Re: Rum and Uncanny

From: Nick Brooke <Nick_Brooke_at_compuserve.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 05:27:23 -0500



Stephen asks for more on Wenelia. The little I know, I learned eight years ago at University; it'd take a bit of hunting to knock anything into shape, but I may give it a try, next year.

> Who are the False Davids, BTW?

The "False Davids", of course, are all of those Davids who do not hold the doubled David rune. They can only use the most powerful David rune-spells on a one-use basis. Yes, David Cake is one of the (many) False Davids.

> Nick left out one important person in his list, namely himself

If you think I disagree with huge amounts of *my own* postings, you're sadly deluded. But I certainly intend to continue indulging myself here.



Peter Metcalfe writes:

> The Dwarfs of Diamond Mountains IMO in Teshnos do not see them-
> selves as cogs in the World Machine but rather servitors of the
> Cosmic Wheel (to fit in with the quasi-indian paradigm). In my
> recent piece, they are the 'ugly midgets' that tend the prayer
> wheels in Teshnos (and it is rumored that inside Diamond Mountain
> is one great big ever-turning wheel).

Cf. "Helliconia Winter", by Brian Aldiss. His wheel would fit beautifully into Peter's Teshnos...



Cristoph says some rather unusual things, but his heart's in the right place:

> I do not think that the Orlanthis are simply dark ages people.

Only Sergio seems to think this is the case; let's ignore him :-) No, that's not fair. I'll run through my quibbles and comments, and see if it gets us anywhere.

> I agreee more with Joerg Baumgartner's view that they are a
> mixture of Celts and Anglo-Saxons, which are both cultures who
> lived before the Dark Ages.

And during them, surely?

Our best sources for the Anglo-Saxons are from the Dark Ages and Early Mediaeval period. While obviously their ancestors existed before the Dark Ages, I don't believe we know very much about what they got up to then. That's my "Anglo-Saxon Settlements" period of English History speaking; Christoph and Joerg may well have been taught it from the other end in a German education, but I'd be quite surprised if there were a lot of specific sources for pre-migration Anglo-Saxon history. Tacitus' "Germania", yes, and some migration sagas, but anything else "before the Dark Ages" that doesn't come in the shape of a post-hole? :-)

Celts also lived during and after the Dark Ages; people borrowing from the Scots and Welsh are probably not backdating their cultural referents *quite* as far as your post implies.

> In the dark ages the peoples of Europe were united in deep =

> faith in god.

Well, some of the Christian peoples arguably might have been, some of the time -- and that's only if you overlook the splits between  the Greek and Roman Churches, not to mention the occasionally virulent heresies within them. You are making rather a sweeping overstatement, so I'm not going to let you get away with it. The Saxons were pagan until Charlemagne beat it out of them; the first Anglo-Saxons in Britain were pagans (worshipping their hideous gods, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday), and I won't even mention the Norsemen. Now, were all these peoples "not European"? Strange definition you must be using...

I'm happy to see Orlanthi as hybrids of Celtic (inc: indomitable Gauls, woad-painted Mel Gibsons, spike-haired warp-spasming Irish, weird crypto-Arthurian Mabinogi, bagpipe 'n' tartan Scots, and anything else that springs to mind), Anglo-Saxon (insufferably tedious poetry, rotating royal courts, wapentakes and juries), Icelandic (sagas, feuds, long-running legal battles, "the young men went off raiding that summer; when they returned..."), and generic Germanic-cum-Norse "barbarians", from Classical times (borrowing from Herodotus, Polybius, Caesar, Tacitus, etc. etc.) onwards through history for as long as we have colourful sources. And that takes us *way* out the other side of the Dark Ages:

Want to run a bit of tear-jerking oppression in your campaign? Get some of John Prebble's books -- "Glencoe", "Culloden", "The Highland Clearances" -- and see how much you can fit straight into Occupied Sartar, with clans being sold out by Chieftains and Lunars (standing in for wily lowland lairds and the English red-coats).

But maybe Portuguese history doesn't have many Celts in it: I wouldn't know. But I would hate to try defending the claim that "Gloranthan barbarians are basically Dark Age types now" -- is there really no room for Vercingetorix, Boudicca, Asterix the Gaul and Cuchulain of Muirthemne (or their multifarious ilk) in your Glorantha, Sergio?

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Nick
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