I would like to offer the following exchange
God Learner : "Excuse me Mr Orlanth worshipper, why does the sun go down each evening?"
Orlanthi : "Because Orlanth killed him after an arguement, and then with some friends rescued him from hell. But because Yelm was once dead he now spends half his time in hell and half his time in the sky".
GL : "Ah, so you believe Orlanth killed Yelm too."
O : "Uh, yeah thats what I said."
GL: "Would it suprise you to know that other cultures in the world also believe this?"
O : "No, It's true!"
In my opinion the religious myths of Glorantha are legends. They are based on something that happened. The events occurred outside time and on another plane, making them hard to comprehend and harder still to organise into a rigid chronology, but they happened. The variations in the legends/myth are due to the 1600 + years of recorded time, during which various groups have had time to change the names of the involved parties, change the sequence of events, change some of the aspects of the gods involved and otherwise adapt the legend so that it becomes more relevant to their current environment.
So when these stories are related the nature of the central characters is always fixed, the story involves the sun and the wind, if the most isolated Orlanthi group in the world had never, ever encountered a person from Dara Happa they would still feature the sun as the evil emperor.
Adrian White
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