More "Not the hw-rules list" stuff.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 20:33:22 +0100 (BST)

David Weihe:
> Theoretically, one's family was not just kin but also anyone that
> one lived with on a long term basis. Aristole included the family
> slaves or animals in the term, for instance, and I expect that it
> would also cover "Uncle" Karlgest, who actually isn't related by
> blood or marriage, but was your father's best friend back when Dad
> was exiled for a couple years for excessively anti-Lunar opinions,
> came back to help Dad on the farm for a while and just never left.

Which would be in Heortling terms, either one's hearth, or one's stead. (I'm giving up on the term "household" entirely, since it seems to mean either of those things by turns, and doubtless other things besides.)

> OTOH, what exactly it means to have a relationship to Bossie, the
> family's best milk cow, is left as an exercize for the GM. :-)

What you're implyinf is perverse, man! Now Flossie, the stead prize ewe, that's quite a different matter... ("I'm just manifesting my Heler aspect, ma!")

> The Bloodline, OTOH, is a legal relationship that can have no
> or even negative emotional impact, like the relationship between
> the Boy Named Sue and his long-disappeared father.

Though precisely _what_ the legal significance of the bloodline is something I'm trying to reconstruct, to even my own satisfaction, from numerous somewhat-at-odds sources. (Including apparently, lots of herowars group posts that I haven't caught up on yet.)

But the one thing the bloodline surely does mean, is a certain minimum degree of kinship. (Either a prescribed degree, like 3 to 5 say, or sharing an "agreed" ancestor.) This means a certain moral and social mutual obligation, beyond whatever the minimal legal requirement.

I think that what one's "family" means, at least in a de facto sense, is a sort of rough and ready combination of both the above. One's deepest familial bonds are with those of one's own bloodline, with which one also co-habits (more or less closely). And in many cases, those will at least roughly co-incide: a titchy little bloodline might just about squeeze into a single longhouse; a larger one might form the backbone of a more extensive stead.

Multi-stead bloodlines certainly exist, of course -- IMG, the Elkenval clan had 5 or so large bloodlines, and few large steads, leading to a very difuse pattern indeed. In such cases, there's a natural tendancy for bloodlines to split, to more conveniently correspond to economic and social realities; or where they are of long standing in such patterns (as with the Elks), for the bloodlines' role to become that much more abstracted, with the individual steads being less and less defined by any "bloodline identity".

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