scott-martin

Love it. All hinge on old controversies ("what did Kargan Tor really do?" "who were the early Ernaldites of Slontos?") so I'll sidestep them for now with a few more questions.

Other than the occasional Horalite throwback, the awful "red Vadeli," red-ochre Thinobutan ancestors and the Red Teleans, are there red people extant on the lozenge? 

Do orange (presumably a pure "storm" elemental type) people only appear in Teleos? 

Other than the horrific and hopefully extinct "yellow Vadeli," do the children of Talar have the golden complexion we associate with "Dara Happan warerans" today?

33 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It is more complicated than that. Malkion had numerous wives and produced children of numerous hues. Caste association by birth sequence is extremely ancient, and applies only to a single myth about Malkion the Founder. A myth that is rivaled by naming various goddesses as mothers for his variously colored sons.

 

I still want to know where the "red people" who became the ancestral Horalites come from, mythologically and elementally. Do we talk about Malkion having a "red wife?" I doubt they are from the current moon, although there may be a Red Planet influence. It may be as simple as an archaic split between Fire (red) and Sky (gold) that more modern theory resolves.

17 minutes ago, davecake said:

I did not know that Cragspider was originally a dark troll. She was already a Demi-goddess at the Dawn. At what point did a dark troll become an immortal goddess? Her sub-cult writeup in Troll Gods has no info either. 

Everything comes and goes. Perhaps there's an implied "current" Cragspider there -- the ritual position of Witch Nymph of Cliffhome is as much title as person.

28 minutes ago, Joerg said:

If we regard Anglo-Saxon as simply an archaic form of English, those terms simply denote an antiquated language. Antiquated compared to what, though? Would the Orlanthi use ancient Vingkotling or even earlier forms, possibly Storm Tongue ones, amidst their current dialect? And would they be aware of that?

Barring a little fast rhetorical footwork, the nomenclature around "Auld" Wyrmish and "New" Pelorian suggests that the sages at least are conscious of languages as evolving structures. They also know several dialects that are extinct outside historical records. They probably bicker about vowel shifts as much as a given story requires.

The evolution from Storm to Sartarite is probably mostly mutually intelligible throughout (RQ percentage), although people will choose more "archaic" or "modern" forms to reflect their goals -- or in some situations, not have access to the full spectrum due to background. Everyday people probably recognize variations between everyday instrumental language, poetic vocabulary, "rustic" speech that preserves non-mainstream forms, court talk, ritual Storm.

28 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Cults of Prax, Aldrya cult:

Quote

Out of likes but these also are true.

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

King Drona(r) and his boar

I don't think Seshna the Likita was the one who taught Father Dro[m]a[l] how to plant, for that matter. But those stories are practically inaudible now.

11 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Ernalda in some references with Flamal as her consort.

Good point. It's a delight to be alive in an era when the goddess complex is coming to life and so many hero(ine)quest revelations are in play, as though we were walking with Monrogh and Harmast into a deeper understanding of the world.

All of which gets me reopening the parallel narratives built into Fertility and modern Earth as well as my ongoing extended "travel and journey" through Plant. Fitting the "grain" goddesses into the the classic earth cycle pushes them into the Maiden Voria position when Ernalda already occupies Mother. That's fine. Most crops only take a year from plow to scythe, so we literally keep getting older while the girls stay the same age. But the field is not the forest. The Rivals who fight over Aldrya may not be the Rivals we tend to acknowledge in places like Garhound. Falamal may dominate a more archaic generation of the cycle than Genner, even though we now remember the story backward. 

In the bright light of day I'm facing the Frazerian enigma that Pela probably wasn't the original land goddess of Pelanda/Peloria. She's a grain goddess. Or if she is the reason we call that country Pelanda/Peloria, then Plant plays a deeper role in land goddess succession than we may have initially suspected. But if we follow the Plant side of the story then the "grower" mythos dominates. Where in Glorantha does that myth come from? In that version, Aldrya's mother travels under the sign of the hourglass instead of the square. Maybe in Peloria she was Oo-eria, who appears all over the Wall in various phases. But the forests were exterminated up there so it's hard to say.

