Some short, sharp shocks over my morning cuppa....
URBAN WHITE RURAL In my boondocks naivety (I'm from canbraaa ya know), I described Glorantha in a previous post as a "western, male urban" mythology. Apparently in some political and academic circles, this is as near a conjuration of evil and unwholesome vileness as you're ever likely to get. (Dead Whites Males and all that). No pejorative sense was implied, it was simply a description of our creative corpus. In case you haven't noticed, I happen to love the place. (I do worry some times about our 'boys club' mentality, but vey, I married a Lunar vingan who is known to quote 'violence is always an option' with a manic grin in our discussions of household finances).
EDUCATING AND 'SELLING' BRIDES If you're using the top down 'marriage as an exchange of women between clans to build alliances' model (and though it always has to be balanced with the view 'from the ground', it has a certain utility) then it is still good sense to educate and invest in your daughters. Why? Because if women are a commodity, they're a valuable commodity. The bridewealth for a lawspeaker or priestess is going to be much higher than for an uneducated sheep girl. Clans with a reputation for providing fair and skilled brides will be sought out as allies, and will attract same.
Personally, I don't think its an issue. The status of women is extremely high in Heortling society, women have substantial personal wealth and political clout, and in my campaigns at least, its the Ernaldans who are usually running the clan anyway.
Matt:
>It's a similar situation to the good ol' Trobriand Islanders (wasn't it? or
>was it Sumatra?) where property nominally descends from a deceased man to
>his sister's sons. Fathers want to see their sons succeed, so they
transfer
>much of it to their own sons during their lifetime.
It's a universal characteristic of any matrilineal society, of which the Trobrianders are certainly one. In a matrilineal system, a man's investment is in his sister's children (who have the same clan identity as he has) rather than his own children, who have his wife's clan identity. Therefore marriage and families tend to take very different forms, and mean very different things. Divorce is common, a women depends on her brothers more than her husband, and 'uncles' (Mothers brothers) are as important or more important to a child than their pater.
RTFM AND BIBLICAL INERRANCY David:
> Alex Ferguson has not RTFM:
>
> > As for the sources cited: KoDP offers only 'statistical evidence'
> > of this, so far as I'm aware (i.e., "I've never seen a male Uraldan
> > in KoDP"),
>
> It's in the manual, p. 52: "Males can't attempt the Ernalda or Uralda
> quests." That's statistics with no outliers.
>
Is your all a Solar 'all' (99%), an Orlanthi 'all' (85%), or a Lunar 'all'
(51%). In a society where men can give birth, I find this dogged exclusivity
more than a bit suspect.
NOT OWNING YOUR LAND Darvall:
>And then there is the example of the Oz Aborigines (pull me up if I'm
>well off beam here John) in which IIRC a bloodline has the right to the
>use of a site but one or more others may well be its custodians. Owning
>a communal bit of grazing or hunting some distance from home & not
>shared by the other dwellers in your building is far from odd. Applying
>the same rules to spades, or worse spears, may well be.
Yip. You're talking about 'owners' and 'managers', a feature of Arnhem Land and Central Desert patriclans. Aboriginal 'owners' may have no practical interest in their land and never visit there. 'Managers' do not own the land, but are responsible for all ceremony upon it, and for its magical fertility. Both groups consult regularly. This is in the context of songlines - ceremonial ancestral walkways that extend for thousands of miles. Apart from the distances involved, the analogy to godtime heroquests is very close indeed. Participants *become* the ancestors and recreate the dreamtime (godtime) journey, meeting all sorts of strange creatures and recreating the magical fertility of the land.
While the social and technological systems are very different, there may be Heortling analogies in rites to temples, pilgrimage paths, and their attendant ceremonies. If real world analogies hold, then even in a strongly patrilineal Heortling clan, many rights, rites and gifts will be passed along matrilineal lines.
GLORANTHA THE OPERA Andrew waxes lyrical on opera.
Confession time: The Pan Book of Opera has been one of my prime plot source references for over a decade. Definitely worth investigation.
Olympics? What Olympics?
Cheers
John
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #846
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