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...)