human beings in Poul Anderson's historical fiction;
beings like elves and trolls in Anderson's heroic fantasies;
Nicholas van Rijn and the Siturushi of Gorzun in the Technic History.
Here, there is a transition from human beings to two kinds of imaginary beings: mythological and extraterrestrial. Anderson makes us feel that it is All One Universe. Norsemen, trolls and Gorzuni are conscious beings who get into fights and need to sort out the consequences afterwards.
Gorzuni are barbarian mercenaries who later, in alliance with human extra-solar colonists in the Baldic League, will sack Earth and enslave Terrestrials but we do not yet know that while we are reading Satan's World. This is a future history. Information read now will resonate later.
1 comment:
Weregild was not so much a one-to-one compensation as a means of avoiding a blood feud.
By accepting "blood-price", your kinfolk were renouncing the right to retaliate against not only the killer, but against his kin-group. Thereafter any killing on their part would be illegal, and make them liable to being declared "outlaw" (a technical term in Germanic law).
There's an episode in THE BROKEN SWORD, where the Viking chief Orm tries to buy the land he wants, but the Englishman won't sell. Orm and his men burn the house down and kill the Englishman and his sons in face-to-face combat, letting women and children and underlings go free (a standard tactic in a Norse feud back home, meant to keep the possibility of reconciliation open).
He then offers wereguild and land-bot (blood-price and land-price) to the surviving kin of the English landowner, which makes the land his "in law" as well as by right of the spear, and rules out a feud -- which, the narrator points out, would have been insanely risky for the English family with so many Danes settling in the area.
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