See:
Alien Halls
The Audience Chamber Of Castle Afon
In The Hall Of The Mountain King...
Old Wilwidh
To these, we add the audience chamber on Erulan:
roof lost in dusk;
narrow windows;
thick-piled rugs;
bloody lances of sunlight;
gold;
jewels;
banners;
tapestries;
lines of rigid guards;
a swarm of prostrating slaves;
enthroned nobles;
blowing trumpets;
thundering kettledrums;
the robed, crowned Arkulan.
Human beings have conquered barbarians and have become barbarized. The text, "What shall it profit a man...?" is quoted twice to good effect in the Psychotechnic History.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The human ex-Nomads who conquered Erulan had not only been barbarized, they were becoming ASSIMILATED into Erulani culture. The conquerors were too few for their own culture to displace that of Erulan. A phenomenon which has been seen over and over in Earth's history.
It's a pity we never see one of the Terran Emperors formally meeting visitors in the audience hall of the Imperial palace in Archopolis in Anderson's Technic stories. The closest we get is Emperor Hans meeting Flandry in a prosaic, businesslike office at the Coral Palace.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And Gerhart receiving Cairncross.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I forgot about that, Emperor Gerhart receiving Duke Edmund in the very same office his father used meeting Flandry!
Ad astra! Sean
Though the humans can't be literally assimilated by the Erulani -- they're not interfertile.
And while humans can adapt completely to a different culture, they couldn't to the society of a different -species-, which would reflect nature as well as nurture.
Also, immigrant conquerors tend to set up cultural defense mechanisms, like segregated institutions in which they're the majority or which exclude the conquered entirely, special educational arrangements, marriage taboos, and so forth.
It took five or six generations for most of the descendants of the early Anglo-Norman nobility to start thinking of themselves as "English"; the upper nobility and the Court were still using French as their native tongue nearly 300 years later -- it was only in the course of the early part of the 100 Years War that that changed.
Chaucer's an example. He started out writing in French, and switched to English (granted that he already spoke it) as part of a movement of proto-nationalism.
And that was among people of the same species, the same physical appearance, the same religion, and with many other cultural similarities -- both had a heavy Scandinavian element in their backgrounds, to name one example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, the human Nomads who conquered Erulan could not literally be genetically assimilated into the conquered race. In one of my letters to Poul Anderson (and his reply) we discussed how Prince Cerdic, in the original version of "Tiger By The Tail," schemed to have his race conquer the Terran Empire. I wondered what might have happened if an alien species had actually done that, AND preserved the Empire. I cited examples like the Manchus overrunning China in the 17th century, who, despite making efforts along the lines you suggested of preserving their own distinctive nationality, still greatly admired Chinese culture. Anderson added that, thinking positively, the genetic barrier between conquered humans and aliens who overran the Empire might LESSEN racial tensions, because the inability to interbreed would eliminate mutual fears of "miscegenation."
More negatively, Anderson thought mutual ALIENNESS between humans and non humans would still cause, over time, strains and stresses of the kind you mentioned. No matter how hard an alien dynasty ruling Terra tried to be friendly or genuinely admired human culture. So the long term prospects of the Nomad humans who conquered Erulan were probably not good!
Ad astra! Sean
Ada astra! Sean
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