From: David Weihe (dweihe@RJLG.COM)
Date: Tue 19 Nov 1996 - 02:31:59 EET
Bryan John Maloney <bjm10@cornell.edu>
> of. It is telling the Orlanth is the *youngest* son of Umath. The GL
> might have eventually moved his generation up to eldest, when the time
> was right for it, but introducing a godling as a youngest son, one who
> had been overlooked by the local Godi due to his youth, was probably the
> easiest way to sneak the proto-Orlanth into the hill tribes' mythologies.
No, it is not very telling. The promotion of the youngest son to the highest
rank is common in RW mythology, legend, and historical fact. Until their
conversion to Christianity, many Germanic peoples practiced Ultimogeniture,
where the youngest son inherits, rather than Primogeniture, where the
eldest inherits the bulk of the estate. This is probably common to many
other Indo-European cultures in their earliest forms.
Witness Chronos (youngest son of Uranus), Zeus (youngest son of Chronos)
Witness Joseph and Benjamin, the favored sons of Jacob/Israel (himself
a younger son)
Witness David, son of Jesse.
Finally, witness that of the 3 sons of Rognvald the Powerful, 1st Jarl
of the Orkeys, his youngest son inherits the settled estate (his two older
brothers had to go off and conquer Normandy and Sicily, respectively). This
is attested to by the Icelandic saga of the Jarls of the Orkneys, available
in paperback from Penguin books (unless it is now out of print).
There are various other tales in Medieval stories that I recall, but
not well enough to quote details.
This leaves aside the problem of how the God Learners made all these
changes in the few centuries that they had to work. And weren't most
Orlanth EWF citizens during that period, or subjects of the Only Old
One, who wouldn't have taken kindly to GLs mucking about with his
subjects' mythologies like that (that would be his job, after all :-).
------------------------------
End of Glorantha Digest V3 #293
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