Gradations of Sartarite Identity

In this piece, Mianmo has provided us with a narrative summary of the different components of identity that would have comprised any given child of the Haraborn clan. More than that, however, she has allowed us to catch her in a snare.

As we know from Six Seasons, the legendary founder of the clan was Jarstakos Forked Spear. Yet initially in the piece, we have his name as Jastakos. This, she scratched out and replaced with Jarstakos-- and then crossed that out and, in a confident hand, returned to Jastakos. Now, it is quite possible that this represents a crisis of memory in the editing process; we may imagine her wracking her brains, trying to remember which was correct. But her familiarity with the clan makes this sort of mistake seem rather difficult to believe. Rather than accuse Usuphus of getting the name wrong (which seems equally unlikely), let us consider whether this was a deliberate change in the narrative she chose to present.

After all, that change brings the name a step closer to the name of the Orlanthi god Mastakos, whose name quite literally means "Traveler Returning" in southern Heortling dialects. With the excision of a consonant, she points the reader towards Jarstakos's mythic antecedent, and may as well be asking the Muse to tell us about a complicated man, one whose myth opens with a past obliterated by his status as a wanderer, who cannot resist the temptation of a home.

Or it is equally possible that her own dialect had trouble with "rst" as a sound, and she simplified the name for her own oral performances. Unfortunately, research into the dialect that would have been native to the White Horse Barrows remains frustratingly slow, so it is likely that the origins of the missing R will continue to vex us for some time.

A Child's Guide to the Gods

This text is interesting both in that it provides a succinct summary of the major Orlanthi gods, complete with examples of how they were invoked by their worshipers, but also in how it betrays Mianmo's source. When she writes of Heler, Elmal and Argan Argar as the Three Thanes of Orlanth, speaks of the Yelmalion Sun Dome Temple unfavorably, and casually drops references to Ezkankekko's Esrolian title, she may as well be holding up a sign to us that she was writing from the perspective of the Haraborn clan, who served under Ezkankekko after Kerofinela was depopulated in the Dragonkill and who taught them ways to propitiate his father, Argan Argar himself. None of these, as far as we can tell, were orthodox positions across Sartar at the time that Mianmo was writing, and they offer a fascinating glimpse at the sprawling religious diversity contained within a seemingly religiously homogeneous culture.

We can only wonder, based on her writings elsewhere, whether she found the Yelmalions to be bad neighbors, and thus encouraged her readers to see them through the same unfavorable lens. Certainly the cult's emphases would have taken everything a sa-elurae would have found unpleasant about the cult of Elmal and made it all even worse. Truth against Illusion; Sun over Earth; Death-the-Pike against Life. (Yet she is positively glowing when she writes about Humakt, who is Death and Truth without Storm...)

 

Foundational Myths of Kerofinela

Like many of her works, Mianmo's Foundational Myths of Kerofinela is (at least on its surface) a compilation rather than an original work, arranged in such a way as to give the reader a basic understanding of what the peoples of Kerofinela believed. However, underneath the surface, her Illusion Rune can be seen winking back at us. After all, we have only her word that these sources existed, and until further archeology finds any evidence to the contrary, we will just have to trust her that she did not make them up on the spot.

Whether they exist or not, she plays different sources against each other, refuses to standardize the names of the gods she speaks about, expects her audience to follow her as she stitches these stories together before and after the weaving of Time, and makes odd substitutions. Most notably, rather than referring to the Greatest Goddess, Arachne Solara (who she could not have been ignorant of, given her Lunar associations), she attributes the weaving of Time to the Esrolian goose goddess Imarja, who shares a claim to omnipotence, albeit one infused everywhere with the Earth Rune. The result is a deliberate patchwork quilt, in which what she does not share is sometimes as important as what she does.

The question remains: who was her audience?  In a culture which was dominated by the oral tradition, she produced a document intended to be read. In a culture obsessed with the origins of things, she sidesteps them as quickly as possible and focuses on the dramas of the gods. In a culture dominated by the Lunar Empire, she includes subversive elements, but also a purportedly Lunar text. This translator's theory is that this was written to satisfy the curiosity of lowland Esrolia about why their northern neighbors were the way that they were, which neatly also explains the excision of Arachne Solara in favor of the hometown hero.

Introduction to the Blog: Mianmo Running Alynx

Recent excavation in southwestern Kerofinela has produced a treasure trove of materials from the Late Heortling period. This blog is chiefly concerned with the literary collection of the scribe Mianmo Running Alynx, which was unearthed from one of the White Horse Barrows. There, on the frontier between civilization and barbarism (itself situated within another such frontier), Mianmo curated a collection of texts that are in conversation with other works of her period, such as Dagius Furius’s Orlanthi Book and Usuphus of Jonstown’s Six Seasons in Sartar, but which in many places displays a striking divergence from such classical literature. Her Thedogony, for example, raises many questions about our understanding of the Orlanthi birth-of-evil myth, and The Lost Book of Etyries, Named Goodears might change our understanding of early non-human embracing of the Lunar Way.

Notably, both study of her grave art and analysis of her skeleton suggest that Mianmo was one of the sa-elurae, one of the civilized shapeshifting foxes local to the region (having chosen life in society over the intoxicating freedom of eating weird bugs). These sa-elurae were strongly associated with the Illusion Rune, and this makes Mianmo’s accounts dubious on both sides of the gap called Time. It is possible that she was nothing more than a fabulist, or was perceived as such by her society. If so, her approach to the Thed mythos was exceedingly dangerous, given that it would have opened her up to accusations of being a Chaos sympathizer. (Her other two personal runes were Earth and Life, usually arranged on either side of that suggestively empty triangle.)