Hadding dreams. War Of The Gods is a fantasy so a dream of the dead can be a visit from the dead. Mist streams past on a wind that Hadding neither feels nor hears. When his dead wife strides forth, the wind flutters her grave-clothes and tosses her hair. Thus, the wind adds drama and urgency to this visitation. Speaking in verse, Ragnhild issues warnings about their son and daughter. Regarding their daughter, Ulfhild, Hadding must:
"Watch that you ward your life." (p. 264)
Gangleri had made a strange prophecy about Hadding's death. Now aging, Hadding wonders. He consults a soothsayer and, in the following chapter, visits his son-in-law and his daughter.
The end, whatever it is going to be, approaches.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I was reminded of King Helgi's equally problematic daughter Skuld, whom we see generations later in HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And Grallon's daughter.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of Dahut as well, and should have mentioned her in my first comment.
Ad astra! Sean
One thing that Poul's work brings out in these historical contexts is how -fragile- things were. Anything that caused an upset, that caused widespread disorder, risked tripping things over into a state where a goodly chunk of the population was going to die.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Because, until fairly recent times, many nations had only narrow margins of wealth on which to fall back on when times got hard. And I have thought more than once of how easily a similar catastrophe might happen even to modern, advanced nations. Mostly thru the bungling incompetence of many gov'ts!
Ad astra! Sean
One reason Europe did comparatively well with regard to famines was the distinctive family and marriage system, which made fertility move in synch with economic conditions.
That was why western Europe didn't have the early and universal marriage pattern that other areas did.
It wasn't that Europeans had less -desire- to marry and have children. The difference in reproductive behavior of English people in England and in the American colonies illustrates that -- English settlers in America had twice the number of children that their cousins in the Old Country did, and their marriage rate was much higher.
But the system effectively -forbade- marriage to a significant sector of the population, and delayed it for most people; and that tightened in bad times and relaxed in good ones.
It wasn't perfect, but it did substantially reduce the subsistence-crisis rhythm of growth and collapse.
(the Japanese developed a somewhat similar system under the Tokugawa Shogunate -- yet another of the eerie correspondences between Japanese and European history.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree practical and social factors played a huge role in making sure population patterns stayed roughly in sync with what an economy could support.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: what it amounted to was that Western civilization -- roughly the area north and west of a line drawn from St. Petersburg to Trieste -- had a very strong taboo against two breeding couples living under the same roof.
Hence there were few multigenerational households; each was, generally speaking, a man, a woman, their children, and (if they were well-to-do) unmarried live-in servants/workers.
Occasionally a spinster aunt, or an elderly parent, but that was largely limited to widowed/widower parents. If the older couple were both still around, what usually happened was that they moved out, or a section of a house would be symbolically "blocked off" so a separate household could be formed.
Note how full-time live-in servants as late as the 19th century were almost never married.
If you look at a well-researched show like Downton Abbey, note how it's remarked on when a lady's maid and a valet marry, and regarded as a singular mark of favor; other servants say they've never been in a household where that was the case.
The valet and the maid are respectively in their 40's and 30's.
And it's accepted as axiomatic that they can't continue to live in the servant wing of the Great House itself once married -- they have to be given a separate cottage, under their own roof.
The senior staff -- the butler and housekeeper -- are referred to as Mr. and Mrs., but aren't married and have no children. When they do marry later, they have to move out.
Note also that the Earl's mother doesn't live at Downton any more; when he married, she moved out into a "dower house", owned by the family and kept for that purpose.
And when his heir and the heir's mother arrive, they get a separate house too. The heir does move into Downton when he marries the Earl's daughter, but that's after the Earl and his wife are past childbearing age.
The spin-off of this was that you couldn't get married until you -could- establish your own household -- in contrast to most of the world, where married children continued to live with their parents in one extended menage, or where it was common for brothers and their wives to live together.
You didn't have to be wealthy; quite a modest household would do, what a tenant-farmer or laborer or craftsman could manage.
But getting the resources together for that took quite a bit of time at the bottom of the economic pyramid; the would-be wife had to have a "dower" of things like bed-linen and kitchen gear, and the man had to be able to pay the rent on a cottage and have an assortment of tools and skills.
Really poor people usually didn't marry or have children at all.
In late Stuart and early Georgian England, up to 25% of the population never married -- and the overall numbers of the population were static or declining from the 1680's through the 1720's. The unmarried percentage never dropped below 10% in normal times.
