> My solution: Cows.
>
> Clan membership and ownership/use-rights to farmland and steads are reckoned
> along the male line of descent, while cattle ownership and rights are reckoned
> along the female line. This explains those dowry/brideprice combos in KoDP.
>
> Cattle are odal property, but perhaps most clans delegate herd management to
> the Uralda temple, putting women in charge of the nitty-gritty details of all
> those cattle loans ...
This has a certain ring to it, but what I can't see is how it 'helps' with the original 'problem'! Especially if marriages are wholly or overwhelmingly exogamous (which even I, an endogamy apologist (exo-bloodline, endo-clan, that is) think is a fairly common case). When your daughter marries out, now not only do you lose her, and her education[*], but a small herdful of cows too? I may just be food-deprivedly slow on the uptake before me dinner, but I'm not seeing how this is gonna work.
Cheers,
Alex.
[*] While I think I know what you all mean, 'Orlanthi education' sounds a bit like 'military intelligence'. ;-) The most intellectual people in the world they ain't! Aside from exceptional cases like lawspeakers, I don't think many people in Heortling society set about self-consciously 'learning' or 'being taught' things, other than in a 'learning by doing and being taught by having it done for you' sense, which happens largely through the desire to get the thing done, rather than through an educational ethos as such.
Though I do concur that you'll feel the day-to-day 'lack' of your out-married womenfolk, and indeed out-husbands too. They're just not _there_ to do stuff, the vast majority of the time. But even in the crudest terms, there's a quid pro quo at work: if our clan started sending you nothing but vacant-stared bimbos (and himbos), your clan would either retaliate in kind, or stop either marrying into or out from our clan at all, and then we'd be pretty hosed altogether, unless for some reason you need us more than we need you. As Tom McVey said, it is rather like prisoner's dilemma, but without boring everyone with _too_ much game theory, one in which the population-stable strategy ought to move towards a co-operative state, I think.
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