"How “historically accurate” is the Dragon Temeraire series?" Topic

The dragon parts notwithstanding. 🙄
It's Napoleonic, sort of. How much of that does Naomi Novik get right?

Most importantly, has anyone actually gamed the hot dragon on dragon action?
How about dragons vs sailing ships?

Briefly heard about the series a while back, but didn't dip my toes in.

I have never read them, in spite of the urging of brother Phil, but he loves them. But he is no expert on Napoleonic warfare.

John and others, you might enjoy A DIFFERENT DRAGON ENTIRELY, author Philip McBride, on Amazon. Giant flying Texas horned toad, and a Texas girl, dealing with the Comanche great raid that ended at Plum Creek. (Phil lives in Lockhart, basically on the Plum Creek battlefield.)

Horny toads are lizards, and they can shoot blood from their eyes. Really.

There are significant changes in the history, as having dragons as air support would produce.
Naomi does know her period naval technology and operations, but the dragons quickly take center stage (as you'd expect), so it's not like she's counting marlinspikes.
The thrust of the war is largely the same— Napoleon is out to conquer Europe— but the dragons affect the outcome of his campaigns, sometimes in completely non-historical ways.

There's a strong through-line as the English hero comes to terms with how his government treats the human-like intelligent dragons as little more than high-value "war materiel" at best, or even as slaves. This makes the question of who will win the fight both less certain and less a cut-and-dried preference for the reader. Despite being a despot, Napoleon is more egalitarian towards dragons— though of course in a tyranny, everybody just winds up equally oppressed.

I enjoyed the series despite the turn from warfare to personal conflicts. As I remember, the dragon "Temeraire's" broadside was considerably stronger than the ship of the line's. The one part disliked was that she made Nelson even more of a jerk than he was in history.

I'm told by those who read them that an honest effort was made to imitate the post-Jena reforms of the Prussian army, with the Prussians being conservative in the use of their dragons early on and much more aggressive in later campaigns--which is not quite linear warfare to columns, but…

I frankly avoid anything along those lines. I'm OK with honest high fantasy or "secret histories" in which magical creatures are real but hidden, or magic really does work, but people don't believe in it. But when I'm presented with, say, an 1870 in which Europe has an Elven kingdom--has always had an Elven kingdom--but somehow the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution all played out in an almost identical fashion, it drives me nuts.

robert, yes, it offends me as a historian too.

I assume you're referring to a widely known Elven kingdom active in world affairs, and not a secret Elven kingdom (whether secretly active in world affairs or hiding from them).

Of course, well into 1870 there were people all over the world who believed in the existence of intelligent folklore creatures, whether dubbed elves, fairies, leprechauns, goblins, svartelves, dwarfs, demons, yosei (Japan), apsaras (India), and more ( link )

And some still hold these beliefs.
In the 1890s even such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle fell for a photographic hoax featuring two young girls playing with fairies in an English garden.

Thus, a modern fantasy work featuring a historical tale where these same hidden beings are actual active, if secret, influencers of human events, is not really showing disrespect to history.

After all, many people today (including myself) attribute certain otherwise inexplicable known incidences or improbable moments to Divine action— things where no known human or natural cause can be attributed or is evidenced.

Humans have actually penetrated comparatively little of the world's surface— even land— and even less of any subterranean regions— who knows what lingers in the places we do not go?

I am not calling for a belief in fairies (I do not, except as remembrances of perhaps some forgotten, reclusive human tribal groups). But I am saying a historic tale can feature them without offending human sensibilities. History can stand the imagined existence of a "nudge" or two.

Quite right, Parzival--"a widely known Elven kingdom active in world affairs."

I was actually alluding to an RPG setting of some years back--Castle Falkenstein. There is, as I recall, an Elven kingdom somewhere near the Balkan Peninsula and an inland sea at least as big as Bohemia--a geography which must have deveated from ours geologic eras ago and a history distinct from ours by thousands of years. But Bismark is nonetheless Chancellor of Prussia, and there are Wittelsbachs ruling Bavaria.

It's a cute setting, actually. I think there are others along those lines. But I have too much training and reading in history to adapt to anything like that.

By the way, Tycho Brahe had as a servant a dwarf who was supposedly adapt at predicting the future, at least as far as the deaths of individuals in the region.
As far as I know, no-one asserted the dwarf was anything other than a diminutive human, but if one wanted to slip in a bit of fantasy revolving around Tycho Brahe's scientific endeavors, well, there's your entry!

Was he hte one with the silver nose?

That's the one— only it turns out the nose was brass.

He lost part of his nose in a duel with a third cousin at an engagement party, over a dispute over which one was the superior mathematician.
So, obviously, no chick involved— or if so, she left with the doctor who treated them.