> > --- Michael Hitchens <michaelh_at_...> wrote:
> If you try to fit the five males from the list in OiD together the
first
> to squeeze out thru the cracks is Brennasson. Apart from them both
being
> in Pavis around the same time I can't make my head fit what we know of
> Garrath and what we know of Brennasson into the one person. He doesn't
> really fit with Argrath White Bull either (who I find the next
hardest to
> fit into the composite).
I suggested a few years back on another list that Brennason could effectively be 'Argrath son of Argrath'.
My logic was that the Garhound Contest in Sun County mentions 'the marvellous harvest of 1604 when young Garreth Sharpsword won the crown' and married the Harvest Queen.
As such a marriage must have been particularly blessed by Ernalda there is thus a very high probability that a child would have been born next year (1605).
So all you have to do is make the 1604 Garhound harvest queen Brenna (whose family may have moved to Garhound after the Dorasorings lost power in Pavis) and that child could be the son of Garrath and Brenna who eventually grows up to be 'Argrath of Pavis'.
Shortly after his birth you have Brenna and the other known kin of Dorasor assassinated by lunar agents and Garrath then takes the child to Pavis and has him brought up by commoners in ignorance of his true ancestry.
The child then becomes a street urchin and acquires the name Bad-Dream Enostar hanging around Lunar barracks and bars, refuses to take any part in the Cradle affair, only initiates to Orlanth some time afterwards to escape a strange magical plague, becomes an anti-lunar revolutionary, opens the gates to the nomad horde and becomes ruler of the city as per AoP.
Other than the name Argrath there is very little to connect this rather sinister-sounding urban conspirator with his dubious lunar connections to the globetrotting Conan-like heroics of Garrath, White Bull and Maniskisson.
As Argrath of Pavis and Argrath Maniskisson are both separately mentioned by Minaryth Blue there is a strong implication that they at least are different people.
We are also told that Enostar had 'learned something important about the men of the lunar army' and shared this information with Orlanth at his conversion - so would it be too great a stretch to make Enostar Brennasson the Argrath who learned how how to organise magical units from the lunars and created the Sartar Magical Union some time after 1625?
The Draconic/EWF connection (the other obvious possible influence on the SMU's new form of magic) also sounds more like something Enostar would learn in Pavis than something that would come naturally to a Heortling from Sartar.
While OiD identifies Argrath-the-magician as Venharlsson one could easily make Venharl Enostar's adoptive father in Pavis.
As I don't think there should be more than a couple of Argraths, I think there is also a good case for combining Maniskisson, White Bull and Garrath - as the story does seem to require an Argrath who is in Pavis in 1621 for the Cradle, sails away to join Harrek, comes back to Prax and raises a nomad horde using connections previously established living amongst the tribes and then leads it on to fight for the freedom of Sartar - and Garrath is around at the right time and in the right place to do all these things.
So by radical use of Occam's Razor I think you can get the total of absolutely necessary Argraths down to two (three if you count Kallyr) and by following my Garrath+Brenna=Enostar suggestion you can establish a logical relationship between the two and the possibility of one naturally succeeding the other.
However the one thing that is relatively sure is that Greg will surprise us all with the Great Argrath Campaign.
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