"Above valleys steep-walled, dark and fragrant with woods, snowpeaks lifted. Closer was a mountainside down which a waterfall stood pillarlike under the moon. A night-flying bugler sounded its haunting note through stillness." (p. 447)
(Three senses.)
Elsewhere:
the Plains of Long Reach;
arctic marshes;
scorching New Gaiilan savannahs;
the Sagiittarius basin;
uncounted islands.
An Ythrian female who marries out of her choth has to adjust to different laws, customs, culture and geography. However, winged Ythrians naturally travel farther and more frequently than human beings. Eyath's mother, Blawsa, often revisits her native Sagittarius - the basin, not the constellation. Eyath plans to marry Vodan who is also of Stormgate. However, war will intervene.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Simply having wings and being able to fly quite naturally enabled Ythrians to travel much more easily and frequently than it was for non-flying races. For most of mankind's existence people seldom went more than five miles from their homes. First trains, then automobiles and heavier than air flight was to change that for many people.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
One young woman reached the age of 16 and began to attend Lancaster and Morecambe College, having never so far in her life been outside of the Lancaster and Morecambe District but that was an extreme case. She had never been to nearby Preston, Manchester, Blackpool, Liverpool or the Lake District. The first job of the College was to put her on a coach tour to somewhere else.
Paul.
Sean: that can be exaggerated. Humans for most of their 250K+ existence were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who moved every few days over territories that were necessarily very thinly populated.
Nor do peasants necessarily grow like turnips. In early-modern England (1500's on) about 1 in 10 of every generation moved to London (which had a higher death rate than birth rate), and that's not counting other towns.
Only about 1/3 of English people died in the parish they were born in, and only about 2/3 in the same county. Yorkshire or Lancashire, for example.
People who weren't in line to inherent property were highly mobile, because they had to be.
England was fairly unusual in the -degree- of mobility, but there was some everywhere.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: That was an extreme case, what you said about that young lady! Even as a child I did better than that, when my mother took me with her on a plane flight to visit her father.
Mr. Stirling: I sit corrected. I should have remembered how humans were nomadic wanderers
during the hunter/gatherer phase of human history.
I probably had in the back of my mind certain of the stories of Anderson, in which peasants and rural villagers seldom went more than a few miles from their homes. I do wonder if, before the Great Plague of the later 1340's, that was in fact the case for most people in England.
The disruption caused by the Plague may well have loosened up things, encouraging people to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the fact that serfdom forbad moving indicates that people -would- move if they could!
People generally moved because it was a way of getting ahead.
Eg., my father's mother's family, the "Uphills", have been living in the same parish in northern Wiltshire since before Domesday book. My father researched them as a hobby.
They got the name "Uphill" when ordinary people acquired surnames because their farm was "up-hill" from the parish church.
So -part- of the Uphill family didn't move much; the ones who stood to inherit the family farm.
But in my grandmother's generation, the Uphills of that farm had 13 children -- she was the youngest.
One son inherited the farm. A two daughters would marry neighboring farmers.
That left 10 siblings!
My grandmother moved across the Atlantic to find work in her late teens. (Her ship hit an iceberg, which is why she ended up in Newfoundland.)
Another son became an Anglican priest; still another became a seaman, and ended up as a trawler captain out of Southhampton. One daughter moved to Caithness, in Scotland, and married a farmer there. One son was killed in WW1. Others went to Australia and New Zealand.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did have things like the laws of serfdom in mind, but I also had other factors I thought as possibly discouraging much movement of populations before the mid 1350's.
High infant mortality, slow and primitive means of traveling, early deaths of many who survived childhood, etc.
Very interesting, what you said about your mother's family. Yes, I agree, if to prevent the family farm from becoming uneconomical from repeated subdivision, only one heir could succeed to its ownership. The other sons would have to seek elsewhere for their fortune. Such as the examples you listed from your own relatives.
THE BROKEN SWORD shows us how Anderson was aware of this phenomenon. Orm the Strong was the fifth living son of his father--but if the lands of their father was divided among the brothers, they would sink into small holding obscurity. Orm suggested to the eldest brother that he buy his claim for a share of the inheritance by out fitting a viking warship and Orm would seek his fortune by viking raids. And two other brothers joined him in that.
Ad astra! Sean
The Uphills sound like humanity in miniature.
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