Showing posts with label real life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real life. Show all posts
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Goblin Brain: An Internet Diary for Me to Whine Into
It's strange, being the only goblin in town.
The most obvious oddity is that I'm sized all wrong for everything around me- though sometimes that can turn around in my favor. Sure, I need a couple of old world atlases to boost me up onto my "standing" desk, but half a standard granola bar is practically a meal for me. Squirrels and small dogs are a daily threat to my existence, but the storage closet under most stairways is like a loft apartment to me. Finding clothing in my size that doesn't have an OshKosh B'gosh tag somewhere on it is a nightmare, but as far as beds are concerned, every one's a king-size. Moderately tall grass is enough for me to get lost in, but sometimes it's good to be able to hide.
The strangeness goes deeper than that, though.
I've never been part of a community of other goblins or our cousins, to the point that I'm not entirely sure what subtype I am. I wasn't orphaned or adopted, though. As near as I can tell, I was born to my (thoroughly human) parents with zero pre- or post-natal changeling shenanigans. People even say I bear a bit of a resemblance to my father- it's the nose, mostly. By all rights I shouldn't be what I am, but I am.
I've made attempts to integrate myself into goblin life, albeit weak ones. I still invite Goody Mooncup's mail delivery marsh goblins over for coffee every once in a while, even if they've been... unambiguous in saying how much they dislike my decaff. I realize that they are technically magical constructs of mud and sweet grass, but trying to define who is and isn't sufficiently "goblinoid" is a steep and slippery slope toward an ugliness that I will not abide here.
Where am I going with all of this...
Perspective, right. Perspective.
I'm only approaching all of this as strange--rather than my ordinary life--because the wonders of the internet have, over the years, allowed me to piece together a broad understanding of the human condition, or at least a couple of forms of it. As an added bonus and/or penalty, I've been able to do it all from the isolation of my burrow, or my old room back in my parents' place. It's genuinely fun and inspiring to read about you people, as horribly patronizing as that must sound. But sometimes, despite my best intentions, I really do not understand what brings big folk to do certain things. Like sprinkling gold on food, or attaching testicles to your pickup truck. But there are many more things that I find compelling, even if I've always been apprehensive to study them in person or in practice.
Something I've always heard references to, suggestions for, and parodies of, is the journal.
Now I'm sure I've left a record of past stages of my life lying around for me to peruse, if I knew where to look. Everything we do is imprinted with who and what we are at the time, and the changes in those seemingly unrelated records can be subtle hints to the changes in us. For example, my favorite color has over the years steadily shifted toward a tannish beige hue, ever since I realized in my teenage years how terribly narcissistic it seem for me to like the color green.
But the deliberate, conscious act of writing a record of yourself, for yourself has always been a weird but fascinating concept to me.
... So I guess I'll give one a shot?
That's the only way I know how to tie together the sloppy beginning and end of this post.
I will write a more personal, introspective series about anything in daily life that strikes me, and maybe it will be enjoyable to read.
I don't have a schedule to begin with, so in a weird way you don't have to worry about journal posts taking up a slot for more of my other projects. This will just be another occasional bit of word-blerf I throw out here, sometimes voiced and possessing the suggestion of production value, but usually not. That is a distinction that I want to keep associated with my episodes of Goblin Watch.
Speaking of which, I really should get to work on the next episode... Those Welsh coblyns aren't going to cwtch themselves.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Qut.
Now that I'm inching back into activity here on the blog (I honestly thought I'd be gone longer), I realize it's time for another one of my posts that can't decide between history and mythology. And what better topic to address in that mindset than the millennia-old concept of sacral kingship, in order to quell the need to go back and edit my college research project?
Sacred kings, past and present, are broadly defined as monarchs (male or female) whose temporal rule holds religious significance. They may hold religious authority, in which case they may hold some similarities to an outright theocrat, or they may simply be an otherwise earthly ruler reigning with the legitimacy conferred on them by a sacred figure or institution. Sacred kingship took a huge variety of forms around the world throughout history, arguably being present on every single continent with the exception of Antarctica.¹ The divine right of kings and mandate of heaven were enormously significant in the western and eastern halves of Eurasia respectively, but I want to look into a form of divine legitimacy that was carried by rulers of states which often straddled Europe and Asia- nomadic pastoralist empires.
The khan named Temüjin consolidated the disparate Mongolic tribes and officially formed the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. After this date he became known as Chinggis Khan. He, like so many other khans of the Mongol people(s), had previously been invested with his power by a böö, or shaman, at the feet of the mountain named Burkhan Khaldun, located in modern day Khentii Province. This was a sacred mountain for the Mongols, and according to the account of his life, Temüjin once escaped certain death after a lost battle by taking refuge at the mountain. Burkhan Khaldun is traditionally believed to be a sort of axis mundi connected to heaven and the sky-god Tengri. By propagandizing the unlikely victories, narrow escapes, and seemingly miraculous events of Temüjin's life, it was easy to demonstrate to the Inner Asian world that he was a legitimate authority figure, surely under the guidance and protection of Eternal Heaven.²
But Burkhan Khaldun wasn't the only source of sacral kingship that Chinggis Khan benefited from. Humans live between heaven and earth, after all. And that is why he chose to place the capital of his nomadic empire at the literal and figurative center of the nomad's world, in a place called Ötüken.
Ötüken, often referred to as Ötüken-yish or Ötüken-jer, meaning "forest" or "land" of Ötüken, respectively, is an area of land that is difficult to pin down today. One theory put forth by Mongolist Thomas T. Allsen is that it stretched from the Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia to the Sayan Mountains of nearby Tuva³, though this doesn't quite match up when you try to place its most central landmark, the Orkhon River Valley, at its center. This is further muddled by the frequent claim that Ötüken is also a single mountain at the center. Though to be fair, spiritual geography can be very vague or flexible based on the needs of the time.
The Orkhon Valley, located at the tentative heart of Ötüken as well as about 320 kilometers west of the modern capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was where Chinggis Khan founded his first imperial city of Karakorum. But it had also once been the site of the city of Ordu-Baliq, seat of the Uyghur Khaganate almost four hundred years prior. Yet the Uyghurs had come there centuries after the fractious Göktürks had done the same twice over, and before them had come the Rourans, and even before them it is possible that the Xianbei and Xiongnu confederations had centered their states on the river valley. By the lifetime of Chinggis Khan it was the site of over a thousand years of cultural continuity and habitation by prestigious nomads whether they be Mongols, Turks, proto-Mongols, or other poly-ethnic or uncertain groups. Chinggis Khan's decision to place the seat of his new empire there was as natural as it was calculated.
