Musings on "Downton Abbey"

[wyrmwwd]

Finally succumbing to the enticements of several of my friends, I began watching Downton Abbey. I devoured the entire first season in a week... this, despite the fact that there are no swords, no monsters, and no gut-churning gore. No, this is just a fabulous period piece about one of my favorite historical eras. The late 19th and early 20th

Comments

[veronica_milvus]

Well, your plot for the series is more interesting than the actual one. I've been to Highclere twice. Lord and Lady Caernarvon have a thriving business, letting it our to corporate clients. There's an Egyptology museum in the basement, collected by the Lord C who employed Howard Carter, and then you get a fabulous dinner in a flashy dining room with silver salvers a go-go. We took some Japanese visitors once and they were well impressed, but confused by the multiplicity of cutlery.

I don't remember visiting the temple bit, but it is probably out of bounds to visitors, being still in use for arcane practices...

Faeries, hobgoblins, boggarts et al were all very much spoken of by older people when I was a kid. Only half in jest.

[wyrmwwd]

There was an indigenous religion in England before Christianity, elements of which seemed to have mostly died out with the generation that was dying out in the late 19th century. One of the sources we have for this is The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries By W. Y. Evans-Wentz[1911]. He went about the rural country side and interviewed people in their 90s to see what still survived