Shall Gargarth him gather
Shall broo hunt and hurt him?
Shall the cold and the dark on his exile be cruel?
Gedday folks
We put the Heortling outlaw topic to bed last month, but I'm slowly getting back up to speed after some medial treatment, and my draft box is full of half written rants and musings. A few are probably worth finishing. So here's an upland skald's two clacks and a greasy bolg on the subject of outlawry.
Outlawed Orlanthi *are* kin.
Outlawed Orlanthi *are not* kin.
They are both, they are neither. They are liminal. It is the liminality of their status that makes the situation so horrible, and so difficult to deal with. Liminality, the process or state where something occupies the shadowy border between two opposed concepts, is a powerful phenomena in religion, myth, and life. Its a threshold state, charactered by ambiguity and indeterminacy. (Latin 'limen' = doorstop, threshold). Things that cross boundaries and that cannot be easily categorised evoke strong emotions (things that pass from within the body to without, sexual identities that do not fit the norm, religious objects or persons that cross religious or magical boundaries, many ritual activities) and are often culturally barricaded by being treated as sacred, or taboo, or both.
Dealing with liminality in a roleplaying context requires placing yourself in the perspective of the participants. It can be a little foreign to the systematised 'box' schemata that we use to simplify and make gameable complex cultural backgrounds, or to source text fundamentalism.
A Heortling lives from birth to pyre enmeshed in the web of kinship. Kinship provides meaning, motivation, support, and responsibility. Kin provide your daily work, your food, your physical and legal protection. Kinship places you in a social universe and tells you who your friends and enemies are, who you can marry or have sex with, who to support who are your rivals and who you should ignore or berate. To be cut off from kin is soul destroying: the very act of outlawry drives many to despair and desperate, reckless action. Indeed the Anglo-Saxon word for outlaw, 'nithing', literally means 'nothing'.
An outlaw has betrayed his or her clan, they are cast out from their social universe. For the most part they will flee far in shame, or wither and die in just a short time. Some will adapt, and become mercenaries or adventurers, some, may join with formerly rival or enemy clans to pursue vengeance or justice (though making a distinction between the two is not easy for a Heortling).
Emotions continue to run very high on both sides - shame and loss and betrayal and anger. If blood had been shed, the outlaw has evoked the grim spectre of kinstrife, the dark place where no Heortling can look. As a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter book notes:
Prey, its as if my people have been handed prey. They'll tear him to pieces if he come with a troop. O, we are apart.
But a brother is still a brother, whether outlawed or no. A mother is still a mother, and a lover still a lover. Emotional bonds cannot be turned off overnight. A woman may move to another clan at marriage, but the bonds, the loyalties, remain and only slowly change over years - this is accepted, and acknowledged and assuaged with ritual and gift-giving and visitation. But an outlaw is cut from the web of kinship suddenly and traumatically.
And the emotional bonds remain. Loyalties are traumatised, but often endure. Brothers may flee with outlawed brothers, entire bands may go into exile with their leader. There is no emotional answer to kinstrife.
And a women may be promised to another, for the good of the clan, even though her lover for her first betrothed remains strong.
My laughing man-boy, my white-maned bull, my Heort, my altar god With his red bone shield and his twin ash spears, his tattooed shank and combed white beard...
I am quoting fragments I have translated from the original Heortling :)(based on the Anglo-Saxon poem Wulf and Eadwacer)...
No more shall I walk with Wulf midst the grain-blessed fields of our tula, nor laugh with him in the hunting camps; neither shall we dance together in the rain as the altar fires spit and blaze. Ill-wyrded Wulf is outlaw now, and I am wed to a lesser man, his kinsman, who betrayed us both.
The carls of my clan, if he comes to our camp Will treat him as prey, they will cut him outright.
By the thunder of thanes, so fearful to foes By the curse of a chieftain, one beaten in love Wulf is goaded by godar, now gone to the forest Worse than a beast, for Odayla joins hunting.
Forked is our fate now, our joint wyrd is weakened, Its weavings unwound, We who were once were one. Sure sundered, betrayed, my true love is an outlaw And I walk in sorrow, bound bitter to brother.
Shall Gargarth him gather
Shall broo hunt and hurt him?
Shall the cold and the dark on his exile be cruel?
Hence our stories, our campaigns, our imaginings.
Cheers
John
john_at_mythologic.info John HughesMythologic: http://mythologic.info
May God us keep
From Single vision and Newton's sleep!
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