>>> [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.
Tarsh is a prime example for the stabilizing influence of earth cults on Orlanthi society's dynamics. ;)
Lankst is not really a stable kingdom - it has hereditary warlords of a similar format as Greymane, and Kocholang tries to change this by creating a new kind of ring (sounds familiar?). It isn't very urbanized (oppidanized?), either.
> 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.
Actually, it is sort of an Orlanthi tradition that the way to greatness is in concert with something non-Orlanthi - Orlanth became King of Gods because of his marriage to Ernalda and her influences. Five of the nine original Vingkotling tribes resulted from Vingkot's daughters' marriages with non-Orlanthi outsiders. (Vingkot's sons might have taken wives from their distant kin, the Harandings, or scattered other lineages like the On Jorri.)
Umath's other sons lacked such input. Orlanth collects all kind of non-Orlanthi companions like Elmal the Rider, Mastakos the watery charioteer, or Heler. The Lightbringers are fringe Orlanthi deities at best.
Heortling culture prospered in alliance and mostly amiable rivalry with the other Theyalan Council members and subjects. The Dorastans were Heortling immigrants, it seems.
As for the evil that will most assuredly befall X: don't you think that this is sort of an established fact, in light of the advent of the Hero Wars and the history of the world's ages among the Orlanthi?
>>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.
Tarsh had a national tribe which did not follow the Alakoring rites. Aggar has many small tribes following the Alakoring tradition. We know too little about Holay or Saird to say much about their tribal sizes prior to Hwarin Dalthippa's conquest.
> The Volsaxi
> group themselves into similar sized tribes, so I have no problem
> with the 260 queens for Esrolia.
The Volsaxi are in a similar pioneer situation - they occupy a land which has just been won from a tribe of trollfriends.
The Hendriki have been described as a single tribe, or four tribes, at times. This seems to indicate much more populous tribes than anything in Sartar.
>>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.
They are practitioners of the Orlanth Rex cult, more fittingly called "Regulus". This includes both a king's magical authority over priests and a smaller tribal size than the older Heortlings used to have.
I know Peter rejects most of my Heortland material, but I still state that the end of the EWF was caused in a significant part by the influence of Alakoring's introductions into its society. By taking power from the priesthood, Alakoring's tribes lacked the necessary bureaucracy to deal with larger organisations than the current tribal size in Sartar. By almost institutionalizing conflicts between these tribelets (to Heortling standards), what little cohesion there was among the remnants of the Wyrmfriends broke apart. The twenty year advance of the True Golden Horde caused many (though far from all) of the survivors of the 1042 regicide and subsequent raid to turn tail and leave for the south. They brought with them an avenue to petty greatness for ambitious but not quite heroic clan leaders. They clustered in the less hospitable parts of (post-Dragonkill) Heortland, but let some of their influences rub off.
For about 300 years the smaller Alakoring tribelets persisted in Heortland, before the kingdom emerged even more centralized from the Kethaelan civil wars and subsequent internal clean-up (causing the second wave of Dragon Pass immigrants around 1350). Something like "four large tribes" or a Hendriki nation emerged.
I don't know how synonymous post-Dragonkill "Heortland" and the Hendriki tribe were. I've seen a map which divides Heortland into four roughly 100,000 people strong sections, not counting cities, and I think that these might be the four tribes referred to in Genertela Book. The three southern sections were marked "Hendriki".
> 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.
It seems that the Colymar set the precedent for tribal size. The Triaties of clans (tree, Hyaloring) appear to be a stab at a different organisation, possibly lacking kings, and lasting only about three generations.
> 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.
During Silver Age and at the Dawn, yes. During the Bright Empire and well into the EWF, these same tribes remained in place without spawning many new tribes. In fact, the last great wave of tribal foundations among the Heortlings before Alakoring seems to be the start of the Silver Age, when the Star tribes were formed from the scattered followers of the Lastralgortelli and a few heroic Vingkotling lieutenants adopting foreigners.
>>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.
Under similar conditions, as pioneers into formerly inhuman occupied territory.
I don't think the Volsaxi qualify as "altered from its Orlanthi basics by heavy Malkioni mercantile, religious, and social impact" (Genertela Book, p.49). This makes their being Hendriki sound more like a convention than an actual measure of core Hendriki Heortland.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #292
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