Thanks for the response to Steve's question about women in Heortling society. It doesn't lay my concerns to rest, though, so I'd like to ask some follow-up questions, and to say that I think the answer lies in fleshing out the birth-clans of the key women, and the relationships beween those clans and the clan you're playing in.
> >What incentives are there for a clan to spend time and effort
> >training women in specialist roles if those women will be lost
> >to the clan when they marry?
>
> "Lost to the clan? Does a father's love for a daughter cease when she
> marries? Does a brother cease going to his sister for advice just
> because she rests at another hearth? Does a young woman cease to care
> for her kin and clan as soon as she takes a husband? To all of this I
> say, 'No'!"
Lovely rhetoric. ;-)
"Most men do not leave the tula their whole lives. Most women do leave when they marry, but then rarely leave the tula of their new clan." (Thunder Rebels, p. 22)
How do families keep in touch? Heortling society is meant to be largely non-literate, so writing home to Mother isn't an option. As far as I'm aware there isn't a regular system of messengers who'll pass on the pattern for Aunt Bertha's birdseye twill or advice about what to do when you're not getting on with your mother-in-law. I'm not aware of a magic which functions like "phone home for a chat". How does that brother ask his sister's advice? What's the mechanism by which families stay connected? Are you assuming that marriages generally take place between clans that share boundaries?
I'm beginning to think that the narrow view of being tied to the tula doesn't work in a number of ways. It would make sense if there were various gatherings for ceremonies and the Heortling equivalent of Agricultural & Pastoral shows. Still, if a sister is married to a clan a fair distance away, I'm not sure how her bloodline would hear much from her beyond the news of the births of her children, carried by travellers coming from that general direction. I'd like to be wrong about this, so how does it work? (If the Sartarite "all" is 85%, is the Sartarite "most" 51%?)
> Firstly, the Heortlings have at least seven different types of
> marriage, temporary and permanent, and involving different
> arrangements concerning habitation and the clan identity of children.
[...] So
> there's lots of choice in determining what sort of marriage contract
> best suits a couple and their clans - and Heortling marriage is as
> much a contract between two clans as a union of two individuals.
>
> One of these marriage types is, as you've identified, 'Wife and
> Underhusband', or 'Esrolian' marriage, and a wealthy woman like
> Halorica might well choose this type. If so, then the underhusband
> might well come to live at Halorica's birth stead, and any children
> would belong to her clan.
The reason for suggesting an "Esrolian" marriage is that that's the only one of the listed options in which the child becomes part of the mother's clan.
This is coming up in the more general context of trying to figure out what Heortling women's lives are like. Think about divorce in Heortling society. It's not a good thing, but it seems to be reasonably straightforward. Now imagine you're a woman, probably Ernaldan, and the defining feature of your life's work is making a home in which to raise children. You leave your support network to go through the ordeal of the youngest wife. You bear a child to your husband's bloodline, and gain some measure of acceptance. At any stage your husband could decide to divorce you, and you'd be expected to return to your birth clan and leave your children behind.
This is not so much of an issue when things are going well, but I'm sure you can see the potential for unpleasantness. What does the woman have going for her that helps to counterbalance this?
Political pressure from her birth clan is one thing. Support from other women might be a factor, but might not: the other women in the clan you married into will have their own agendas and their own clan causes to advance. There's quite a lot of myth supportig the notion of happy marriages, but the reality doesn't alway match the archetypes of Mom and apple pie.
Oh, there seems to have been some debate out there about which clan a married woman belongs to. Has a consensus been reached? Who gets her wergeld?
Cheers,
Jennifer
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