From: David Dunham (dunham@pensee.com)
Date: Thu 06 Jul 2000 - 23:26:46 EEST
Alex Ferguson replying to my statement:
> > the clan is the basic unit of Orlanthi society
>
>To digress entirely off the original point, I'm curious as to how
>people interpret statements such as the above. For David, it seems
>to mean that each clan must work as the whole of Orlanthi society
>in miniature, therefore laws apply to the components of clans in
>much the same way as they do between different tribes.
>
>For me, it means almost exactly the opposite: the clan is a
>fundamental building block of society: within a clan, things
>function quite different than between two difference one. A clan
>has a status as a legal entity that smaller groupings do not:
>bloodlines, and families don't have common property as a clan does
>(at least de jure they don't, in practice they often might as well),
>they don't have formal leaders as a clan does, they can't 'federate'
>and 'unfederate' from larger groupings in the way clans can. For
>many purposes, the clan is the 'social atom' (and the legal one):
Yes, the clan is the social atom. (Yes, it's composed of bloodlines,
but these, quark-like, don't exist outside the clan.)
I believe justice is a central aspect of Heortling society, and the
assignment of wergild is a fairly basic Orlanth myth. Thus, I believe
wergild is meaningful within the clan and is not some new-fangled
higher-order thing.
This all began with a discussion of wergild, if I recall correctly,
and this *does* work differently between clans -- the big difference
being that within a clan, there is a common leader who can assign a
value and force it to be paid. When a Karandoli clansman kills a
Greydog clansman, there is no way to get justice. It has to be
handled on a case by case basis -- the Karandoli can offer wergild
(the Greydogs are under no obligation to accept), the two clan chiefs
can negotiate, or a feud can start. If one of the Greydogs kills
another, it's significantly easier for the Greydog chief to resolve
the issue, because it can be handled within the clan framework.
The tribe is an attempt to apply the clan framework in such a way
that it works with clans as constituents (e.g. there's a tribal king
to supply justice, and a tribal ring). And Sartar's kingdom was much
the same, treating tribes as its elements (though it reverted to
Vingkotling-style kingship). So this is actually the reverse --
Heortling society is clans only in the large...
The internal structure of a clan does matter when there's a killing
within a bloodline, because then there can be no transfer of wergild.
The bloodline is like a black box as far as the clan is concerned
(and an infected one at that).
And families (and individuals) can certainly transfer from one clan to another.
>At least for the Heortlings (or the Heortlings I have any familiarity
>with). YOMV...
Oops, my bad -- replace "Orlanthi" with "Heortling."
David Dunham <mailto:dunham@pensee.com>
Glorantha/HW/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html>
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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