'Legally' kin?
The obvious reference is the first chapters of Thunder Rebels.
Your bloodline is kin; it is your family, and is the basic legal unit.
Your clan is kin; though you will not always know your exact relationship to another person, you can be confident you share ancestors. It serves as the legal unit in dealings between clans.
Relatives by marriage are a type of kin - affines - they are valued and honoured according to custom and law, but are not as important as blood kin.
Wives are a major exception of course, over time, especially as they give birth to children for your clan, they become accepted and regarded the same as blood kin and full clan members, even though they still have links and obligations to their birth clan.
Members of other clans are not usually kin, though they may at times be affines. They are usually kaylings - they worship the same gods, and obviously will usually share language, custom and law to a greater or lesser degree.
Tribal membership shifts and change, so tribal affiliation runs a distant second to your clan identity. It has little or no legal status.
Confederations and kingdoms have few legal kinship links, though a new consciousness of Sartar as a idea and nation may be forming in certain rebel enclaves - we've discussed this previously (nationalists create nations). However, relationships not based on kinship - with the exception of relationships with fellow cultists - are a rarity to most Heortlings. As a result of this, normal Heortlings think little of tribes and tribal confederations apart from the kingship ceremonies and the magic they bring. The Kingdom is remembered with nostalgia, but meant little in everyday life even when it functioned.
Heortlings, as a kin-based society, will have an almost unconscious appreciation of the subtleties of kinship in the same way as Inuit have hundreds of words for snow and we have hundreds of words for the ways a Windows pc can crash. Basically, imagine a circle extending outwards from your biological familt to non-kin stranger Orlanthi - Heortlings will be familiar with the graduations in expectation, tradition and law for each group. Once the degree of kinship is established, both parties will know exactly what is expected of them.
John
nysalor_at_... John Hughes
Vingkot's sons and Heort's strong daughters
Barefoot Harmast's kin and kaylings,
Orlanth's tribe, Ernalda's hearthlings
We the Thunder, we the Storm!
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