[Aldrya and the Rivals, Arroin, Zorak Zoran, the Hill of Gold, "Falamalio," the Two Brothers cult, where is "Genner" in all of this? -- cut for sanity]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

calling such a deity a grain goddess

I often wonder where our contacts with blue elves come from. More generally there seem to be multiple earth goddess systems at play here, some of which have a closer track to Aldrya -- the "grain" goddesses like Pela, the Rice Mother, etc. -- and some like the likita complex that don't. I don't know if Aldrya has a mother.

2 minutes ago, David Scott said:

That's the problem

All the plus.

10 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Genert didn't just die, he was mauled by Chaos . . .  lucky that we know as much about Genert as we do . . . hid his remains . . . hyena.

What do we have to make out of the absence of Tada from the Battle of Earthfall? Especially if Tada is an integral manifestation of Genert's major power?

Undoubtedly swimming out too far from shore here but again reversing the causal relationships (myth allows us to do that in ways history doesn't) a different story plays out in which the absence of Tada triggers the disintegration of the golden age. The king of the north corner fails "because" fire season always gives way to the harvest and then the dark. When the northern kings are separated from Tada the land requires a sacrifice and the king must die. Normally the land takes a new husband. This time, the cycle failed. 

Perhaps another way to tell this story is to name Genert's queen and who her husband is now.

50 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Genert died, but the area affected was limited to the area between the Shan Shan and the Rockwoods.

This is a great point. I wonder if it bears a tiny tweak:

When Genert died and was not replaced in the great rite of the year husbands, the "waste land" that resulted was such and such.

Side note (for all I know it is DEEP) but when "Pela" and her cognates are weeping goddesses then odds are pretty high that the dead king bears a family resemblance to the god we call Yelm. When the goddesses are smiling the Lodril / Turos / whoever is out of jail and in the house. Of course this is probably a taboo topic for conservative Dara Happans but it's not like I was eager to stay on their guest list.

Where is the footnote that singles out Peloria for being largely unexplored mythic territory for Imperial Age explorers, which is one reason the rebirth of the Goddess was possible there? Away from my books.

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

How much Genert will be felt?

IMG the argument tends to go backward: the boundaries of "Genertela" encompass all lands where they recognize a figure identifiable as "Genert." In some places the identification is weak and we may be dealing with mythological "subcontinents" separated from their origins when the world broke. 

That said, I would be surprised if the archaic Frona, Seshna and Ralia venerated in the animal empires weren't weeping for some lost king or another when the first Malkioni found them. Much of Malkioni history may revolve around trying to pinpoint "the historical Genner" and in their imperial phase they eventually settled on the Wastes as the locale where his saturnian Golden Age played out. This may or may not have come as a surprise to the people living there at the time.

Britha may weep for other reasons.
 

9 hours ago, Steve said:

Homer had synesthesia

As we like to say around our house when the Homeric palette comes up, the poet is also generally depicted as blind so "his" color choices may be on the expressionistic side of the rainbow. Where Belintar is concerned he may have started out as "sky" bronze or patina from his time in the water and then burnished up bright once dried and cleaned up.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Storytelling uses non-linear techniques as well, e.g. through flashbacks, possibly nested or interwoven flashbacks. Heroquests or (for stories outside of Glorantha) time travel may alter the anchor position.

Another analogue is that we recall the Godtime in almost exactly the same ways we recall a dream. The narrative feels coherent at the time but in retrospect discontinuities, paradoxes and outright absurdities emerge. Key transitions drop out. Symbols shift when we open our eyes. While communicating our "dreams" -- our non-empirical experience -- can further compound the confusion, occasionally enough similarities shine through that we can work together as fellow initiates.

We, on the other hand, have Glorantha.

Hi Curtis -- 

Good to have you here. The Internet Archive has that one HERE -- of course if you encounter a copy of the original Shadows on the Borderland where it appeared in print, it's worth grabbing. 

2 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Empowered water creeps onto the land, probing it for food. Water which has given up or lost its power falls down into a puddle, following the pull of [...] heaviness

While this thread focuses on Gloranthan "physics," I love the alchemy this suggests: two water metals, one light and leaping, the other liquid and leaden. The relation between them is a secret. 

