The Winter Sun is specifically Elmal. The Yelmalians worship their own god as the "Sun Dome", effectively a sort of intermediary to the Real Sun, who is unambiguously Yelm.
> when the Summer Sun is available as an alternative?
Just what the (heretic) Yelmalians said! The last instance of this was in the mid-16th century, but the seditious influence of the "patently superior" lowland sun god has been an ongoing thread in Orlanthi history, ever since the two cultures met (which was either in the Dawn Age, or the Golden one, depending on your interpretation).
> Is there a Yelmalio
> ceremony mid-year for saying farewell to (the manifestly more powerful)
> Summer Sun and welcoming the (relatively weak, but somehow more loveable)
> Winter Sun back?
This is more a "problem" for Elmali, and for Orlanthi in general. I don't think any one clan would actually worship Elmal and Yelm in rotation like this, it's more a matter of the Elmal clans taking the "credit" for the sunshine in the winter, when one wants all one can get, while in the summer, it's already quite hot enough, thank you, and the emphasis is very much on Orlanth worship, to fend off the (as someone aptly put it) Oppressive Heat of Yelm. And we _know_ it's Yelm's fault, as _we're_ certainly not praying for it to be hotter in summer, so it has to be those pesky Pelorians, meddling with the weather again, by praying to _their_ warped version of the Sun.
(I'm reminded by this timely Lunar/Russian parallel, that I meant to ask: Does anyone have contact information for Chris Gidlow about their person? I've no idea if he has email, so a postal address would be just spiffing.)
But it's further confused by the fact that Elmal cultists get shoehorned into playing the Evil Emperor in the rituals that require one, so there is a undeniable schizoid quality in being an Orlanthi sun worshipper. So it's not so surprising the religion's on the skids. ("Your reward for your loyalty in last season's ritual is that in this one, we beat the snot out of you." "D'oh!")
Peter M.:
> The Orlanthi at the Dawn believed that the Sun they rescued was Elmal.
Possible, but this requires that the whole Elmal myth be essentially flipped around to arrive at the modern version. (Or at least, the KoS version, conspiracy fiends.) It could also be argued that:
o The key object was "divine order", or harmony, or whatever the precise phrase the KoS myth uses to describe what's rotting in Hell with the Emperor -- in other words, the whole Sun identification is a later accretion. It hardly seems likely that the Evil Emperor was actually bodily resurrected, though -- presumably it was just a sovereignty salvaging and co-opting exercise, under this assumption.
o The object of the quest was Agricultural, not Solar -- the whole Ernalda/Flamal bit. Sun thing later, ditto.
o The purpose was "The Healing of Elmal". This seems the most contrived, though, as it least resembles the modern myth.
I presume Jeff Richard's Great Orlanth Revelation has some Light to shed on this whole matter -- or failing which, lots of Heat. After all, if we get to Invent a Quester in mid-Quest (or after the quest, come to that), then we can assuredly due the same with the Quest Maguffin.
It certainly seems likely to me that one of the reasons why, even in the modern version of the myth, multiple purposes are evident is that at the time of the First and Second Councils (and possibly to a lesser extent even during the Second Age), there were all sorts of different LBQish myths flying around, associated with different (proto-)Orlanthi tribes. By the time the Executive Commitee has arrived at Composite Myth #117, God needs a veritable mythic wheelbarrow to bring back all the stuff He's rescuing.
G'night,
Alex.
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