And with good reason: thanks to a local microclimate, some of the greatest grazing lands in the Mongolian Steppe are located here, in addition to a breathtaking array of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. I believe it was as close to a paradise as the harsh steppe landscape could have offered to ancient nomads.
But it wasn't just a beautiful landscape with practical or tactical value and a long history.
Orkhon Valley is the place from which qut emanates.
Qut is a divine power which originates in Ötüken and spreads outward, granting the local ruler the divine right to unite and rule all of the tribes of the land. It was an extension of the favor of the spirits of the land, or yer-sub, whose mood and disposition toward humanity was said to be seen reflected in the weather and bounty of nature, in particular the fruit trees of Orkhon. The valley was recognized in writing as being vital to imperial power as far back as the early 8th century CE, when one of the rulers of the Göktürks, Bilge Khagan, inscribed on a stele at the site that "If you stay in the land of the Ötüken, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötüken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!"⁴
It is also no coincidence that Ötüken is one of many names given to the earth-goddess of Turko-Mongol mythology, commonly seen as second in power only to Tengri, who was often presented as being her husband or relative. By controlling both Ötüken and Burkhan Khaldun, Chinggis Khan had the exceptional ability to say that the two greatest divinities of the world were on his side.
I see qut as sort of a hybrid sacral kingship model, which combines the elements of a few others. It comes from a physical location which must be seized and controlled in order to harness it, yet it takes the form of an empowering supernatural energy that is non-exclusive with, similar to, and distinct from the general favor or protection of the chief deity. I'd dare to say it resembles the power of barakah conferred upon people, objects, and places by God in Islam, though on a comparatively very limited scale, and with very specific stipulations attached.
Today we don't have a lot of world leaders claiming that they are empowered by magical leyline energy, which is probably for the best. But the beauty and history of the Orkhon Valley are preserved by a UNESCO heritage site designation.
¹ Though to be fair, we aren't sure about how the Elder Things governed themselves.
² Franke, Herbert. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Page 347.
³ Allsen, Thomas T. "Spiritual geography and political legitimacy in the eastern steppe." Ideology and the Formation of Early States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. Pages 124-125.
⁴ Drompp, Michael R. "Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 3. American Oriental Society, 1999. Page 391.
Sacred kings, past and present, are broadly defined as monarchs (male or female) whose temporal rule holds religious significance. They may hold religious authority, in which case they may hold some similarities to an outright theocrat, or they may simply be an otherwise earthly ruler reigning with the legitimacy conferred on them by a sacred figure or institution. Sacred kingship took a huge variety of forms around the world throughout history, arguably being present on every single continent with the exception of Antarctica.¹ The divine right of kings and mandate of heaven were enormously significant in the western and eastern halves of Eurasia respectively, but I want to look into a form of divine legitimacy that was carried by rulers of states which often straddled Europe and Asia- nomadic pastoralist empires.
The khan named Temüjin consolidated the disparate Mongolic tribes and officially formed the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. After this date he became known as Chinggis Khan. He, like so many other khans of the Mongol people(s), had previously been invested with his power by a böö, or shaman, at the feet of the mountain named Burkhan Khaldun, located in modern day Khentii Province. This was a sacred mountain for the Mongols, and according to the account of his life, Temüjin once escaped certain death after a lost battle by taking refuge at the mountain. Burkhan Khaldun is traditionally believed to be a sort of axis mundi connected to heaven and the sky-god Tengri. By propagandizing the unlikely victories, narrow escapes, and seemingly miraculous events of Temüjin's life, it was easy to demonstrate to the Inner Asian world that he was a legitimate authority figure, surely under the guidance and protection of Eternal Heaven.²
But Burkhan Khaldun wasn't the only source of sacral kingship that Chinggis Khan benefited from. Humans live between heaven and earth, after all. And that is why he chose to place the capital of his nomadic empire at the literal and figurative center of the nomad's world, in a place called Ötüken.
Ötüken, often referred to as Ötüken-yish or Ötüken-jer, meaning "forest" or "land" of Ötüken, respectively, is an area of land that is difficult to pin down today. One theory put forth by Mongolist Thomas T. Allsen is that it stretched from the Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia to the Sayan Mountains of nearby Tuva³, though this doesn't quite match up when you try to place its most central landmark, the Orkhon River Valley, at its center. This is further muddled by the frequent claim that Ötüken is also a single mountain at the center. Though to be fair, spiritual geography can be very vague or flexible based on the needs of the time.
The Orkhon Valley, located at the tentative heart of Ötüken as well as about 320 kilometers west of the modern capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was where Chinggis Khan founded his first imperial city of Karakorum. But it had also once been the site of the city of Ordu-Baliq, seat of the Uyghur Khaganate almost four hundred years prior. Yet the Uyghurs had come there centuries after the fractious Göktürks had done the same twice over, and before them had come the Rourans, and even before them it is possible that the Xianbei and Xiongnu confederations had centered their states on the river valley. By the lifetime of Chinggis Khan it was the site of over a thousand years of cultural continuity and habitation by prestigious nomads whether they be Mongols, Turks, proto-Mongols, or other poly-ethnic or uncertain groups. Chinggis Khan's decision to place the seat of his new empire there was as natural as it was calculated.
And with good reason: thanks to a local microclimate, some of the greatest grazing lands in the Mongolian Steppe are located here, in addition to a breathtaking array of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. I believe it was as close to a paradise as the harsh steppe landscape could have offered to ancient nomads.
But it wasn't just a beautiful landscape with practical or tactical value and a long history.
Orkhon Valley is the place from which qut emanates.
Qut is a divine power which originates in Ötüken and spreads outward, granting the local ruler the divine right to unite and rule all of the tribes of the land. It was an extension of the favor of the spirits of the land, or yer-sub, whose mood and disposition toward humanity was said to be seen reflected in the weather and bounty of nature, in particular the fruit trees of Orkhon. The valley was recognized in writing as being vital to imperial power as far back as the early 8th century CE, when one of the rulers of the Göktürks, Bilge Khagan, inscribed on a stele at the site that "If you stay in the land of the Ötüken, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötüken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!"⁴
It is also no coincidence that Ötüken is one of many names given to the earth-goddess of Turko-Mongol mythology, commonly seen as second in power only to Tengri, who was often presented as being her husband or relative. By controlling both Ötüken and Burkhan Khaldun, Chinggis Khan had the exceptional ability to say that the two greatest divinities of the world were on his side.
