> David Weihe:
> > Theoretically, one's family was not just kin but also anyone that
> > one lived with on a long term basis.
Heortlings have ways of adopting people into their kinship world view. But blood kin are blood kin: more valuable than affines or adoptees. They have a sharp eye for subtlties you or I might not think twice about.
Kinship has a range of different meanings, complicated by the fact that we have one of the most kinship-poor cultures ever. 'Kinship in the narrow sense refers to the parent-child link, and to relationships built upon this. Used in this sense, it contrasts with both affinity (relationships by marriage) and descent (relations based upon ancestors). In the broader sense (and the sense I use it), it refers to the entire web of belonging and identity). Kinship and descent are almosts always conceptualised as seperate though parallel systems of identity. I think that may be the source of Alex's confusion (though I learned long ago never to speak for Alex :))
In writing Thunder Rebels, there was a deliberate decision not to provide limiting or technical definitions. It was after all, a game book, not a kinship manual. In addition, the range of Heortling kinship systems (patrilineal, matrilineal cognatic) and marriage/residency patterns (virilocal, uxorilocal) together with the communal nature of stead life means that almost *anything* is possible. Local patterns and customs serve story and game needs, and should primarily be the provinence of the gm. The broad strokes provide the flavour, and a few key concepts - brothers living together and supporting each other, communal hearths linked by descent that work as a corporation - provide a lot of the essential background for game use.
> > 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.
The bloodline is a corporate, usually patrilineal descent group, and is your family and 'cousins'. To a heortling, it *is* the family. If you want a 'default' definition its membership is voluntarily assigned through known descent links to an apical ancestor or ancestress. ("We are the Two Birch bloodline, and our great great grandfather Tovar cut our stead tree here in the time of the Tearing Claw Season").
Its a *descent* group rather than a *kinship* group, so Alex's prescribed degrees are an unneccessary confusion: they depend entirely on the stability and generational age of a particular group. A cousin of the 5th degree may be in your bloodline while a cousin of the 3rd may not.
Because of the voluntary nature of membership, even your brother may be in another bloodline if hostily causes a group to break or members to go live elsewhere. ("We will plant!", said Oddi. "We will herd!", said Danwyr. For three long seasons the brothers argued, and when the rains of Sea Season called the world to planting, Danwyr and those who supported him moved from the hearth to cut a new lodge at Whispering Falls, and the herds were divided, and the fields, and afterwars the brothers did not speak, and from Danwyr came the Red Bull bloodline.)
Heortlings being the sort of people they are, changing bloodlines will not be that uncommon in response to family stress. Any Heortling will be eligible for several bloodlines through ancestry; although 'everyone' takes the bloodline of their father, folk will change if necessary, and the normative and defining function of the kinship myth takes care of the rest.
I'm not sure what you mean by the Sue sentence above. Adoption is common for the Heortlings, almost unthinkingly so in communal steads shared by groups of brothers and their wives. Sue's story would be different.
Most of the people at your hearth will be of your bloodline, and 85% of the time the situation is fairly straightforward. However, 'there's none so queer as folk' (to quote an ethnographic axiom :)) and no human society has ever followed its rules of kinship as laid down 'in the book' - prudence, circumstance convenience, and what the moot chooses not to see always play their part.
> 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.
The second, not the first. Descent and kinship are *separate* systems, even though they usually work in parallel. They mustn't be confused: a bloodline is not a fidhe.
And yes, 'kinship' is the realm where the expectation of mutual moral obligation prevails, and where what Fortes called the 'axiom of amity' holds sway, along the decreasing axis of bloodline ('total help'), clan ('mutual help') and tribe ('what's in it for me?). Of course, its also the focus for the most intense rivalries and hatreds.
> 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".
Multi-bloodline steads exist, and multi-stead bloodlines exist. They are both fairly common AFAIK. Communal living makes it hard to draw neat lines. Heortlings are (that term again) pragmatic opportunists in this as in most things. A bloodline will grow and expand until it becomes too unwieldy or too geographically dispersed, it will then split along resource (our valley, your hill, this stead, that stead) or ideological (Braggi for chief! No his sister Kalda for chief!) lines.
Kinship again. Doesn't anyone tell duck jokes anymore?
Cheers
John
nysalor_at_primus.com.au John Hughes
"Remember, we are dealing with barbarians..." - - Tacitus, on the Britons.
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