I didn't even think your earlier post was disagreeing with my contention... Are you saying that there's a legal entity corresponding to a bloodline that receives and pays wergeld, that its received and paid by a number of individuals, according to (patrilineal?) kindship, or what?
> KoS p.250
>
> "The clan is the "overfamily" of several bloodlines..."
>
> and
>
> "The clan is responsible for overseeing marriages within its bloodlines,
> justice among them and distributing the land commonly held by them all."
I don't see how these contradict my point at all. Pretty much what I've been saying, no?
> Similarly
>
> KoS p.260
>
> "There can be no crimes against one's own kin of the bloodline".
Which simply means that within your bloodline, you deal with your own 'problems', fairly informally; between different bloodlines, alleged illegalities are dealt with by the chief, ring, and/or clan moot (as appropriate to the case); within clans it's a matter of formal law suit, which is the point where wergelds are appropriate.
> On a seperate issue KoS however suggests contradictarily that it is
> bloodlines and clans that are exogamous.
I've wondered about this, though I can't recall KoS being clear (even contradictorily...) on this. I eventually plumped for exogamous bloodlines, though of necessity marriage within a clan is a less formal thing than inter-clan marriage.
> Local prohibition probably varies
> as we are told that the triarchy method of tribe alliance through
> inter-marriage is now anachronistic (KoS p254).
Indeed. The very notion of what a 'bloodline' is may vary considerably. David's Delelans sound like they'd have something like the Irish derbhfine: not a fixed partition of a clan into distinct subsets, rather, effectively a measure of relatedness.
> Additionally I find it hard to reconcile the clan owning all of the cattle
> on the tula, for cattle belonging to a bloodline would remain one of the
> main resources used in the payment of fines.
Apart from wergeld, what does one need to be paying fines for? This is exactly why I think the responsibility lies with the clan, since it's the clan that (technically) owns the wealth necessary to pay it, at least commonly.
> KoS p251 says that they are
> the owners of herds but it does not state *all herds*, and suggests that
> reallocation of grazing is used to reward bloodlines in favour; this would
> imply that the bloodline had a use for that grazing.
But this doesn't mean that they need to 'personally own' the cattle, any more than they 'personally own' the land itself. The clan holds them in common, and usage rights are distributed. (And often may be 'traditionally distributed' the same way for generations, of course.)
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible for cattle to be personal property, but I don't see any forcing (or more to the point, fun) argument that its commonplace, and that KoS was describing anything other than usual practice.
> This would suggest
> that in addition Orlanthi bloodlines own cattle as personal property (though
> they maybe a cattle-loan from the clan to the bloodline).
This sounds muddled to me. Something can be personal property, in which case it belongs to an individual, or odal, in which case it belongs to the clan. It can't be 'bloodline property', at least not in any model I'm aware of.
> Note that KoS suggests that most bloodlines are agnatic p250 so
> the patrilineal model for weregild distribution is probably most accurate
> here.
I remain deeply skeptical. I think you're applying a analogue in which the clan is a good deal less important than in what we know to be true of the Orlanthi.
Having said all that, of course how a clan deals with inter-bloodline killings, and what it does with wergeld paid to (and payable by) it is entirely up to it. Thus it's likely to vary even more than law for inter-clan law circumstances, and its quite possible that the 'practice' is not unlike the sort of thing you have in mind. (If wergeld is paid as odal property, it still has to be 'assigned' to someone, after all: those cows ain't gonna milk themselves. So the actual kin of the victim are an obvious candidate to any wise/ compassionate/politically clued-in chief.) I just don't think there's a corpus of law that treats the bloodline as a political and legal entity in its own right, and nor do I think odal property is an inconvience to be finessed so that we can play the Orlanthi as if they had completely modern property laws...
Cheers,
Alex.
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