I see qut as sort of a hybrid sacral kingship model, which combines the elements of a few others. It comes from a physical location which must be seized and controlled in order to harness it, yet it takes the form of an empowering supernatural energy that is non-exclusive with, similar to, and distinct from the general favor or protection of the chief deity. I'd dare to say it resembles the power of barakah conferred upon people, objects, and places by God in Islam, though on a comparatively very limited scale, and with very specific stipulations attached.
Today we don't have a lot of world leaders claiming that they are empowered by magical leyline energy, which is probably for the best. But the beauty and history of the Orkhon Valley are preserved by a UNESCO heritage site designation.
¹ Though to be fair, we aren't sure about how the Elder Things governed themselves.
² Franke, Herbert. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Page 347.
³ Allsen, Thomas T. "Spiritual geography and political legitimacy in the eastern steppe." Ideology and the Formation of Early States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. Pages 124-125.
⁴ Drompp, Michael R. "Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 3. American Oriental Society, 1999. Page 391.
Sunday, July 8, 2018
The Esuvee: An Ecology of a Majestic Mechanical Beast.
((Hey, burrowers. Does anyone here remember the year 2005? How about the lawsuit which alleged that Ford Motor Company's marketing misled drivers on how to drive and maintain their Explorer S.U.V.s? I had no idea about any of that controversy, or the tragic and preventable loss of life that spurred it, but my life was impacted by it in some way regardless.
I watched the commercial that they made as part of the year-long, $27 million USD advertising campaign for S.U.V. safety which followed. And to little twelve year-old Furt, it was pretty glorious:
This strange, lumbering beast phonetically named an Esuvee fascinated me, and I honestly wish I could have owned some kind of paraphernalia as a kid, like a plush toy version. Most other people I've spoken to about them seem to think that they're kind of creepy, and I admit their CG has not aged well, but I find the giant esuvee weirdly cute and endearing. And since I have a place in which to make my rambling ideas concrete these days, I thought why not go all the way with them and write a post? Consider this my first attempt at writing homebrew for an Ultraviolet Grasslands game.))
"Whoa, girl. Easy! Easy now! It was only a startled chrome-fox."
-- Lonzo the Game Warden, to his startled mount, Stampies.
"Don't stand behind them for an hour or two after they've had their headlights on. The smell of their exhaust will make ya either pass out, or vomit somethin' fierce."
-- Malgoret "Mags" Persidy, senior convoy leader to a group of children.
Far to the west, beyond the battery acid swamps and Rust-Storm Alley, there stretches a vast swath of even more untamed wilderness. Ruined hulks of technology and deposits of rare and jumbled ores break the rolling plains of jagged, saw-toothed grass. Lightning spontaneously crackles and spiderwebs through the sky even on the clearest of days. The earth itself buzzes or throbs with an almost undetectable energy that unnerves but compels human and canine alike. It's a place that no one would have any interest in, were it not located in between every other place of interest to be found in the Teal Wastes.
The grasslands are home to many bizarre animals, but none are so immediately identifiable as the esuvees- also known as lamp-heads, grill-brows, or simply iron beasts. These shaggy creatures, typically between three and four thousand pounds and eight and twelve feet tall at the hump, are the undisputed masters of their environment. Despite this, they are almost total herbivores who roam in great, placid herds known as convoys. They graze through the sharp foliage for the choices knives of grass, and break off mineral deposits with their surprisingly powerful jaws in order to gum them like a cow tonguing a salt-lick.
But they are more than simply adapted to their environment. They reflect its very nature, being an awkward fusion of organic and inorganic.
The most striking feature of an esuvee, besides its size, is its face. Its wide, flat countenance sports a pair of massive pseudo-crystalline bulbs spaced far apart, each one capable of projecting a beam of light stronger than 65 watt lamps and moving with partial independence from the other. Their eyes are connected to an intricate system of specialized nerve endings which incorporate copper particles like filaments, and which run all the way from the head down into the fifth and sixth stomachs. These stomachs are specialized less for digestion and more for fermentation, brewing up an ethanol fuel from the truly nightmarish volume of plant matter which the average esuvee consumes every day. That fuel is in turn compressed into adjacent bladders and burned, powering the esuvee's lights as well as short bursts of extreme energy, such as in fighting off or fleeing the bands of small ambush predators who have to separate an esuvee from its convoy and then harry it for several miles in order to bring it down.
Not as well known to strangers of the plains is the pair of smaller, much less luminous lights which an esuvee sports upon its rear. Studding the back of each hind leg's "knee" (actually a digitigrade ankle) is a dull, reddish bulb which consumes far less energy than those up front. These are useful to members of a convoy traveling at night, in which the bulk of the herd is able to power its night vision down to a soft glow, simply following the lights of the esuvees in front of them who lead the way with lamps at full power. And when the forerunners tire, they can simply slow down to be enveloped by the group as fresher esuvees move ahead to take their places. These rear lights do not seem to be eyes in any way however, leading experts to wonder how an esuvee's body distinguishes wire-filaments from actual optical nerves.
Between the luminous eyes is situated a large, flat space where a nose might be expected. There are in fact nostrils somewhere in there, but they're a bit difficult to find in between the thick rows of wrought metal which form a sort of protective face-plate. These "grills" fuse seamlessly to the skull bones from which they grow, almost like metal mimicry of smaller animals' horns. The grills of male esuvees tend to be larger and more pronounced than those of females, which aids them in their headbutting displays during the highly competitive annual mating period.
This time, colloquially known as "rocking season", is what causes esuvees to get such a negative reputation for aggression and single-mindedness in the wider world. This isn't helped by the fact that seeing a mated pair of esuvees a-rockin' can be quite a... scarring experience for more impressionable eyes.
I watched the commercial that they made as part of the year-long, $27 million USD advertising campaign for S.U.V. safety which followed. And to little twelve year-old Furt, it was pretty glorious:
This strange, lumbering beast phonetically named an Esuvee fascinated me, and I honestly wish I could have owned some kind of paraphernalia as a kid, like a plush toy version. Most other people I've spoken to about them seem to think that they're kind of creepy, and I admit their CG has not aged well, but I find the giant esuvee weirdly cute and endearing. And since I have a place in which to make my rambling ideas concrete these days, I thought why not go all the way with them and write a post? Consider this my first attempt at writing homebrew for an Ultraviolet Grasslands game.))
