Rat and Cat Have a Contest

This, too, is a piece from the journal that Mianmo labeled "From the Cottar," and as such is likely another rural recitation that she saved for us. Here we have an example of the Just-So Story, a distinctly lesser myth that would likely only have been of interest to children and those few bold souls who walked the path of Yinkin.

Here we see the origin of one of the great rivalries of the granary and the storehouse: the alynx and the rat (whose patron deity eludes current mythographic practices, but was associated with both undermining Krarsht and troublesome Eurmal in the Orlanthi imagination). Here we also see a warning against underhanded dealings, theft from the community, and being unwilling to accept second place. All of these warnings would have been especially important among the ambitious and competitive masculine world of the Orlanthi; the unspoken lesson is that those who betray their clan in the pursuit of glory are cast out.

Given the uncertain divine place of Rat, and the rather childish suffixes given to both of the titular characters, the translator has chosen not to use either "alynx" or "Yinkin" to refer to Cat in the following story. If the reader prefers, "tabby" and "kitty-cat" also convey the meaning behind the Theyalan name given for the tale's protagonist.

The Six Great Predators

This piece was part of one of Mianmo's working journals, labeled: "From the Cottar." Given its rhythms, and its distinctly oral nature, it is likely that this was dictated directly to her, and it never found its way into one of her own works. Here we see a glimpse of what was important to pass on among the lower class of the pastoral Heortlings: direct information on how to avoid being eaten by the predators of Kerofinela, and how to protect your flock of sheep from the same (as sheep were a distinctly lower-class animal to herd; the more affluent carls herded cattle and yoked them to the plow).

However, it's important to note what this, too, omits: there is no reference here to the wolves that we know haunted the highlands of Sartar at the time, Telmori or otherwise, and neither is there reference to the Praxian saber-toothed lion, or to the Lesser Esrolian Tiger, or to the roving packs of scavenging dinosaurs that were a menace to travelers skirting northwestern Sartar. Rather, this hexapartite list serves as an introduction to the elements that formed the backbone of Heortling cosmology, each one attached to a certain creature which displays characteristics of the element. Little wonder, then, that Mianmo felt this was worth noting down.

(Translator's note: while predatory bats may seem laughable, the crag bats of Dagori Inkarth are widely attested as being both large enough to carry enlo riders and ravenous enough to eat sheep, not to mention the humans who looked after them. While scholarship is uncertain whether they ever spread to the Quivini, don't get so lost in the Lunar allegory here that you write off what was possibly a very real fear. For more on this, this translator recommends the paper "BATS ARE BUGS: Third Age Chiropterology and the Politics of Darkness.")

Fragments from the Elura Tales

In these fragments from Elura Stories, Mianmo gives us a teasing glimpse at the stories told about the mother of the sa-elurae, quite possibly told by the sa-elurae themselves. But some historical context is important to understand both the stories and Mianmo herself.

While sa-elurae could be found as enterprising individuals in places as far afield as Glamour and Nochet, archeological evidence suggests that their communities were centered on the northern bank of the Stream, particularly at Duck Point, Quackford, Bayberry and Clearwine. (Note that while these communities were close to Beast Valley, they were outside it; the sa-elurae were distinguished from the elurae of Beast Valley by their choice to live among humans, rather than treating them solely as somewhat dimwitted entertainment.) While all sa-elurae were by birth members of the cult of the primordial fox goddess Vusalka (who was likely the Vuskaratha of Middle Sea Empire texts), they were also strongly associated in Sartar with the trade-cults of Issaries and Etyries, who they called Etyries Goodears and claimed as one of their own; with the cult of Donandar the Entertainer, particularly the Puppeteer Troupe; and Ernalda-Uleria, Ernalda in her aspect as the Great Lover.

These associations, along with their inability to breed with humans (without proper dispensation from Ernalda-Uleria) despite very active libidos, led to the sa-elurae being stereotyped as untrustworthy sex workers among the Heortling tribes of southern Kerofinela. Stories abounded of how sa-elurae merchants would lift their tails to sweeten a deal, and how their musicians were more than happy to accommodate “private performances”; we have records from the Blue House in Boldhome that suggest the priestess “Kellys Brightbrow,” a top earner from 1616 to 1626, was a sa-elurae using a natural talent for mimicry for her scandalous performances. 

In the margin of one of her manuscripts, Mianmo wrote: “my tunic embroidered NOT A MEMBER OF THE CULT OF LANBRIL is provoking many questions already answered by the tunic.” As no such piece of clothing was found in her tomb, it is unclear as to whether this was another one of her jokes— but it is similarly revealing. The thief-cult was associated with Illusion, after all, and the sa-elurae were forced to the margins of society. Would it have been surprising if some turned to the cult as just another way to make a living?

Perhaps it would be surprising in the Kingdom of Sartar, given their loyalty to the kingdom’s legendary founder, a shocking polestar for these mercurial beast-women. (In them we can see a feminine echo of the wild Telmori bodyguards of the Princes of Sartar.) While overlooked by Fazzur Wideread’s Duck Hunt, many sa-elurae risked their hides to act as Duck smugglers, and Lunar tax forms reveal some fox woman pelts were mixed in with the dead Ducks. They are on the margins of the tales of rebellion against the Lunars from 1602 to 1625: as daring smugglers, as spies in Lunar caravans and command posts, as messengers and facilitators for rebel warbands. Perhaps it was in this context that Mianmo had interactions with the Haraborn clan, the core of the famed Company of the Dragon.

(Translator’s note: the use of “sales” below may seem anachronistic; Mianmo used a New Pelorian loanword here, which had developed similar connotations among the Heortlings at the time of her writing.)

Fragments from the Thedogony

Someone tried to destroy this material.

The manuscript for the Thedogony was found in a casket among Mianmo’s grave goods. The sheets were loose (but showed signs of having once been bound into leather), were out of order (insofar as an order can be imposed), and had sustained some damage from fire. It is possible that they are the remnants of a research journal, though it is equally possible that they form a Mianmo narrative similar to Foundational Myths of Kerofinela, relying on the reader’s interpretation of what lay within— but we have had to reconstruct what she had to say to us, between the damage and the disorder. As the title says, these are just fragments from a larger document; Mianmo has forced me to join her in making deliberate artistic choices, and the rough chronological order is my own.

Let me be clear: this material flies in the face of conventional Kerofinelan studies. Paulis Longvale’s writings on the Unholy Trio and the birth of the Devil are clear. “Madness was his father, Rape his mother, and Plague his midwife.” “Hatred, selfishness, greed and jealousy motivated them.” (Though I believe that all four motives can be found in Mianmo’s account, just in different shapes.)

So perhaps she was simply writing perverse, blasphemous fiction in very poor taste. Or perhaps we have, through her, a glimpse into the folk traditions and the women’s traditions of Kerofinela (and these often go hand in hand), undocumented by Paulis and other such important men.

But whatever the truth is, you must remember: someone tried to destroy this so that you would not be able to read it. Doesn't that make you a little curious?

(Translator's Note: yes, I know it should be Thedgonia. "Thedogony" was a joke that stuck, and now we are stuck with it.)

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.