Re: Area of Steads lands

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From: BEThexton (bethexton@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 07 Mar 2002 - 16:32:38 EET

>
> It's a mess, and the published figures don't really make much
sense. Hunting
> lands, and even more importantly, summer sheep grazing uplands,
will extend
> beyond any recognised tula boundary, IMO. I use the distinctions of
>
> * harstings,
> * tula,
> * wilds and
> * waste
> to mean
>
> * worked land,
> * fixed clan boundaries including some relatively small hunting and
grazing
> lands,
> * regular hunting and grazing lands that might be shared with
neighboring
> clans, and
> * wilderness with no fixed ownership.
>

I like that. Very clearly different people have had different views on this....some sources suggest that essentially all of Sartar is claimed by one clan or another, but yet you have things like Storm Tribe saying that prospective Yinkin initiates must survive a year in the wild (how they get through that W4 winter without any magic I'm not quite sure....), which would be hard if all the wilds are claimed by clans and watched over by their wyters.

I can accept that in those rarer fertile areas tula boundaries will meet up and and all the land will be claimed. Heck, this even has story opportunities ("Black Creek has been the boundary between our clans for four generations, but after the flood brought about by their storm magics it shifted course and several hides of our land are now on their side of the creek, but it is still our land and if we have to we'll fight to defend it!")

In the abundant rougher lands this just doesn't make sense to me. When you only have pockets of arable land, with more dependance on herding and hunting, the lands needed to support a clan get a lot bigger, but can a wyter really keep as good an eye on an area five times as big, with many parts where your clan may not go from one year to the next? I could almost see the tula, in magical terms, becoming a series of dots, with the various steads centering larger dots, and certain critical other areas (shrines, mines, upland pastures) forming smaller dots....simply because the clan doesn't have the time to undertake the necessary activities to bind the wyter to all the land in between. They may claim the rest of the land, but there is little that they can do to enforce that claim.

But having said all that, there is no point in defining a clan that contradicts the official sources.

--Bryan

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