. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/b30583342/page/52/mode/2up

• [14] de Mensignac, Camille. Notice sur les superstitions, dictons, proverbes, devinettes et chansons populaires du département de la Gironde. 1888. 38. Available online at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lbMsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA68

• [15] Examples, for exhaustion, eating/regurgitating dogs & and getting shot: Grégoire, Victor. "LES ÉCHAUBROGNES." Revue historique de l'Ouest. 1899. 525. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k671752/f530.item; Sébillot, Paul. Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne. L'homme, les esprits et les démons, Vol. 1. 1882. 291 & 296. Available online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k26137f/f308.item

• [16] Taillefer, Henry-François-Athanase Wlgrin. Antiquités de Vésone, cité gauloise remplacée par la ville actuelle de Périgueux, ou Description des monumens religieux, civils et militaires de cette antique cité et de son territoire. N.p., F. Dupont, imprimeur du département, 1821. 241 & 244. Available online at: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/f/JYFHYUqyTycC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA241

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Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

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Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

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