John Hughes:
> Alex (on the HW rules list) questions Heortling sex and marriage. Quietly
> despairing that no seems to talk about *important* issues like names for
> one-legged duck bandits any more, I endeavour to make reply.
I'd happily start talking about that recurrent villian of mine, Pinfeather One-pinion, but then I'd find it necessary to take this to herowars_at_yg (and we've only just got here).
> Me :
> > > All Heortling clans are exogamous, so one of your parents was born into
> > > another clan and has been accepted into your clan through marriage.
>
> Alex:
> > Even if we accept this statement at face value, that all "legal" marriage
> > is exogamous in this sense (never mind that it needlessly contradicts
> > significant amounts of earlier sources, canonical and otherwise).
>
> I'd be pleased if you could expand on these sources. ROTO spells out clan
> exogamy and *clan-level* incest taboos explicitly. What other sources are
> you referring to?
The non-canon is the truckload of fan material (e.g. Tales 18, to take but one example) based on the more natural reading of ROTO, which in one passage explicitly talks about exogamous _bloodlines_. (I don't have the exact source to hand.)
> This clan exogamy/clan incest taboo is the official position, expanded
> upon carefully in TR.
i.e. the naff retcon. ;-)
> For the record, my own position is more lenient - I play *bloodline* level
> incest taboos, and would allow 'incestuous' marriages within a clan for
> particular ritual or religious purposes.
OK, I'll blame Greg for Gregging himself, then, if I can't blame you!
> > doesn't mean that every _child_ has parents from two different clans,
> > since it's surely clear that there's no "incest prohibition" on sex
> > between members of different bloodlines of the same tribe (barring some
> > other close social or blood relationship between them).
>
> Talking about tribes is pretty meaningless in this case. I'll assume you
> mean clans.
D'oh, think-o. Yes of course, I meant "clan".
> ROTO explicitly spells out just such a taboo on sexual
> intercourse with other clan members.
It does? Where? This I don't recall at all.
> Such offspring
> > of such unions are inevitable, it's simply a matter of whether they're
> > common, and of whether they are "marriages" in any formal or ritual sense.
> > (It makes more sense to me that they would be, but I may have been out-
> > canoned (or out-retconned at least) on that one.)
>
> We differ in that I don't assume that unwanted pregnancy is particularly
> common in Ernaldan society. Control of fertility, magical and herbal
> contraceptives and arborticides, few taboos on talking and educating
> youngsters about sex... there are too many unquestioned assumptions about
> the background that I'd want spelled out before accepting your argument.
> (And mine too, if I was making one).
And why would such pregnancies be ipso facto "unwanted"? (Other than by assumption.) Even if marriage were legally impossible (which seems entirely unrealistic and unnecessary to me, but no matter), why would this rule out an informal union (aka, "shacking up"), or in the manner discussed below? Why are these "undesirable" outcomes from any given perspective
> > Insert "it takes a village" type homilies on the likely rearing of
> > such children.
>
> Since sexual conduct rules are socially normative, the child would
> (certainly in my campaigns) have a social mother but no social father.
> Normative reasoning: "There is no such thing as incest"; ergo the child must
> have come from the gods or from the Earth. (I note unusually busy mythic
> background of Earth Tribe parthenogenesis).
I thought we'd established that such a union would not be "incestuous".
If anyone could quote me a remotely comparable RW example of a society which is anything like this restrictive about _either_ sex or marriage (i.e., none of either within 1000 people and several kilometers) I'd be most pleased and enlightened. (Once again one is forced to raise the "what did they breed with, rocks?", in periods such as the early resettlement era, and in certain regions where supra-clan structures are effectively non-existant.) Certainly it makes no sense with respect to the usual Nordo-Celt "analogues".
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