Imagining Glorantha

[Qizilbashwoman]

I should add that in case you are curious, women wear money because it's theirs. In patriarchal societies their dowry is the only thing they own, and in more neutral societies it is theirs plus whatever they earn. You carry it! Gold bangles aren't just pretty. I bet a lot of cultures in Glorantha feature women wearing prominently coins, particularly Sun Domers (but not Yelornans), Dara Happans, and other places that are strikingly unequal (or were until recently).

This rural highlands woman was photographed in her wedding dowry and someone realised her outfit was worth 4 million Nepali rupees (about US35K). Her income is classed as "poverty" as she's a mountain-dwelling woman with no running water.

Edited August 28, 2019 by Qizilbashwoman

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Ochoa said:

Gods damn it, Scott

Eyes on the prize! But where else do the Aisors . . . I mean "Issaries" . . . come from?

Edited August 28, 2019 by scott-martin

[Sir_Godspeed]

This should perhaps have been posted in the beginning, as it is Chaosium's own style reference for the development of the Guide:

https://www.glorantha.com/docs/orlanthi-overview/

It pretty much covers what we've already mentioned in this thread - or rather, it already covers what we've mentioned.

[Ali the Helering]

On ‎8‎/‎27‎/‎2019 at 10:14 PM, Joerg said:

But hey, if you find a culture of free farmer-warriors who are both transhumant pastoralists and grain farmers and form small republics as their dominant social order, point them out and show how they weren't really led by dynastic demigod kings, and use their cultural terms for these positions                                                                                                                                                                    

Medieval Swiss?

[Joerg]

6 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Medieval Swiss?

Good call? But my Schwyzerdütsch is at best passive only, despite my Alpine surname, and the Swiss undertitle their own German with high German on TV, so we'll need a pronunciation guide. I'll ask Philipp Glass at Tentacles for a list of Schwyzerdütsch terms for Thane, Carl, Cottar and Thrall, and whatever other "norman" terms people can think of that need de-anglisation..

😋

 

[Qizilbashwoman]

On 8/27/2019 at 5:14 PM, Joerg said:

But hey, if you find a culture of free farmer-warriors who are both transhumant pastoralists and grain farmers and form small republics as their dominant social order, point them out and show how they weren't really led by dynastic demigod kings, and use their cultural terms for these positions

uh... this is like a large portion of Eurasia, from Tibet to Hungary. The ability to ignore dynastic demigod kings was a large motivator for maintaining transhumance away from early empires. I'm reading an entire book about qazaqlyq, which is "the tendency to go freebooter" - an old Turkic term for when people just up and left to raid and then settled in a new place. The Kazakhs and the Cossacks both got their name from the early Turkic word qazaq.

[Joerg]

16 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

uh... this is like a large portion of Eurasia, from Tibet to Hungary. The ability to ignore dynastic demigod kings was a large motivator for maintaining transhumance away from early empires. I'm reading an entire book about qazaqlyq, which is "the tendency to go freebooter" - an old Turkic term for when people just up and left to raid and then settled in a new place. The Kazakhs and the Cossacks both got their name from the early Turkic word qazaq.

Grain farming in the Eurasian Steppe? Pastoralism, no doubt. But grain farming away from the riverine urban-dominated areas? Something left to the equivalent of a Vendref population, AFAIK. (This would have been the case for the cossacks under Elisabeth the Great. Later on, farmers would join cossack uprisings, and possibly be acculturated.)

Yes, there seems to have been a group of Yamnaya-related folk that made it pretty far east, the Tocharians. They inhabited oasis-cities, in all likelihood with some celestially descended overlord like most of the Yamnayan European Bronze Age descendants.

 

The terms I really would like to see replaced most are Chief, (tribal) King and Clan. Chief is the least toxic of these, as it conjures images of Tecumseh or Sitting Bull. Or Winnetou.

King gives me everything from Hamlet's dad and uncle to Louis XIV, and while I can live with Helsingborg, I can't with the Versailles images. (Kinglet gives me the Viking sea kings, but we mustn't think Viking, we mustn't...)

And "clan" is something I used to associate with plaid kilts, at least until recent forms of criminal structures in Germany. At a stretch, the KKK comes into play, too. The German term "Sippe" has completely different connotations in my mindscape, and describes what Coming Storm calls a Bloodline. I could live with "hundred" for a clan, as in one hundred man-days behind the plow to feed the community, and also the average size of the warband owed to tribe or (federation) king.

