>Hmm, and in the "real world" [cattle] aren't ridden usually, although I
>did see a bison rider at a rodeo in Belle Fourche, South Dakota; bison are
>the only one of your list there that get ridden in Glorantha coincidentally.
Look at the March 1996 National Geogrpahic. There's a photo on page 25 of a bull saddled up for riding, it belongs to a teacher in Xiajiang province. It's not as unusual as it appears.
Oliver Bernuetz:
>>If the cattle
>>were really all that small then why aren't the Orlanthi hooking up
>>ordinary sized *horses* which could do the job better (even without
>>a horse collar)? Methinks the team implies rotation of the oxen
>>on the plow rather than a full component of oxen.
>Au contraire. Without a horse collar you cannot get any decent amount of
>work out of a horse. A yoke or a rope around the neck strangles horses.
> (This is due to the fact that they have much narrower shoulders than an ox
>does). Oddly enough they find it hard to do any work when they're slowly
>being strangled.
That's the orthodox opinion but A. Trevor Hodge in response to a criticism of this view (ie harnesses strangles horses) in the Letters Column of Scientific American (June 1991) says:
The view of Roman Harnessing I expressed was the standard one of current orthodox scholorship, but it has been disputed by J. Spruytte in _Etudes Experimentales sur l'Attelage_ (Paris, Crepin-Leblond, 1977). That well -documented study has perhaps not had the opinon that it should
I must say that I have not seen this book and my above comments are based on some derivative source which did not go into detail and whose name is forgotten.
So although the amount of work that could be gotten out of a horse is limited by the harness, it is disputed as to whether the harness actually throttled the horse.
>The reason they might need eight ox teams to plow would be that they're
>plowing heavy or virgin soil. My understanding is that Orlanthi territory
>is for the most part former woodland ala Northern Europe. That tends to
>mean fairly heavy soils. [...] You need a lot of oxen to pull a heavy plow
>because the yoke is an inefficient way to harness an animal. You need the
>heavy plow because the soil is so hard to turn.
And here is the nub of the problem. The Orlanthi AFAIK are using scratch plows as practiced in Roman Times. The heavy Lod-plows have not yet been adopted by them. So they don't need the eight oxen pulling at the plow. Methinks someone somewhere has fouled up.
End of Glorantha Digest V4 #318
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