European Castles

[malymin]

Not sure how to word this...

I'm looking for information on castles? In particular the keep, which was a residence for the nobility as well as a last line of defense.

Some questions include:

• Wikipedia only talks about English, French, Italian, and Spanish castles having keeps. Did castles in northern, central, and eastern Europe not have keeps, or is this just a matter of fewer English-language sources on, for example, German, Danish, and Polish castles?
• If you know of any good diagrams or floor plans with labels of castle keeps - both the kind of "generic" cross-section illustrations you see in children's educational books (the larger and more visually detailed the better!) and of specific real-world castles. Preferably castles that actually served as fortifications in addition to residences, rather than castle-esque palaces like Neuschwanstein Castle. It's difficult for me to reconstruct spatial information with text, so visual aids are helpful. It's very hard to find good educational pictures with an image search these days, there's too much AI-generated inaccurate bloat in the results.
• Relatedly, photos or illustrations of the castle's interior.
• Who (if anyone) resided in the castle, aside from the noble that owned it and their family, and the servants? Also, more information on the duties and types of servants who would have been present in the castle.

I, um, am sorry if this is too broad. ^_^;

Comments

[msilverstar]

Do you have a time period in mind? A level of wealth? A location? A minor lord's castle in 1450 is pretty different from a king's in 800.

[full_metal_ox]

Out of curiosity, would this be for your Creatures game?

[malymin]

Heh, no actually. ^_^; That would require me designing my own metaroom, which I do not have the artistic or technical skill to accomplish... at least not at this point in time, and not to my own satisfaction.

I've uh, been on and off working on a postcanon Princess Tutu angstfic featuring Mytho, on and off for years... my Ao3 hasn't been updated in ages, but I have a bunch of drafts for future chapters I'm not satisfied with enough to publish. Because Mytho and Rue go back "into the story", the setting I'd be working in (the setting of Drosselmeyer's original literary fairy tale novel) wouldn't be the one shown in the show (the 'real' town enchanted by Drosselmeyer's story). Beyond that it's a world with princes, princesses, and knights (and thus presumably the kind of romanticized feudal setting often associated with fairytales), we don't really know much about it. Obviously this makes it free space to invent details and play around, but I do want to be at least somewhat grounded in something, instead of working solely off my limited American-ass knowledge where I've only seen castles as depicted in children's cartoons.

If I recall correctly, analysis of Drosselmeyer's attire would place him as being from the 1700's, but the style of ballet in the show (and ballet stories which the real-world creators of the show drew upon for the plot) is late 1800's, so I feel more comfortable using the latter as my benchmark for when the in-universe book that Mytho jumped out of was written. The fictional town the show is set in is also heavily referenced off of Nordlingen in Germany, so that's my other data point for trying to figure out what's a reasonable starting point for research. Unfortunately, it still feels too vague, and most English-language information on the 1800s, the Middle Ages, and "the middle ages as imagined by people in the 1800s" is about... England.

[gatheringrivers]

Are you familiar with the Scociety for Creative Anachronisms? This question would be right up their alley if you've got a local group.

SCA main website

[jazzfish]

Strongly recommend David Macaulay's children's book Castle, about the building of a fictitious English castle in Wales and its subsequent defence against a Welsh attack.

... ooh, there's a PBS special. May have to watch that myself.

[donutsweeper]

If looking for what a castle keep for a German castle might be like maybe searching using the term 'bergfried' might be what you are looking for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergfried

[beatrice_otter]

Unfortunately, pretty much all the castles still in existence spent so many centuries as residences/palaces/manor houses after their defensive use was no longer needed that the final state of the castle bears very little resemblance to what it was like when it was an active part of the defenses.

The other problem is that castles are not like monastic cloisters. Monastic cloisters followed a very predictable layout that didn't change much over time. Castles changed RADICALLY over the centuries, and also even within the same time and place, could have very different layouts, sizes, and staffing. If you don't care much about accuracy or specificity, just want something vaguely plausible, this is not a problem, of course; and it also gives you a lot of room for adjusting things to fit your preferences or the needs of your story.

To give an example, early castles tended to be a stone building with one room. That one room was everything: kitchen, dining hall, sleeping quarters for the entire household, everything. There might be a separate barn, or the animals might just be sleeping in the "castle" along with the people. As time goes on and things get fancier, you start getting innovations like "a stone wall around the castle and barn", "a basement to put the kitchens and servants and food storage in", "a separate bedchamber for the Lord and his immediate family". Then as time went on, more stuff would be added. What exactly would be added depended on the location, the purpose of the castle (who are you thinking you're going to need to fight or defend yourself from?), the amount of money the lord had to spend, the fashions of the period and location, and the tastes of the lord in question. Layouts depended on a combination of fashion, the environment around the castle, and the tastes of the lord.