"Whoa, girl. Easy! Easy now! It was only a startled chrome-fox."
-- Lonzo the Game Warden, to his startled mount, Stampies.
"Don't stand behind them for an hour or two after they've had their headlights on. The smell of their exhaust will make ya either pass out, or vomit somethin' fierce."
-- Malgoret "Mags" Persidy, senior convoy leader to a group of children.
Far to the west, beyond the battery acid swamps and Rust-Storm Alley, there stretches a vast swath of even more untamed wilderness. Ruined hulks of technology and deposits of rare and jumbled ores break the rolling plains of jagged, saw-toothed grass. Lightning spontaneously crackles and spiderwebs through the sky even on the clearest of days. The earth itself buzzes or throbs with an almost undetectable energy that unnerves but compels human and canine alike. It's a place that no one would have any interest in, were it not located in between every other place of interest to be found in the Teal Wastes.
The grasslands are home to many bizarre animals, but none are so immediately identifiable as the esuvees- also known as lamp-heads, grill-brows, or simply iron beasts. These shaggy creatures, typically between three and four thousand pounds and eight and twelve feet tall at the hump, are the undisputed masters of their environment. Despite this, they are almost total herbivores who roam in great, placid herds known as convoys. They graze through the sharp foliage for the choices knives of grass, and break off mineral deposits with their surprisingly powerful jaws in order to gum them like a cow tonguing a salt-lick.
But they are more than simply adapted to their environment. They reflect its very nature, being an awkward fusion of organic and inorganic.
The most striking feature of an esuvee, besides its size, is its face. Its wide, flat countenance sports a pair of massive pseudo-crystalline bulbs spaced far apart, each one capable of projecting a beam of light stronger than 65 watt lamps and moving with partial independence from the other. Their eyes are connected to an intricate system of specialized nerve endings which incorporate copper particles like filaments, and which run all the way from the head down into the fifth and sixth stomachs. These stomachs are specialized less for digestion and more for fermentation, brewing up an ethanol fuel from the truly nightmarish volume of plant matter which the average esuvee consumes every day. That fuel is in turn compressed into adjacent bladders and burned, powering the esuvee's lights as well as short bursts of extreme energy, such as in fighting off or fleeing the bands of small ambush predators who have to separate an esuvee from its convoy and then harry it for several miles in order to bring it down.
Not as well known to strangers of the plains is the pair of smaller, much less luminous lights which an esuvee sports upon its rear. Studding the back of each hind leg's "knee" (actually a digitigrade ankle) is a dull, reddish bulb which consumes far less energy than those up front. These are useful to members of a convoy traveling at night, in which the bulk of the herd is able to power its night vision down to a soft glow, simply following the lights of the esuvees in front of them who lead the way with lamps at full power. And when the forerunners tire, they can simply slow down to be enveloped by the group as fresher esuvees move ahead to take their places. These rear lights do not seem to be eyes in any way however, leading experts to wonder how an esuvee's body distinguishes wire-filaments from actual optical nerves.
Between the luminous eyes is situated a large, flat space where a nose might be expected. There are in fact nostrils somewhere in there, but they're a bit difficult to find in between the thick rows of wrought metal which form a sort of protective face-plate. These "grills" fuse seamlessly to the skull bones from which they grow, almost like metal mimicry of smaller animals' horns. The grills of male esuvees tend to be larger and more pronounced than those of females, which aids them in their headbutting displays during the highly competitive annual mating period.
This time, colloquially known as "rocking season", is what causes esuvees to get such a negative reputation for aggression and single-mindedness in the wider world. This isn't helped by the fact that seeing a mated pair of esuvees a-rockin' can be quite a... scarring experience for more impressionable eyes.
 |
| I'm only partly sorry. |
Regardless, the first pioneers into this land were quick to notice how the esuvee thrived, and quicker to stake their own claims in them. They followed the convoys, learning the quickest routes in between potable water sources while also hunting the beasts. Over time they learned to tame them, and a herding industry flourished among the pioneers which survives in their descendants to this day.
Even a juvenile esuvee has enough iron-rich meat on it to last a family several days, though a person with already adequate iron levels has to be careful to thoroughly drain it of blood and hemoglobin before consumption to reduce the risk of iron poisoning. Its bones are dense and heavy, owing to the rich deposits of metals intermingled with the calcium throughout. A skilled smith can purify trace amounts of several metals from every bone, slowly but reliably adding up to workable amounts in a landscape where staying in one place long enough to properly mine an ore outcropping can be dangerous business attracting of much unwanted attention from the other local fauna. The face-plate is a far more accessible piece of metal of course, and grill-metal tools or weapons have been renowned for their durability in the past. Unfortunately this has given rise to the practice of poaching esuvees solely for their grills while leaving the rest of the animal to rust and rot- a truly disgusting waste of life and resources that convoy-keepers have taken great pains to crack down upon in recent years. Their fur, though reputed to be very musky, can be perfectly clean and serviceable for clothing and shelters alike with proper treatment. Because it can be sheered from the esuvee's hide with no harm to the animal, it has become so widely available in many markets that even rabbit's fur has become a rare "luxury" by comparison. Even the animal's eyes, if extracted with their roots undamaged, can be made into lanterns when coupled with a crude electrolytic battery.
An esuvee is just as valuable alive as it is for its parts, however. When trained and cared for properly they are some of the most prolific beasts of burden known to man and several other sapient cultures. Just one harnessed cow can tow two to three thousand pounds for long distances, which has allowed the convoy-keepers to become some of the least light-traveling nomads around.
 |
| The average chieftain can carry around a solar tent, three water tanks, and a hot tub. |
Less well known, but no less unusual than the esuvee's grill and headlights, are its soles. Each four-toed foot has a treaded texture somewhere in between rubber and old leather, as well as a series of tiny bladders located several inches below the surface, which travel all of the way up into the elbow. Through a hydraulic mechanism that isn't perfectly understood at this time, these bladders can engorge with air to give the lower joints of an esuvee a cushioned, almost balloon-like quality.
 |
| Their properties could revolutionize airtight technologies, if only they didn't smell so footy. |
This strange adaptation helps the truly massive and heavy esuvee from damaging itself with its own weight while running at high speeds, which can be in excess of forty miles an hour when the beast is well and started up.
