Nick Brooke:
> 1) The difference between a "weaponthane" and a "housecarl" is IMO that the
> housecarl is attached to a chieftain or king's household. Our collective
> gaming experience among the Orlanthi *surely* tells us that there are many
> more competent warriors in Orlanthi lands than those attached to leaders'
> personal retinues. Ergo, there are more weaponthanes than housecarls.
I think this is pretty much all correct: apart from the implication that 'weaponthane' is simply 'competent warriors': as others have pointed out, KoDP and the clan-gen from (draft) HW have informed us that in these contexts, it's used to mean the 'full-time' or 'professional' warriors of a clan.
I observe the following: clearly titularly, a weapon'thane' ought to outrank a hus'carl'. This is likely not true in practice, but outright reversal of this really swouldn't make any sense at all, IMO. In practice I suspect they are more or less interchangeable, but I'm also sure there are 'historical' reasons behind each term which affect the connotations of each.
As has been commented, the 'Humakt the Champion' gives the mythic basis of clans having weaponthanes, and why they're indeed at least notionally thanes. But given that it appears one can semi-routinely have 20 active WTs in a clan, it seems clear that there's a certain amount of 'thane inflation' at work here, and WTs aren't _really_ of all the social status of an actual thane, though this may formerly have been the case. (For example, the term may originally have applied _only_ to the clan champion, to posit an extreme case, and 'grown' from there.)
On the flip-side, huscarl seems to be especially associated with the households of tribal kings and the like. It could be that this term is more traditionally associated with non-clan warriors, to whom the term 'weaponthane' in the precise sense above isn't applicable. And if you consider 'non-clan'[*] warbands, such as quasi-freebooting hordes of Uroxi or Vingans, the term could be applicable there too, whereas it would seem silly for every member of such a band to be a 'thane'. Thus the term 'huscarl' may have the ring of such a type of warrior, and consequently somewhat different from the 'run of the mill' weaponthane, in a way that doesn't necessary reflect the origins of the terms.
Or to out it more crudely: if our tribe's Humakti huscarls don't rank as thanes, but are nevertheless able to administer Fatal Beatings to any given weaponthane of our penny-ante fyrd, then the cachet of the former may transpire to be superior, technicalities notwithstanding.
> -- unless you're one of
> those inbred one-bloodline clans we all joke about --
I agree we all joke about one-bloodline clans, and inbred ones: but the two vices are mutually somewhat exclusive, aren't they?
Slán,
Alex.
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