It used to be some ghastly kludge about Law Rune, so people have tried. I will find it out! Because we can assign rough dates to Fenela, assuming of course that the story isn't an outright fabulation...
> I think she just set the classic impossible task of fairy tales. She didn't want to marry him, but didn't want to hurt his feelings, so he gets an impossible task.
I thought about that too. But even so, the parameters required her to have much better information about the proto-Wastes than we normally give the Westerners credit for having. She knew there was a fabulous giant out there who was dead and that it would be vanishingly unlikely to ever put him back together.
Interestingly, the people who win in that story are "the Desert Trackers of the Trader Princes," which is to say there are cross-continental commercial prerogatives in the background. That part of the deal may have been grafted on much later, but these "grafts" are exactly why I'm having this freakout.
No graft, then Fenela was operating in an environment where information and some commodities passed between Auld Seshnela and the Wastes. There was a trade route, or this is the story of how that trade route was founded. This is potentially more bizarre and exciting but also a bigger headache. Because if the West with their Law Rune and tripartite triangle were even thinking about the Wastes as a joke to scare off a venal suitor, then the Block takes on new nuance.
How was old Garzeen supposed to get the pieces back to the princess in the "original" form of the story, I wonder.
> Although Fenela is the daughter of Froalar, I always read it as Fralar, which then makes much more sense. The names are so close...
Even Froalar in himself is one of those spooky cthonic figures. Could have been Ronance's second cousin by marriage. In those first days when the awful endless forest was alive with shadows and whispers and snakes, maybe word got out to some hapless Malkioni, GO TELL THE PRINCESS THE GREAT GOD GENERT IS DEAD.
Maybe that whispering snake was a friend of her stepmother's.
And old Fralar, yeah! I've been actually exercising restraint to avoid Bringing the Hsunchen Into This. Because we know from the texts that people who used to be hsunchen are now upstanding humans with a curious connection to some types of animals.
Kinda like the tribes of Waha...
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