 |
| Strong harness-belts and a stronger neck are needed to ride at full bounce. |
The air-cushioning adaptation also reduces the risk of an esuvee being injured when rolling over onto its side. Esuvees roll over with startling regularity, little-known fact. This is usually to no injury of their own, but often to the detriment of anyone unskilled in riding them. Much effort has been put into educating people beyond the Teal Wastes in the proper use of an esuvee, particularly when it comes to wealthy young men who have one imported as a way of showing off their money and virility. Top-heavy esuvees are often the first (and last) mistake those riders make.
 |
| You don't want to know where the rider ended up. |
Despite all of these dangers, the esuvee is a reliable and valuable beast, known for its surprising degree of compassion and empathy with humans. It has captured the imaginations of people for generations, as centuries of folklore and oral traditions exemplify. Even as new technologies are developed or old ones rediscovered from the ancient wrecks of the Long Ago time, the convoy-keepers and their faithful esuvees seem like they won't be going anywhere anytime soon, except for everywhere they choose to.
 |
| The closest I could find to an old-school monster manual sketch. ESUVEE by theblitz |
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Updates, and More Excerpts from Hraela's Homework.
((Hello, Burrowers! I'm still alive, and I'll add some length to this smallish post by tacking a few things on here. Yes I've had a super slow month this month, but this month my slow month is somewhat more understandable than other months. Month month month.
... Anyway, I managed to graduate from my college earlier. As in, officially did the walk and received the piece of paper covered in Latin that I wouldn't think to be a degree except for the fact that it has my name on it and I sort of recognize the word "Baccalavrei".
In addition to freeing my mind from a lot of mental and emotional tethers, this changes how I'll be able to approach my blog for the foreseeable future. I won't be pumping out the level of content I did last year when I started the blog up in the dead of summer, since I'll actually be working this time around, but I will feel comfortable enough to do more, and hopefully do it better.
Additionally, I'm inching out of my electronic isolation by interacting with other blog-smiths.
Head on over to Unlawful Games to check out some cool new content created by TheLawfulNeutral, whom you might recognize from a few of the comment strings down here in the Burrow. Or literally any of the free advertising he's giving me on the larger internet. He recently decided to start up his own more OSR-oriented blog to house his menagerie of terrifying and creatively visceral ideas.
He doesn't have a huge library of posts yet, but that means you don't need to fear archive binge. If you still don't know where to start though, maybe try his monster conversion of the Longfolk from beyond my very own Axebitten Woods.
Now, let's see how our sneaky little giant fencing student is handling this whole ordination fiasco.))
Rough Draft Page 8
Useless.
Completely unintelligible, impenetrably obtuse(sp?), poorly-written garbage.
I've watched Litte scribbling like mad since before we departed on this journey. Is this all that he has produced since then?
I have reproduced an excerpt from his "writings" as well as I can above, and I write that meaning that I've done a fairly accurate job of repl. This is not the script of Ersuut, or any other language in the world that I've ever seen or heard of. And there are dozens of pages of this. Hundreds and hundreds of lines scrawled front-and-back across sheaves identical to but completely different from the above.
I honestly cannot believe that this is anything of substance. I begin to suspect that this man is actually deeply mentally unhinged, and the University was simply getting him out of their hair for a time while mercifully humoring his illusions of grandeur and countless other exen ecsen eccentricities. Fools that we are, we agreed to join him on his romp through his own imagination. I wonder if he even told the truth about there being a delegation waiting for us at our destination in the mountains.
But despite the fact that these pages are worthless for my original plan to practice field ordination, I believe I should continue to curate them, and copy them. There is just enough reuse and regularity between tortured curves and line segment snarls to give some vague sense of anti-logic to Litte's writing. Even the manner in which some characters transcend their lines of text to join with others seems somehow preder predetermined and deliberate. I can't say what the reversal of brush stroke direction in the last line means. Maybe he just adjusted the angle of the quill in his hand. This all leads me to admit that there is a (very) small chance that what is written here might actually say something to anyone else but he. It could be a code or a cipher, and if he is trying to hide something then my mission is even more important than I could have imagined. I must make a breakthrough on this before he does or says anything to damage or embarrass the University, or worse.
From the sounds of drunken rioting across the drinking hall from where I've hidden myself, I don't have a lot of time.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
WHY THE MONGOLS (probably) DIDN'T STINK (any worse than the other unwashed masses of Medieval Eurasia)!
As my indecisive caps lock above indicates, this post is an attempted balance between reasoned caution in approaching the study of history, and impotent nerd-rage.
Some of you dear Burrowers may recall that I was in school for a degree in Historical Studies up until recently, with my area of interest being medieval Inner Asia. Ergo, I'm a huge nerd for the Mongol Empire, as well as any and all pastoral steppe nomads who came before or after.
The Mongols tend to get a bad rap across most of Western Europe. And Eastern Europe. As well as Western Asia- especially Western Asia in a lot of respects... Parts of the Indian Subcontinent, too...
Alright, they get a bad rap in most places that they encountered in their hay day.
Not all of it is unmerited either, because their sometimes very brutal tactics on the battlefield or in administration resulted in them fashioning together the largest contiguous land-based empire in history, and that empire produced a lot of unhappy historians from victimized groups. On the other hand, their warriors practiced violence in what was already (and would continue to be) a very violent world. But that's not what I'm here to argue about, because one trogloxene college student on a rinky-dink fantasy blog isn't going to resolve over 800 years of ethnic and cultural tension.
Overview:
What I am here to talk about today is one of the secondary beliefs about the Mongols, which contributed to but wasn't central to others' perception of them as the quintessential barbarian. This was the idea that the Mongols never bathed, and never changed their clothing until it literally rotted off of their bodies.
Here is a discussion of the topic on reddit which I originally stumbled upon for reasons I can't recall, and which initially got me thinking about that idea, how popular it is, and how true it may actually be. I quickly took a skeptical stance, as you will see if you manage to slog through this whole thing.
The basic idea is that these unhygienic behaviors were enforced by the Mongols' own rulers for some reason or another, and that the two practices came together to contribute to a rank smell that was allegedly so horrible that an approaching Mongol army could be smelled before it could be seen.
The original reports of these decrees against washing or bathing come to us in highly fragmentary form from various 13th-to-15th century historians and travelers, primarily of European and West Asian/North African background, who were attempting to describe the character of the Mongol Empire's Yassa Code.
