Re: Another go at mythic "chronology"

From: bryan_thx <bethexton_at_h6pdG6vBMBx7xFjkJ_2fPXXuMvjTKrYFLObPPbbhpWh3wRG3vwlgVI3OSAuhMBdEQw>
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:24:32 -0000

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> Concerning "dating", using GRAoY for that purpose is a bit of a blunt instrument, first and foremost for reasons already provided by Peter ; but more deeply because GRAoY does not concern itself with the Spike, as this Mountain was not located in ancient Dara Happa... :-)
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> Various magical catastrophes described in that Work *could* potentially be linked with the destruction of "The" Cosmic Mountain ; which is of course _exactly_ what the GLs did themselves ; but there is no reason to suppose that any such links to external, non-Dara Happan histories and myths should be fully relevant to the traditional DH timelines, nor to simply assume that such and such individual catastrophe in DH mythology should have been even *caused* by the destruction of the Spike.
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> "Various cosmic destructions occurred in Godtime, providing various magical catastrophes," as a completely vague generalisation, is probably the closest that you can get to any kind of general truth in this affair ;)
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To add to the confusion, if you accept the Heortling metaphor (myth) for how things happened, Time itself was not yet born when the Spike exploded. Everything before the dawn happened 'pre-time', in which change happened (at least after the Green Age), but trying to associate those sequences of change with the sort of linear time that post-time mortal minds can easily understand is probably akin trying to understand three dimensional objects by the shadows they cast on a cave wall. In the Chaos age, the sequence of events was most likely even less comprehensible or consistent, chaos being what it is.

Personally, I think that in the Chaos age the world(s) were shattered into fragments in various ways (not all of which we could readily understand). Some of those fragments were pulled together at the dawn (those whose gods held a strand of Arachne Solara's net, by the Heortling metaphor, but other cultures have their own metaphor for how things came back together). The surviving pieces most certainly did not fit together quite as they had before, both because some pieces were missing and because each had changed on their own, in varying degrees.(and indeed that would lead to different feelings of how long that 'time' was by the survivors in different fragments).

Probably the closest the modern Gloranthans could come to understanding that fragmentation would be the effects of the Ban. Not that the fragmentation was anything like that, although it could be that the ban follows the lines of the fragments that came together into Fronela.

I'd say that the spike had been the thumb tack holding all of those fragments together at one point, in manners at least as much magical/runic/metaphorical as physical. In that sense, from its destruction until the fragments were pulled together could not have been 'long' or it would probably not have been possible to pull them back in. In fact most likely all the efforts to do so were a desperate last attempt to keep things from totally falling disassociating....it may not have been how anyone wanted to do things, it was just the only option they had in the end. But without time, how do you say how long that desperate last action took?