Runes and Disruption

From: Peter Metcalfe <P.Metcalfe_at_student.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 21:39:28 +1300


Nils Weinander:

>>WATER: Known by the World Council and held by the Dragonewts

>Which is really weird since dragonewts normally don't use elemental
>magic.

But this was the first age when everything was much different.

Joerg Baumgartner:

>This comes from the initial concept, which the God Learners seem to have
>taken from the Theyalan Second Council.

The God Learners had perfectly ample runic sets of their own IMO. What do you think they wrote with?

>I find it a bit strange that they were so willing to drop their native
>deities' names - Aerlit for air, Ehilm for fire and the sun, etc., for the
>Theyalan names.

I believe the Gods' names in the GL Monomyth were the False Gods of today. Look at the False Gods Revolt - the gods there are Ehilm, Worlath and an invented one. Wyrms Footprints also talks about Ehilm being spread by the Westerners. If the God Learners had dropped the names for theyalan ones then we would see the False Gods being mentioned as Elmal and Orlanth. IMO Aerlit is a being of Waertagi myth and not a proper god learnerism.

Me>>AIR: is pretty much the same all over the world. It's derived
>>from the path Orlanth's Ring traces out over the Heavens.

>I always found this a lame excuse - why should anybody explain air by a
>constellation which appeared only quite lately in the Silver Age sky?

It's appeared before - look at the Doom Conjunction where it is displayed with the same symbol. The Starseers labelled it star #50 because it was the 50th star to appear after the Kazkurtum and they recognized it as a Disruptor of their old records.

And as for anybody explaining the aerial element by this planet, there are two possible explainations:

  1. The planet has observable features which embody the Storm Element in much the same way as Mars embodies War, Venus Love or Jupiter the King of the Gods. Since the stars are orange, I think an association with flint or the thunderstone is made.
  2. When the Orlanthi framework of their mythology was still in its early state (ie pre-great darkness), they saw the behaviour of the disruptor and took this to be an emblem of their new leader (who had brutally deposed the old tyrant) or vice versa (ie the liberator was inspired to assasinate the tyrant when he saw how the Disrupter destroyed the order of Heaven and made it better).

Pick, choose and season to taste.

>The spiral is the form of the cyclone, and in smaller scale the
>whirlwind.

But nobody knew that Orlanth blows in the form of a cyclone or whirlwind until the God Learners started their meterology experiments.

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