The Yassa Code was a private customary law code which was used by the Chinggisid rulers of the Mongol Empire and its successor Khanates to inform their decisions on public policy. Allegedly, the Yassa was compiled from the scattered reports of the deeds and sayings of Chinggis Khan so that those who came later could benefit from his wisdom- almost like a secretive, non-religious Hadith.
Because the Yassa was secret, intended only for the nobility of the Mongols who sometimes followed it and sometimes did not, it was never made public in a clear, written form. The only indicator that the actual laws of a region in the Mongol Empire were written with the logic of the Yassa in mind was if the authorities of the time said so. Thus, even contradictory edicts could plausibly be said to have been informed by the contents of the Yassa.
That didn't deter outsiders from trying to understand it like an actual written body of laws, so any practice which could be said to be derived from the nebulous Yassa was written down by the visitor as if it was a law. Because of this, it wasn't difficult for misunderstandings or plain fiction to enter into these accounts. And again, these accounts were themselves fragmentary, with none describing the entirety of what it called the Yassa, and not all of them even corroborating the same laws.
So, our current understanding of the Yassa is formed by bringing all of those reports together and comparing their consistency, as well as taking into account the reliability of the people who originally wrote them down.
This leads to two issues. The first is that actual laws or customs could have been taken out of context and exaggerated in their reproduction. The second is that not all of these writers had what we would consider perfect intellectual integrity.
Issue 1:
The evidence that Mongols never washed themselves or their clothes comes from fragments written by a Mamluk Egyptian historian from the 14th-15th centuries, named Taqi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi. We will stick with just al-Maqrizi for now, as most other sources do.¹
The logic for this prohibition, according to what al-Maqrizi either wrote or repeated from earlier scholars (more on that later) was that the Mongols did not wish to pollute sources of running water and thereby anger the powerful spirits or "dragons" who controlled the water cycle. The Mongols were (and to a degree still are) a shamanic and animistic people, and belief in spirits who influenced natural elements like water is not out of the question. But the conflation of spirits with dragons is unusual, because of the rarity or almost complete absence of dragons from the native mythology of Turko-Mongols. Dragons are prominent in Tibetan and especially Chinese beliefs however, which makes me suspect that if it is authentic, this prohibition was recorded in a region where Chinese or Tibetan Buddhist cultural influences had already been embraced by resident Mongols, as much as a century after the life of Chinggis Khan. This presents the reality of Mongols living in and around increasing numbers of Chinese and Persian cities which often had public baths. It also may have been that the prohibition was developed in a non-Mongol context by some other subjects of the Empire.
Further, the original edict might have been mangled in translation, a bit like a game of telephone. A later historian and French Orientalist named François Pétis de la Croix (17th-18th century) with access to Al-Maqrizi's work formulated that the original prohibition may only have been against washing or bathing in water during a thunderstorm, due both to the inherent danger of that act, and a need to respect the power of the Mongols' supreme sky god, Tengri. Russian-American historian George Vernadsky, writing in the 20th century, agrees with Pétis and argues that the original prohibition was not nearly as restrictive as the fragments we've received would indicate, and that it originally served a "partly ritualistic" but also "realistic, or scientific" goal.² And even if this law should be read as referring to the use of water for washing at all times, it still only specifies running water- therefore, water collected in a vessel and used indoors would probably be omitted from this rule.
Water could be very scarce on the steppe or in the surrounding desert-like environments of Inner Asia, and conservation of existing water sources is a totally valid concern, and I don't mean to diminish that reality. One would probably save most available water to drink or water animals with, if the choice was between that and bathing. But a traditional nomad who performed military service but did not experience urban luxuries alongside the imperial elite would probably not need to bathe that many times in a year to be comparable in cleanliness with the rural populations of much of the rest of Europe and Asia. I say this being aware of the misconception that people of the middle ages "never" washed, but also aware of the reduced availability of bathing facilities outside of large towns or the private homes of the wealthy, in a time when the majority of people belonging to a polity or state were still rural and directly concerned with food production, whether agrarian or pastoral.
The specific myth that Mongol armies could be smelled before they could seen could probably be chalked up to a combination of folk belief, and the reality that all soldiers on campaign tend to get pretty ripe, especially if they are cavalrymen.
Issue 2:
Once again taking issue with al-Maqrizi, I point to the fact that both he and his sources may not have been trustworthy. Maqrizi allegedly received all of his information on the Yassa Code from a contact of his by the name of Abu-Hashim, who insisted that he had seen a copy of the entirety of the Yassa housed in the libraries of Baghdad, during his brief political exile there. We know little about the accomplishments of Abu-Hashim today, and nothing about the materials he supposedly studied, if they existed at any point. But what he toted as the entirety of the Yassa Code was a comparatively small list of offences and punishments (including bathing and clothes-washing) from the supposed criminal law of the Empire, so either Abu-Hashim was wrong or lying, or al-Maqrizi only paid attention to a very narrow section of what he was given.³
Further, al-Maqrizi does not acknowledge that in his writings on the Mongols, he borrowed heavily from a scholar named Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, who in turn wrote his material based off of what he knew from the even earlier historian, Ata-Malik Juvayni. Juvayni was an accomplished official in the Mongol Ilkhanate, as well as the author of the History of the World Conqueror, which is famous for being one of the most complete and unbiased accounts of the Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan of the 13th century, despite much of the subject matter pertaining to the conquest of Juvayni's own homeland.
Juvayni does include the Yassa stipulation about bathing in his work, but it specifies that it could not be done during a certain time of day during the spring and summer months, which is when thunderstorms are most common, and is not repeated in al-Maqrizi's work. Additionally, the entire edict is presented so that Chagatai Khan could throw the law straight out the window and demonstrate his mercy and wisdom as a ruler by pardoning and then giving property to the poor Muslim man who was caught bathing in midday.⁴ This gives the entire entry something of a didactic or praise-literature character that was, despite Juvayni's admirable attempts at historical accuracy, one of his primary responsibilities in writing his History for the Mongols of the Ilkhanate. So, it may be that the law was present only in a small portion of the post-division Mongol Empire, little-known and little-enforced in its hay day, if it did exist at all. Juvayni, after all, was working with the same limited knowledge of the real, secret Yassa Code that most other historians were.