6 hours ago, Steve said:

things strong with Earth

The ladies translate my "gravity" as "love" and say, of course there is love in Glorantha. Otherwise nothing would cohere and we would all drift alone. 

As usual I have no idea what they mean.

54 minutes ago, davecake said:

Aldryami being supplanted by Hsunchen

This is fertile ground since we know Falamal is a secret god of Hrelar Amali, maybe the central cult.

Aeelra Aldryama, Jorestl’s daughter,
ever lovely, shining white
in her forest dance when the world was young,
unmarried, and the prey of Basmalt.
She is the mother of Pendal.
- Song of the Children of Basmalt

Of course that's Jorestl. Kanthor apparently preferred to remain aloof from Pendali territory and there's also Dontri back on Brithos, but those aldryami backed Faralz against the "Vadeli" and may no longer be extant. (I would love it if they were the forest that relocated to Jrustela.)

Early chronologies indicate "burning of Kanthor's Forest" in 59 ST at the end of a two-year war between Damolsten and the Aldryami, by the way, so that particular forest seems to have gotten a whole lot worse before it got better. 

49 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I would really like to work on a project making such maps and lots of other thematic layers available as a digital application, possibly with pdf export options. However, that would be a full-time job of more than a man-year for getting that data together, never mind the application infrastructure.

Used up my likes. I strongly believe that the board game simulations mad visionaries like @KeithN and others have run over the years are the accelerated way to fill the gaps on regions where the notes at Chaosium are no longer extant or may have only been fragmentary anyway. If you reading this happen to be someone who has been involved with these, please let me know if you have records.

2 hours ago, Steve said:

Harmast hadn't tried some "modern" heroquesting

Love it. My sense of the barefoot womanizer is that he -- deliberately or otherwise -- practically (re)invented what we now call Orlanth worship from the scraps Loko hadn't managed to eradicate. This process undoubtedly took time and a lot of work we would call "heroquesting" before he had enough of the LBQ to try it. When Varmast initiated Barefoot he initiated a genius. Thank God.

10 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

What is beer but something infused with the life of the earth?  Without the grain, you'd just have water.

!! They have a weird call-and-response to that one they love shouting at me: what is cloth but time you can see? Without the knots we'd all go naked.

I have no idea what they get up to after I go to bed. More swan knighting later when I digest.

2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

the Societies of the Cloth have rooms/halls for such

Wow, those ladies can drink. 

The really wild performances seem to happen around the big fleece fairs later in the season when the girls are tired and looking for one last hurrah. Not as familiar with the linen parties but they seem a little more settled.

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

That's not quite the message I get, with all that durulz/goose stick going about.

No expert but my emergent take on the Goose Girl / Swan Woman complex is that she reflects the female equivalent of King of Dragon Pass aggregate mastery of the realm down there, possibly as an undocumented survival of something like the archaic "stork mother" they have in the northern lowlands or some local beast/hsunchen culture now lost.

We know the durulz venerate a transcendental goddess of "nature" at the Wild Temple. Maybe Imarja initiates recognize that goddess as their goddess too. In this scenario, I always assumed an orgiastic edge to stork mother (why SurEnslib gets such bad press at home) so this may look like chaos to establishment-minded people. 

Of course cults change so we would need to look at when people pivot into Imarja when the conventional Ernalda complex doesn't give them what they need and when they pivot away. Maybe chaos gets in there at various points but I think her nature has defeated that so far. Also while I like the idea of the Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd) being autochthonous she might have come from afar . . . perhaps from the east riding an oracular horse named something like Falada. If and when the Feathered Horse Queen ever saw the mysteries in that temple I suspect she'd understand.

The problem of chaotic earth is interesting. If I were them down there I'd look toward the Print and then back to the greatest city in the world and start pondering who krarsht really was once.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

Stations 6, 7: The Judge of the Dead, prior to the Bridge over the River of Swords. King of Sartar (p.59) has Janak and the bridge before you enter the Court of Silence. KoS p.72 suggests that Issaries negotiated the boat fare with Jeset the Ferryman instead, no bridge involved, but special knowledge of Lhankor Mhy involving the Elder Tree allowing the original questers to bypass the Court of Silence, it seems.

Great catch. I wonder if the quest forks early enough that someone could succeed with either a beard or a talker, but not necessarily both.