>> What do you see as the distinction here? My dictionary implies
>> "slave" and "thrall" are synonyms with the latter having a
>> Scandinavian root.
>
>Slave has a Scandinavian history, too - basically it is "captured Slav".
>As opposed to "trell", a general term for an owned (male) worker (but also
>for fighters in the service of a great lord, not unlike German "Knecht"
>and English "Knight").
>
>Thrall (to me) has the connotation of someone born to the culture he
>serves in.
Which seems to be a rather fuzzy distinction. A Roman citizen who was enslaved for some crime would be a thrall while a German tribesman who was captured by the Romans and enslaved would be a slave.
>Maybe this is rooted in an aspect of German history, some local duchies of
>which had non-tradeable owned peasants well into the 19th century. Thrall
>is the term I would use to translate "Leibeigener", rather than slave,
>which has its direct parallel, and is strongly associated with the
>colonialist slave trade (and never was compared to property-serfdom aka
>"Leibeigenschaft" when abolition was an issue).
AFAIK English doesn't have a word for "Leibeigener" as distinct from "Liebeigenschaft" because England never seems to have had such a group of peasants. I'd translate both as "serf". Indeed I'm reluctant to regard serfs as property because although their obligations could be transferred from one landowner to another this is more a transfer of a contract than the transfer of the individual. Indeed the distinction between a contract of employment and a contract of serfdom is that the former can be terminated at short notice while the latter cannot and the latter is inheritable.
>> Property is always tradable
>
>In ultra-chauvinist cultures, does this extend to wives? (And this is a
>serious question in context of the Vadrudi.)
Like England up till the 18th Century? The last recorded wife sale predates the abolition of slavery only by a few decades. Admittedly by that time it was more a way of ending one marriage and starting another without the legal process of divorce which was far too expensive for ordinary people.
In the context of the Vadrudi it really depends on whether they regard their wives as property. Or whether women regard their husbands as property. Or neither do.
>> although the
>> market may be more or less developed in different places and
>> times.
>
>Somehow Vadrus and "fair trade" (a prerequisitive even for slave
>trade) don't go well together.
>
>Which is why I hesitate to make the Yggites stereotype Vadrudi -
>Hrimthurs can serve that role a lot better. The Yggites evidently
>arranged themselves both with the local Ouori and with the Winterwood
>elves (before breaking those arrangements).
I find it difficult to imagine any society which doesn't have some means of trading both between members and with neighbours. The society may rarely use it but it will exist.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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