The section plagiarized by al-Maqrizi, dealing with criminal justice, seemed also to be chosen for a very particular purpose which has to do with the political climate in which al-Maqrizi was involved at the time of his writing. Al-Maqrizi, as an aristocrat and historian living under the Egyptian Mamluks from 1364-1442, had perhaps an understandably sour opinion of the Mongols, and the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde in particular, who represented the aftermath of some of the most brutal conquests of Muslim-majority states by the first waves of Mongol invasion. But the Mamluk elite itself, derived from administrators and slave-soldiers taken from areas of Turkic Central Asia, possessed numerous Mongol influences. This included their own law code called the Yasaq. As the similarity in names might indicate, there was a line of influence and continuity, or at least a perceived line of continuity, between the Mongolian Yassa and the Mamluk Yasaq.
When the political tensions between the Mamluks and the religious scholar elites of Egypt resulted in the Yasaq being applied to cases which were normally under the exclusive jurisdiction of Muslim judges and the interpretation of Shari'a law, al-Maqrizi was very vocal in defaming the practice. He even referred to the original Yassa from which the Yasaq was derived as being "Satanic" (lit. shaytaniyya).⁵ Therefore, al-Maqrizi's already plagiarized and de-contextualized observations on the Yassa Code have a distinctly negative, propagandist attitude, as he attempted to diminish the Yassa in comparison to the schools of jurisprudence favored by the religious scholars of Egypt, whom al-Maqrizi was strongly in support of.
Conclusion:
To try and form a concise thought out of all of this, we know next to no complete details about the Mongol Empire's Yassa law code. We should be extremely cautious in treating any fragmentary writings by outsiders pertaining to it as if they accurately depict it and apply equally to the entirety of the Empire and its lifespan. Historians such as al-Maqrizi (who could be a very attentive and respectable historian otherwise) were not above using the Yassa to take a political stance, and the popular myths which have sprung up around these centuries of scholastic smack-talking should not be taken at face-value as truth.
The Mongols probably did not smell much worse than any other political group in medieval Eurasia. To our modern senses of hygiene, they may have smelled unpleasant, but this would have been the same for any other imperial power of the day possessed of large numbers of soldiers and even larger numbers of horses.
References:
¹ Vernadsky, George. "The Scope and Contents of Chingis Khan's Yasa." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1938): 337-60. Pages 340-341.
² Ibid, 352-353.
³ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Studia Islamica, no. 33 (1971): 97-140. doi:10.2307/1595029. Pages 101-104.
⁴ Juvaynī, ʻAlāʼ al-Dīn ʻAṭā Malik, John Andrew Boyle, and David Morgan. 1997. Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pages 204-206.
⁵ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Page 105.
Some of you dear Burrowers may recall that I was in school for a degree in Historical Studies up until recently, with my area of interest being medieval Inner Asia. Ergo, I'm a huge nerd for the Mongol Empire, as well as any and all pastoral steppe nomads who came before or after.
The Mongols tend to get a bad rap across most of Western Europe. And Eastern Europe. As well as Western Asia- especially Western Asia in a lot of respects... Parts of the Indian Subcontinent, too...
Alright, they get a bad rap in most places that they encountered in their hay day.
Not all of it is unmerited either, because their sometimes very brutal tactics on the battlefield or in administration resulted in them fashioning together the largest contiguous land-based empire in history, and that empire produced a lot of unhappy historians from victimized groups. On the other hand, their warriors practiced violence in what was already (and would continue to be) a very violent world. But that's not what I'm here to argue about, because one trogloxene college student on a rinky-dink fantasy blog isn't going to resolve over 800 years of ethnic and cultural tension.
Overview:
What I am here to talk about today is one of the secondary beliefs about the Mongols, which contributed to but wasn't central to others' perception of them as the quintessential barbarian. This was the idea that the Mongols never bathed, and never changed their clothing until it literally rotted off of their bodies.
Here is a discussion of the topic on reddit which I originally stumbled upon for reasons I can't recall, and which initially got me thinking about that idea, how popular it is, and how true it may actually be. I quickly took a skeptical stance, as you will see if you manage to slog through this whole thing.
The basic idea is that these unhygienic behaviors were enforced by the Mongols' own rulers for some reason or another, and that the two practices came together to contribute to a rank smell that was allegedly so horrible that an approaching Mongol army could be smelled before it could be seen.
The original reports of these decrees against washing or bathing come to us in highly fragmentary form from various 13th-to-15th century historians and travelers, primarily of European and West Asian/North African background, who were attempting to describe the character of the Mongol Empire's Yassa Code.
The Yassa Code was a private customary law code which was used by the Chinggisid rulers of the Mongol Empire and its successor Khanates to inform their decisions on public policy. Allegedly, the Yassa was compiled from the scattered reports of the deeds and sayings of Chinggis Khan so that those who came later could benefit from his wisdom- almost like a secretive, non-religious Hadith.
Because the Yassa was secret, intended only for the nobility of the Mongols who sometimes followed it and sometimes did not, it was never made public in a clear, written form. The only indicator that the actual laws of a region in the Mongol Empire were written with the logic of the Yassa in mind was if the authorities of the time said so. Thus, even contradictory edicts could plausibly be said to have been informed by the contents of the Yassa.
That didn't deter outsiders from trying to understand it like an actual written body of laws, so any practice which could be said to be derived from the nebulous Yassa was written down by the visitor as if it was a law. Because of this, it wasn't difficult for misunderstandings or plain fiction to enter into these accounts. And again, these accounts were themselves fragmentary, with none describing the entirety of what it called the Yassa, and not all of them even corroborating the same laws.
So, our current understanding of the Yassa is formed by bringing all of those reports together and comparing their consistency, as well as taking into account the reliability of the people who originally wrote them down.
This leads to two issues. The first is that actual laws or customs could have been taken out of context and exaggerated in their reproduction. The second is that not all of these writers had what we would consider perfect intellectual integrity.
Issue 1:
The evidence that Mongols never washed themselves or their clothes comes from fragments written by a Mamluk Egyptian historian from the 14th-15th centuries, named Taqi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi. We will stick with just al-Maqrizi for now, as most other sources do.¹
The logic for this prohibition, according to what al-Maqrizi either wrote or repeated from earlier scholars (more on that later) was that the Mongols did not wish to pollute sources of running water and thereby anger the powerful spirits or "dragons" who controlled the water cycle. The Mongols were (and to a degree still are) a shamanic and animistic people, and belief in spirits who influenced natural elements like water is not out of the question. But the conflation of spirits with dragons is unusual, because of the rarity or almost complete absence of dragons from the native mythology of Turko-Mongols. Dragons are prominent in Tibetan and especially Chinese beliefs however, which makes me suspect that if it is authentic, this prohibition was recorded in a region where Chinese or Tibetan Buddhist cultural influences had already been embraced by resident Mongols, as much as a century after the life of Chinggis Khan. This presents the reality of Mongols living in and around increasing numbers of Chinese and Persian cities which often had public baths. It also may have been that the prohibition was developed in a non-Mongol context by some other subjects of the Empire.
