Miriam "Banner" Abrams sends Yewwl and her followers to spy in what might be enemy territory:
"'I seize no sense,' Ngaru of Raava complained.
"In truth, the idea of organized enmity was vague and tricky as wind, and felt as icy." (X, p. 137)
(My computer suggests "...wind and..." instead of "...wind, and..." and I would write this phrase without the comma but, of course, inside quotation marks, I must reproduce the text as written by Poul Anderson. Comma use varies considerably.)
Anderson fans note, first, that, in this passage, the ever-present wind is characterized as "vague" and even as "tricky."
"'Wodan-Mercury-Hermes is the Wanderer because he's the god of the wind.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 390.
And Odin is certainly tricky - and comes from an icy realm.
But the Ramnuans do not understand "...organized enmity..." and do not have gods:
"'...Ramnuans don't have religions of human type and most definitely have never had armies...'" (IV, p. 48)
Why no armies? Well, why should they have them? Large scale killing of members of one's own species is certainly a questionable concept. In the case of the Ramnuans, grief tends to drive them berserk. Thus, a soldier whose comrade was killed would run amok. Ramnuan societies have had to cope with a lot of individual fights but have never had wars, armies or states. In this, they resemble the Ythrians.
Yewwl explains to Ngaru:
"'Suppose a feud is between Banner and the clan-head at this place... Their retainers are naturally loyal to them, and thus likewise at odds.'" (X, p. 137)
So there are feuds between individuals who have loyal retainers but that is as far as the Ramnuans go down the road to war.
What of gods?
Ramnuans lose themselves in Oneness through dance, music, chant, winds (!) and distances but this is not what Banner calls "worship" because:
"...worship involved a supposed entity dwelling beyond the stars-..." (VIII, p. 123)
The earliest worship involved many entities in the immediate natural environment. Then the object of worship was unified and pushed away beyond the stars. But the Ramnuans began with Oneness without animism.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That inability of Ramnuans to understand large scale institutionalized conflicts (wars) now makes me doubt they can go or advance very far if unable to think beyond the level of clans. True, there were the Lords of the Volcano, presiding over several clans, but with strictly limited powers.
Ad astra! Sean
We should note that every single species on this planet that is social (lives in long-term groups) and predatory (gets most of is sustenance from killing and eating other animals) has a high level of intra-specific violence.
This is true of wolves, of hyenas, of lions, of jag hond, and of human beings.
And that some non-predatory social species (like chimps) have substantial, though lower, intra-specific violence rates.
Human beings are essentially chimps that over time evolved to be more like wolves, and then got smarter because of social competition for breeding opportunities.
Since many unrelated varieties of mammal are involved, and since this type of behavior is -not- typical of many other mammals, there's probably a pattern to be discerned.
Human beings come into the social-predator category, since we've always lived in groups starting with the very earliest hominids, and for the last 2,000,000 years or so we've been apex predators.
The last 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture don't negate this.
There's overwhelming archaeological evidence that in all human cultures before the emergence of the State, both hunter-gatherer and neolithic, the commonest cause of death for adults has been death by violence at the hands of other human beings.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Which is why I am so skeptical hominid "lions" and "lambs" will ever lie down peacefully with each other!
Ad astra! Sean
I have seen the claim (rather speculative in my view) that punishment such as execution or long jail terms for violence, has had a selective pressure against violence in humans over the last few millennia. If true of course this would only reduce the amount of violence.
Kaoe, Jim!
Then I would suggest looking up Ernest van den Haag's book, PUNISHING CRIMINALS, discussing the problem of what to do about malefactors.
Ad astra! Sean
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