Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

Cruising around looking for medieval stuff I ran into the Real estate listing for this castle in the Austrian Alps!

A little under four million dollars is the “negotiable” price!! Whoa!

60 or so rooms and 12 guest rooms. Can you imagine?  Anyway, wouldn’t it be the absolute coolest to actually live in a real Medeival Castle?

 One of the great things about a castle like this is that it probably has quite a remarkable history! The website tells us that it was built around 1268 and the chapel was twice consecrated by bishops who went on to become popes!

Just freaking amazing - My hallucination is that this becomes the corporate headquarters for stormthecastle.net

Anyway, if you want to take a peek or if your checkbook, unlike mine, is just bursting at the seems check it out here: Medieval Castle for Sale

If you don’t have the resources to buy a ready made, 750 year old castle you might want to consider building one yourself! This is what I did Although not on quite the same scale!!

Take a peek my castle here: The Battle Between Good and Evil

Popularity: 20% [?]

The new forum is starting to heat up and looking through the threads I found one that somebody started about mead. It doesn’t get more Medieval than mead and it really got me thinking about making some!

Mead seems to be wrapped up in our psyche as a mysterious drink that has been passed down to us through the centuries and well, I guess it is just that. And one of the things about mead is that it is written about a lot but it is not very well understood. How many times have you read an epic fantasy novel and joined the main characters in a tavern for some mead? Probably often. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about mead either so I had to look it up.

 Mead: It is an alcoholic beverage made with honey and often spiced up with other flavors like vanilla or cinnamon, and, there are plenty of variations that include various fruits like pears. The big thing to know about mead is that it is neither a wine nor a beer but mead! You have to give it its own class of drink. It is believed to have been made as long ago as 8,000 years and it was the preferred drink of everybody until wine came along. But wine was more expensive and considered better so royalty and wealthy people preferred it. And this relegated mead to the drink of peasants and common folk - until the advent of beer when they made the switch!

How is mead made?

It seems to be a simple process whereby you boil honey and water then add the fermenting yeast then let it ferment for 30-60 days. After that you bottle it then let it age for a year! Wow, I didn’t realize it had to “age” for a year. I guess I won’t be making any mead for this years Fourth of July barbecue. But if I get started soon it will be ready for next years bash! Seriously, I think I may give it a whirl. It would be fun to brew a little mead! Here is the mead thread in the forum if you want to take a peek: Mead  

Popularity: 13% [?]

eek… This is the question I had to google this morning! Seriously, I couldn’t remember her name!

 Anyway, On my hit list of things to do is write an article about the most influential women writers of epic fantasy so this morning I decided I had put it off long enough and started writing it.

It is a subject that can literally take up a whole book but to get myself to tackle the project I resolved to just pick five writers that I thought could show a nice flow of development over the past century or so.

 Anyway, the article is complete and I will be posting it to one of my websites. I will post a link to it in a future post so you can check it out.

Now, back to the author of the Harry Potter phenomenon

I have to confess that I only read the first book (when it came out) so that was quite a few years ago and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea (excuse the british pun).

And even though I am not a big fan I really do have to tip my hat to Ms. Rowling for what she has done for  Epic Fantasy. She has introduced it to the world and a whole generation of children! What more can a fan of epic fantasy ask for? I am sure that she is the primary influence behind some young writers that will some day take the world by storm with their books. It’s an almost magical thing! <- I couldn’t resist that pun!

And the threads between her writing and the writers that have come before her are clear. She openly credits some of the other writers in my essay as an influence in her own writing. As she should. Did you know that Ursula K LeGuin wrote a book in the sixties about a young boy with hidden magical abilities who goes off to wizard school?

And how the heck could I forget who wrote Harry Potter? Have I been living under a rock this past decade? Well, I guess I really need to have somebody open the portcullis and let me out of my castle keep. It’s getting quite stuffy in here.

Popularity: 18% [?]