That this was economic compulsion backing up social custom is shown by the pattern in the English colonies, where food was cheap, land was cheap and wages high.
There instead of marrying at 25-35 and a lot of people never marrying, over 90% married and they usually did so in their late teens and early 20's.
Hence Americans of English blood usually had 6-8 children, whereas their cousins in the Old Country had 2-4.
In both cases -marital- fertility was quite high; married women had children at 18-24 month intervals from right after marriage to menopause or natural infertility. They weren't deliberately restricting the number of children.
The difference was that Anglo-Americans married 4 to 6 years earlier on average, and nearly all of them did marry.
That's what their relatives in England would have done if they could, but they couldn't, the way things were set up.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for many comments long and substantial enough to count as articles.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
And I approve of how people behaved in both the Old Colonies and Great Britain. They were rationally calculating what was possible for them to do, if they wanted marriage and children. First, obtain the means needed for supporting a household, no matter how modest, before marrying and having children. Briefly, more easily and quickly done in the Colonies, but with more difficulty and at a later average age in the Old Country.
Ireland, however, seems to have differed from the pattern seen in Britain. I've read of how, before the Great Famine, most of the Irish married and had children at very young ages. So much so the Church had difficulty on insisting the Irish waiting till reaching at least the minimum ages set for marriage in Catholic canon law. The system in Ireland seems to have been based on true subsistence farming, on crofts rented from land lords, and perilously dependent on the crops (esp. potatoes) NOT failing.
Paul: absolute agreement!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Ireland's a bit more complex than that.
What was different was that the Irish economy was less monetized, especially before the Famine.
Very few actual tenant farmers died in the Famine - that is, the men who rented farms for cash rent from landlords. Virtually none who rented 20 acres or more.
They went through some very hard times, but mostly pulled through.
The people who died were either landless laborers working for wages, or (and this is where the lower monetization came in) "cottars" -- sub-tenants, who were given a potato patch in return for their labor.
Cottars didn't rent from the landlords, they rented from the tenant farmers, who got the labor they needed (Irish agriculture was -much- more labor-intensive than English) without laying out scarce cash from their working capital.
Before 1848, considerably more than half the Irish farming population were laborers and cottars, not tenants.
Early marriage was easy for the Irish rural poor because they could sub-lease a potato patch and a hovel.
In England, you couldn't do that. Landlords were vigilant against that sort of thing because under the English Poor Law they were ultimately responsible for people of that sort if they got "settlement" in a parish and then went "on the rates", ie, on welfare. That was harsh and grudging by our standards, but in the 19th century world England was unusual in having -any- compulsory, legislated provision for feeding the destitute.
English landlords tried hard to keep the number of people living on their land at a minimum. Irish landlords (even when they were the same people) didn't.
After the Famine, everything changed.
The dying and the mass emigration were heavily concentrated among the landless and the cottar class; over the next two generations, by roughly the 1890's, they'd effectively vanished or were a shadow of what they'd been, and the majority of rural Irish people -were- tenant farmers and their families, with a leavening of shopkeepers, blacksmiths and so forth.
And Irish farmers altered their marriage patterns too -- they waited until they could inherit a holding, and only one son and one daughter in each family had any prospect of doing so (or of marrying the inheriting son of a neighbor) and of being able to marry.
So the other sons and daughters of tenant farmers had to leave or stay on as spinster/bachelor poor relations, and the ones who stayed and inherited married very late -- after the 1840's, later than the English did. Most emigrated; a lot went into the Church as celibate religious.
This was helped along by the land reforms that started in the 1870's, which first protected tenants against eviction, and then fixed rents, and then started a compulsory purchase program to turn the land over to the tenants (a process largely complete before WW1).
Rural Ireland became an intensely petite-bougeoise place, dominated by conservative small farmers and the Church.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for correcting my too broad and oversimplified comments about Ireland. Briefly: landowners, tenants, subleasing cottars, landless farmhands. Casualties of the Famine mostly concentrated in the last two of these groups. And many of the survivors who did not die emigrated.
After the Famine the rural Irish became mostly tenant farmers and then small landowners. And that drastically changed marital patterns, because only one heir would inherit such holdings. Younger sons and daughters either remained unmarried and landless, emigrated, or became celibate religious.
Some, of course, became artisans, shopowners, merchants, lawyers, doctors, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: occasionally my intitial career choice of history professor becomes obvious... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that certainly shows! I am grateful you so often contribute such interesting and well informed comments here.
Ad astra! Sean
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