Tribe takes my mindscape to colonial confrontations of the 19th century, but that's ok. Spear-wielding Zulus threatening to overrun red-coated invaders are fine as my mental imagery for the Orlanthi goes. So do tribal names like Sioux or Apache (learned from Karl May). Nothing wrong with that (weirdly lensed) imagery, either.

 

Hearth is another term that cries out "Anglo-Saxon" to me. Modern English has "fire-place". But then, I don't mind 4th and 5th century Anglo-Saxon, except for the boats.

[Qizilbashwoman]

24 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the Tocharians

the tocharians were buddhist and we have no evidence of any pre-buddhist religious practices except for pre-oasis settlement steppes burials including marijuana and ephedra: no imagery or real sense of a caste system

24 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Hearth is another term that cries out "Anglo-Saxon" to me.

Oh? That's one of the words that doesn't seem weird, I use that word in real life.

I agree with king, it's wrong. chief is not good either, i'd prefer chieftain to chief. but actually I'd prefer "leader". I'd like Orlanth to be less "we're German tribes" and more "we are akin to Bronze-Age tribes like the IE tribes". 

Edited August 31, 2019 by Qizilbashwoman

[Jeff]

22 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

the tocharians were buddhist and we have no evidence of any pre-buddhist religious practices except for pre-oasis settlement steppes burials including marijuana and ephedra: no imagery or real sense of a caste system

Oh? That's one of the words that doesn't seem weird, I use that word in real life.

I agree with king, it's wrong. chief is not good either, i'd prefer chieftain to chief. but actually I'd prefer "leader". I'd like Orlanth to be less "we're German tribes" and more "we are akin to Bronze-Age tribes like the IE tribes". 

Chief is used in a LOT of cultures. King is also used as a translation for an awful lot of cultural titles. And clan is also used with groups like the Iroquois and Choctaw. So I am perfectly fine with them.

The usual translation for anax is "king". Same thing for "Lugal". Same thing with "raja". I got no problem using "king".

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Hearth is another term that cries out "Anglo-Saxon" to me. Modern English has "fire-place". But then, I don't mind 4th and 5th century Anglo-Saxon, except for the boats.

I must say, I suspect that most native English speakers (I can only speak for Canadian english speakers) hold warm feelings for the word "hearth". Perhaps it''s english speakers of all stripes who live in the north... I will have to keep that word in my warm and fuzzy Glorantha. Otherwise,  I think I prefer Jarl and Rig Jarl (I know, too nordic) to king, myself. Though, chief; I like no particular reason and the same for clan.

Cheers

Edited August 31, 2019 by Bill the barbarian

[Sir_Godspeed]

I was going to mention the Icelandic, who practiced less transhumance and more sheep farming and grain farming perhaps, but they did possibly have the longest-lasting farmer republic in the world.

Of course, that just leaves us in Germanic roots again, with Lawspeakers and thralls and so forth, so doesn't really change anything.

Not that I think hopping over to the Caucasian-Caspain highlands is necessarily going to yield any less particularistic terminology, with the added downside of being less clear for new users.

[Jeff]

10 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I was going to mention the Icelandic, who practiced less transhumance and more sheep farming and grain farming perhaps, but they did possibly have the longest-lasting farmer republic in the world.

Of course, that just leaves us in Germanic roots again, with Lawspeakers and thralls and so forth, so doesn't really change anything.

Not that I think hopping over to the Caucasian-Caspain highlands is necessarily going to yield any less particularistic terminology, with the added downside of being less clear for new users.

Lemme see, we could also look at the Shakya Republic, or any of the oligarchic republics in 6th BCE India, or we could look at any number of SE European states (to the extent we know much about their institutions).  There are a lot of models for all of this - and the nice thing about them is they don't immediate scream "Viking".

[Joerg]

 

Edited August 31, 2019 by Joerg
Moved to Glorantha forum for esotericism

[Brootse]

A very Gloranthan-feel Vice video about Blood sacrifice in Indonesia:

 

 

[Qizilbashwoman]

 

Pasola, in case you missed the name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasola

[Kloster]

Nice pic. What do you see (in Glorantha, of course)? Pent? Grazelanders?

[Brootse]

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

Nice pic. What do you see (in Glorantha, of course)? Pent? Grazelanders?

Pol-Joni, since they have such tiny horses.

