Marriage

From: Donald R. Oddy <donald_at_grove.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 21:59:04 GMT


>Donald Oddy writes:
>
><< Ok, what happens when two clans who have a lot of intermarriages fall
>out? What do the wives do? If they stay with their families and work
>with that clan then the family bond is stronger than clan. Alternatively
>there are two groups of women leaving their children behind to return
>to their clan because they aren't trusted. >>

From: JeffJErwin_at_aol.com

>Why would this happen? The women aren't sitting idle are they? It's clearly
>in their interest to prevent a falling out. This seems to dismiss a primary
>cultic role of Ernalda women: as peacemakers. This would involve a serious
>failure of women's magic and responsibility.
>Multiple marriages mean a stronger friendship between tribes and clans. A
>feud-ending marriage doesn't only end the feud, it is intended to keep it
>from sparking again.
>Besides, there aren't just young mothers involved, but older, respected women.
>"Shall we raid the the Red Clay clan and offend Grandmother?" I think not.
>This I think is key to the binding nature of exogamy... Sartar wouldn't exist
>without it.
>I've come around to this view after reading the many posts.

Certainly this will tend to happen but there comes a time when all this influence fails and even the proposal of letting champions decide isn't acceptable. Remember women from any one other clan will be a minority within the clan and women of the Blue Water clan may well support an attack on the Red Clay clan.

On a similar topic, what's the Orlanthi view on bride stealing? Cattle raiding is clearly OK and I can imagine the same view applies to raiding another clan for a wife. Clearly if she (or he) refuses the marriage it won't occur but otherwise it could cause immense complications both over dowery and bride price as well as a member of a hostile clan within your own.

>From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>

>It's especially dangerous to assume minimal changes, when one can see
>maximal changes within cycling distance of this very keyboard. (What
>you say may have been much truer of the slightly-less-recently-
>modern situation...)

Well my experience does go back ten years and the father was an old man then so it may have been the last of those cultural attitudes.

>> Ok, what happens when two clans who have a lot of intermarriages fall
>> out? What do the wives do? If they stay with their families and work
>> with that clan then the family bond is stronger than clan. Alternatively
>> there are two groups of women leaving their children behind to return
>> to their clan because they aren't trusted.
>
>The short answer is 'depends'. It would be unreasonable and
>unrealistic to assume a crisp answer to such cases, _whatever_
>one's view of the legal question of clan membership. Also it
>depends on what degree of 'falling out' you mean; two neighbours
>'falling out' in Sartar would be as uncommon as rain before daybreak...
>
>If a nightmare scenario like open warfare descends, then the women
>in such situations have some hard choices to make, and will more
>often than not to be heard to be pointing out, "There is always
>another way" (perhaps more in hope than in expectation).

As you were asking earlier, what is the usual result? While I'm sure there isn't an absolute rule there must be a traditional response if only to avoid a wife picking up a spear and killing a raider who turns out to be her cousin. Perhaps we need a myth to cover the situation.

>I personally think it's deeply misleading to think of land as being
>'owned' at all in anything like a modern sense. Clans occupy it;
>groups within the clan are assigned the rights to work it. That's
>the gist of it... No 'title' to the land could be bought, sold,
>or otherwise obtained by any means other than "It's been our tula
>these generations past, and besides, it has our weaponthanes all
>over it". But that's a semantic niggle of a digression, from which
>I will now return...

I agree, modern land ownership is based on individuals having all, or most, rights to small pieces of land. Not applicable to any ancient culture I am aware of.

>I just don't see any force or logic to the set-up you describe,
>or any argument (from sources or otherwise) for it. If a stead
>is a heterogenuous mix of any number of bloodlines, each of which
>having dibs on chunks of property, and rights to work land, etc,
>then the stead ceases to be any sort of organising social unit at
>all, in favour of a geographically hap-hazard bloodline.
>Contrariwise, if a stead is essentially composed of members of a
>single bloodline (and their resident spouses), then in such
>cases the distinction is small enough not to be worth arguing
>over.

I don't think a stead would usually have a large number of bloodlines, the most would be the clan chief's where specialists such as lawspeakers and weaponthanes live irrespective of bloodline. The average stead would have members of maybe three or four bloodlines and the reason for this is spread of occupations. In order to be largely self sufficent a stead needs carls, cottars, pig tenders and even stickpickers. I don't see a bloodline rich enough to own an ox team and plough allowing some individuals to be so poor as to be reduced to stickpicking. More likely an unrelated bloodline chooses to live near to a good source of income and so becomes part of the stead. KoS confirms this but uses the word household rather than stead.

Equally a bloodline with many sons would need more land than previous generations and the only way to achieve this is by some sons moving out. This might be to land where the previous bloodline has insufficent men to work or it might involve creating a new stead in virgin land. In either case a single bloodline extends over several steads although in a few generations they will become separate bloodlines.

>It's clear that no one is saying _all_ property; KoS itself (or was
>that the G:G player's book?) makes that fairly clear. What I'm
>saying over above that is that the 'communal property' function
>you're ascribing to bloodlines, which IMO are in some cases rather
>amorphous collections, with no direct map onto the social condition
>of the clan, is more appropriate to either the stead, or the individual
>household (where those differ).

In KoS a bloodline is described as the smallest social unit in terms of _law_ as well as custom and tradition. This is in contrast to modern law which regards the individual as the smallest social unit. Effectively that means the law does not recognise property as owned by an individual, family or household. Within the bloodline there may well be an agreement that that is Ragnar's spade but legally it belongs to the bloodline.

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