Jane Williams:
"The various laws are
almost straight out of the Black Book of Carmarthen and similar texts."
Or the Gragas, which is an Icelandic text, or any of the English codes. The terminology is English or Norse, but the general feel of the legal code, based on a system of payments for injuries, would fit neatly into Anglo-Saxon law (if you take out the generally strong royal authority of the Anglo-Saxon legal codes), and very well indeed into Icelandic law (for instance, the way outlawry works). It doesn't have an Icelandic approach to jury selection, but there you go. It's pretty clear that the Islendingasogur are an important inspiration for Sartar; incidents in the feud in Barbarian Adventures, for instance, are taken directly from sagas, like the horse-fight and the goad and so forth, which IIRC is from Njals Saga. The geography is very Icelandic, with the addition of a couple of towns -- but Sartar doesn't even really have villages, which is Iceland all over.
So while there are Irish or Welsh elements, I don't think it's possible to say that the Heortling culture is predominantly one or the other, partly because it's such a mishmash and partly because the RW cultures influenced each other and were similar to each other. The Heortlings of Dragon Pass are generally modeled on the cultures of what you might call the "North Sea world": the early medieval cultures of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the North Atlantic.
-- James Holloway ------------------------------
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