>Any word on what happened to the Germans at the Con there?
Still (in both the English and German sense of the word) working on it. The con hasn't happened yet - thankfully, when I look on my to do list. Nice to be missed, anyway...
Nick brooked:
>>This is *terrifying*, and does far more than anything
>>else I can think of to banish the cuddly Tolkienesque image of elves from
>>the Aldryami of the deep forest.
I grew up as a Tolkien fan, and I still fail to see any connection whatsoever between Tolkien's Edhel and Glorantha's Aldryami, except a few basic real earth myths heavily distorted.
and Martin replied:
>Tolkien's High Elves weren't cuddly.
True. My favourite Gloranthan parallel to Tolkien's High Elves would be the Brithini (and add the Vadeli as the (noble version of?) Orcs...), arrogant, Western, and Immortal, and distant kin to the Western Master race. The best Tolkien parallel for the Aldryami are the Ents, but for the size. I liked the more entish presentation of Aldryami in e.g. MOB's Hut of Darkness scenario a lot better than the all-too-human representations in the Avalon Hill publications. The Broken Council Guidebook presentations (textual, and by Dan Barker) went in the same direction, away from the fairytale elf image.
>The Wood Elves or whatever were kinda fey and cute.
Those of the Hobbit. Don't judge a myth through a children's story. If anybody ever wrote a bedtime story set in Glorantha, I doubt we would recognize the gritty realm of myth we've been discussing here. (Anyone taking up the challenge? Might be a good way to prepare a new generation of Gloranthaphiles, too...) The Green (but non-coniferous) Elves of the Silmarillion are maybe fey, but cute doesn't really ring with me. Not any more than Glorantha's Aldryami, Mostali or Uz.
>(I won't talk about Tolkien's racism.)
Neither will I, but racism appears to have served as the base for quite a lot of European myths. Think of the early Irish myths...
>Despite being
>Anarcho-Syndicalist Autonomous Collectives (or maybe because of it), Aldryami
>communities are highly practical and lacking in things humans take for
>granted. Individual Aldryami (to the extent they _are_ individuals) think
>nothing of doing things which would cause great anguish for humans:
>sacrificing their friends and family, dying for the greater good, butchering
>helpless captives--that sort of thing.
Check the early Heimskringla sagas for very similar incidences among the human kings there. IMO we are too enmeshed in the post-Zarathustran monotheist mindset about human sacrifice to really understand such practices. Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac is presented as a quite normal incidence, except that Isaac was the late and only (legitimate) fruit of his loins. People volunteering to become year-kings or for similar (potential) sacrificial positions - even in Loskalmi Idealist Malkionism, and IMO a couple of Stygian sects, too - are a quite normal occurrance in Wareran Genertelan human society (i.e. everything west of the Shan Shan). Whether this is the influence of the Pan-Ga(e)an earth worship which preceded all other human civilisations remains to be discussed.
So, all the activities you mentioned above may cause grief, or even anguish, among Genertelan humans, but would be regarded as a normal facet of the cycles of life and death. I think that the Aldryami should be able to feel some individual grief and anguish, too, otherwise they'd be too Mostali-like for my taste. Or do individual grief and anguish make Aldryami suffering from these a parallel to clay mostali heretics, and finally apostates? Does the functioning Aldryami have these emotions?
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