Esrolian Queens

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:11:45 +1300


Joerg Baumgartner:

>> [The Esrolian Statelets are] smaller than Tarsh or Heortland.

>Each of which have borrowed non-Orlanth traditions (and combined with
>older Heortling or even Vingkotling traditions) to grow to their size.

Well, Lankst and pre-Lunar Tarsh then.

I don't think adoption of non-Orlanthi traditions actually has much part to play in the size of an Orlanthi state and I dislike attributing the size of large states to unorlanthi traditions as this implies to me that something is rotten in the state of X and that evil will most assuredly befall X someday because it has dared to deviate from Orlanth's laws.

>> I think Esrolian Queendoms are really tribes under
>> another name which works out to roughly 260 queens in Esrolia
>> (using the Sartarite example of 26 tribes per 180,000 people).

>I doubt that the artificially small tribelets of Sartar compare to
>anything in Kethaela.

This is the first time I have seen that the tribes of Sartar are artifically small and nothing else suggests it. The Volsaxi group themselves into similar sized tribes, so I have no problem with the 260 queens for Esrolia.

>They are borrowing the Alakoring tradition which
>entered Kerofinela briefly (for about 200 years) from the north, before
>the Dragonkill sent small remnants packing.

I do not believe that the tribes of Sartar are Alakoring praticitioners given that they came from Heortland, a long established land with its thousand-year old traditions. Even if they retained some knowledge of Alakoring ways from a few migrants, it does not seem likely to me that _all_ the people that migrated north from Heortland adopted the Alakoring method of how to size their tribes.

I am aware that Joerg bases his theory on the disparity between the size of the Heortling tribes of the dawn age and modern Orlanthi tribes, but I do not find it convincing in that the Dawn Age tribes might have had a lower population density to deal with.

>Esrolia never underwent the fragmentation of Alakoring, and neither did
>the Hendriki succumb to that influence.

The Volsaxi who are part of the Hendreiki do have roughly similar sized tribes as the Sartarites do.

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