Akhôrahil

One of my favorite examples of this from history is how how some Muslim rulers tried to stop local Christians from converting to Islam as it reduced the tax base.

On the other hand, you're not really breaking the covenant when you create herd-men out of humans (using fairly easy and standardized magic), are you? I'm confident the Morokanth would argue that they aren't. There seems to be a lot of give to the Covenant.

Wikipedia: "The word aurochs was borrowed from early modern German, replacing archaic urochs, also from an earlier form of German." So it's the same "Ur-" bit. In Swedish, it's still "Uroxe". Although it seems that this interpretation of the "ur-" part might have been retroactively fitted to mean ancient, primal. Etymology Online says: "from German Aurochs, from Old High German urohso, from uro "aurochs" (cognate with Old English ur, Old Norse ürr), which is of unknown origin, + ohso "ox" (see ox). Latin urus and Greek ouros are Germanic loan-words."

What happens when you get an intelligent Herd-man?

Everyone condemns rape, but they may not classify certain things as rape that we would. The sexual abuse of slaves, as you mention, and I also cannot imagine that marital rape is even a concept within Yelmic culture, for instance (or most other, for that matter).

It also seems likely that there would be an amount of "part-time" prostitution in Orlanthi clans – the stickpicker woman who help ends meet by taking the occasional carl into her hut for a hunk of cheese or leg of goat, and the like.

So the Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes quote on p. 1 of this thread – "They prohibit sex [...] with members of their own clan" – should not be regarded as canonical (or at least, interpreted in some different fashion)? If so, I'm pleased to hear that – that never quite made sense to me, and it seemed like a rule that would get broken on a large scale. (Same thing with forbidding sex with foreigners...)

So if sex within the clan is incest, what are the consequences when it inevitably happens (we're talking about people here, after all). Initiated unmarried teens who hardly see people outside the clan for most of the year, for instance – I'm hard-pressed to believe that they manage to keep it in their pants. Is it merely a minor crime (even Medieval Europe was surprisingly lenient when it came to pre-marital sex)? If it's a chaotic activity, one has to wonder how it's not a huge problem – it would seem far more common than other chaotic activities like rape or secret murder. Or if between married people within the clan – would it be worse than the 'mere' adultery (in quotes because adultery is a pretty big deal in itself), a further aggravating factor? (One also has to wonder exactly what counts as 'sex' – only potentially procreative heterosexual acts? "I did not have sex with that clan-member"?))