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, Kloster said:

Nice pic. What do you see (in Glorantha, of course)? Pent? Grazelanders?

Pelandan areas where Spolite sacrifices have been banned.

[Bill the barbarian]

Threatened to start practicing a bit of necromancy did I not? Well here is a Topic in need of a calling back from the beyond.

And to start it back on the road to the land of the living, I figured I would mention "Bilal: A New Breed of Hero". It is set in Arabia a thousand years ago and tells the story of a pair of slaves; brother and sister. Could give inspiration for oasis people, and has given me a bit of insight for my own table. Thanks @Crel for the awesome Topic. Too bad it died way before its time, but as we all know...

That is not dead which can eternal lie!

Cheers!

 

Edited February 16, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[Qizilbashwoman]

10 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Threatened to start practicing a bit of necromancy did I not? Well here is a Topic in need of a calling back from the beyond.

And to start it back on the road to the land of the living, I figured I would mention "Bilal: A New Breed of Hero". It is set in Arabia a thousand years ago and tells the story of a pair of slaves; brother and sister. Could give inspiration for oasis people, and has given me a bit of insight for my own table. Thanks @Crel for the awesome Topic. Too bad it died way before its time, but as we all know...

That is not dead which can eternal lie!

Cheers!

In case anyone was wondering, this is in fact that Bilal, Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ al-Ḥabashiyy, the beloved friend of Muhammad and the first muezzin of the Muslim community. He died in 620 so it was a little more than a thousand years ago, though 🙂

Bilal is a beloved Muslim hero and one of the earliest converts to Islam. "Al-Ḥabashiyy" means "the Ethiopian" or "the person from the Horn of Africa" and he was a slave of proxies of the Byzantines.

[Bill the barbarian]

13 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

In case anyone was wondering, this is in fact that Bilal, Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ al-Ḥabashiyy, the beloved friend of Muhammad and the first muezzin of the Muslim community. He died in 620 so it was a little more than a thousand years ago, though 🙂

 

Spoilers my dear qizilbash, spoilers. I have not seen it all... and alas I can not unsee your post.

Thank you very kindly for the quote and the like and the  post. I can not read any more until I see the movie so if I had something to answer....

Edited February 16, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[Qizilbashwoman]

25 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Spoilers my dear qizilbash, spoilers. I have not seen it all... and alas I can not unsee your post.

Thank you very kindly for the quote and the like and the  post. I can not read any more until I see the movie so if I had something to answer....

i assure you this is no spoiler, you just aren't Muslim. I was only providing context for the ignorant Christians who didn't recognise the name, unlike the 1/3 of the world this film was actually marketed to. The film is from a Malay-speaking country, and Bilal is one of the commonest Muslim names on the planet.

Edited February 16, 2020 by Qizilbashwoman

[Bill the barbarian]

42 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i assure you this is no spoiler, you just aren't Muslim. I was only providing context for the ignorant Christians who didn't recognise the name, unlike the 1/3 of the world this film was actually marketed to. The film is from a Malay-speaking country, and Bilal is one of the commonest Muslim names on the planet.

Alas, being one of the ignorant ⅔ it is news to me and thus spoiler to me. I prefer to let the realization come at the directors pace. Oh well, my fault for trying to turn people on to this. Had I kept it my secret the movie would not have been spoiled for me. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

sigh

Edited February 16, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[Qizilbashwoman]

36 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Alas, being one of the ignorant ⅔ it is news to me and thus spoiler to me. I prefer to let the realization come at the directors pace. Oh well, my fault for trying to turn people on to this. Had I kept it my secret the movie would not have been spoiled for me. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

sigh

... this is akin to learning that saint paul was saint paul, it's not a spoiler? I didn't talk about anything that the film, you know, covers. the bits i talked about aren't in the film

is it a spoiler if it's not in the film?

Edited February 16, 2020 by Qizilbashwoman

[Shiningbrow]

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

... this is akin to learning that saint paul was saint paul, it's not a spoiler? I didn't talk about anything that the film, you know, covers. the bits i talked about aren't in the film

is it a spoiler if it's not in the film?

@Bill the barbarian, this is true. I have seen the film and what @Qizilbashwoman wrote above as a spoiler was still new to me! 

It'll all make sense to Muslims (I got that), but otherwise would go over your head. As per what often happens with foreign films, you usually lack all of the cultural contexts to fully understand and appreciate.