Further, the original edict might have been mangled in translation, a bit like a game of telephone. A later historian and French Orientalist named François Pétis de la Croix (17th-18th century) with access to Al-Maqrizi's work formulated that the original prohibition may only have been against washing or bathing in water during a thunderstorm, due both to the inherent danger of that act, and a need to respect the power of the Mongols' supreme sky god, Tengri. Russian-American historian George Vernadsky, writing in the 20th century, agrees with Pétis and argues that the original prohibition was not nearly as restrictive as the fragments we've received would indicate, and that it originally served a "partly ritualistic" but also "realistic, or scientific" goal.² And even if this law should be read as referring to the use of water for washing at all times, it still only specifies running water- therefore, water collected in a vessel and used indoors would probably be omitted from this rule.
Water could be very scarce on the steppe or in the surrounding desert-like environments of Inner Asia, and conservation of existing water sources is a totally valid concern, and I don't mean to diminish that reality. One would probably save most available water to drink or water animals with, if the choice was between that and bathing. But a traditional nomad who performed military service but did not experience urban luxuries alongside the imperial elite would probably not need to bathe that many times in a year to be comparable in cleanliness with the rural populations of much of the rest of Europe and Asia. I say this being aware of the misconception that people of the middle ages "never" washed, but also aware of the reduced availability of bathing facilities outside of large towns or the private homes of the wealthy, in a time when the majority of people belonging to a polity or state were still rural and directly concerned with food production, whether agrarian or pastoral.
The specific myth that Mongol armies could be smelled before they could seen could probably be chalked up to a combination of folk belief, and the reality that all soldiers on campaign tend to get pretty ripe, especially if they are cavalrymen.
Issue 2:
Once again taking issue with al-Maqrizi, I point to the fact that both he and his sources may not have been trustworthy. Maqrizi allegedly received all of his information on the Yassa Code from a contact of his by the name of Abu-Hashim, who insisted that he had seen a copy of the entirety of the Yassa housed in the libraries of Baghdad, during his brief political exile there. We know little about the accomplishments of Abu-Hashim today, and nothing about the materials he supposedly studied, if they existed at any point. But what he toted as the entirety of the Yassa Code was a comparatively small list of offences and punishments (including bathing and clothes-washing) from the supposed criminal law of the Empire, so either Abu-Hashim was wrong or lying, or al-Maqrizi only paid attention to a very narrow section of what he was given.³
Further, al-Maqrizi does not acknowledge that in his writings on the Mongols, he borrowed heavily from a scholar named Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, who in turn wrote his material based off of what he knew from the even earlier historian, Ata-Malik Juvayni. Juvayni was an accomplished official in the Mongol Ilkhanate, as well as the author of the History of the World Conqueror, which is famous for being one of the most complete and unbiased accounts of the Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan of the 13th century, despite much of the subject matter pertaining to the conquest of Juvayni's own homeland.
Juvayni does include the Yassa stipulation about bathing in his work, but it specifies that it could not be done during a certain time of day during the spring and summer months, which is when thunderstorms are most common, and is not repeated in al-Maqrizi's work. Additionally, the entire edict is presented so that Chagatai Khan could throw the law straight out the window and demonstrate his mercy and wisdom as a ruler by pardoning and then giving property to the poor Muslim man who was caught bathing in midday.⁴ This gives the entire entry something of a didactic or praise-literature character that was, despite Juvayni's admirable attempts at historical accuracy, one of his primary responsibilities in writing his History for the Mongols of the Ilkhanate. So, it may be that the law was present only in a small portion of the post-division Mongol Empire, little-known and little-enforced in its hay day, if it did exist at all. Juvayni, after all, was working with the same limited knowledge of the real, secret Yassa Code that most other historians were.
The section plagiarized by al-Maqrizi, dealing with criminal justice, seemed also to be chosen for a very particular purpose which has to do with the political climate in which al-Maqrizi was involved at the time of his writing. Al-Maqrizi, as an aristocrat and historian living under the Egyptian Mamluks from 1364-1442, had perhaps an understandably sour opinion of the Mongols, and the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde in particular, who represented the aftermath of some of the most brutal conquests of Muslim-majority states by the first waves of Mongol invasion. But the Mamluk elite itself, derived from administrators and slave-soldiers taken from areas of Turkic Central Asia, possessed numerous Mongol influences. This included their own law code called the Yasaq. As the similarity in names might indicate, there was a line of influence and continuity, or at least a perceived line of continuity, between the Mongolian Yassa and the Mamluk Yasaq.
When the political tensions between the Mamluks and the religious scholar elites of Egypt resulted in the Yasaq being applied to cases which were normally under the exclusive jurisdiction of Muslim judges and the interpretation of Shari'a law, al-Maqrizi was very vocal in defaming the practice. He even referred to the original Yassa from which the Yasaq was derived as being "Satanic" (lit. shaytaniyya).⁵ Therefore, al-Maqrizi's already plagiarized and de-contextualized observations on the Yassa Code have a distinctly negative, propagandist attitude, as he attempted to diminish the Yassa in comparison to the schools of jurisprudence favored by the religious scholars of Egypt, whom al-Maqrizi was strongly in support of.
Conclusion:
To try and form a concise thought out of all of this, we know next to no complete details about the Mongol Empire's Yassa law code. We should be extremely cautious in treating any fragmentary writings by outsiders pertaining to it as if they accurately depict it and apply equally to the entirety of the Empire and its lifespan. Historians such as al-Maqrizi (who could be a very attentive and respectable historian otherwise) were not above using the Yassa to take a political stance, and the popular myths which have sprung up around these centuries of scholastic smack-talking should not be taken at face-value as truth.
The Mongols probably did not smell much worse than any other political group in medieval Eurasia. To our modern senses of hygiene, they may have smelled unpleasant, but this would have been the same for any other imperial power of the day possessed of large numbers of soldiers and even larger numbers of horses.
References:
¹ Vernadsky, George. "The Scope and Contents of Chingis Khan's Yasa." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1938): 337-60. Pages 340-341.
² Ibid, 352-353.
³ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Studia Islamica, no. 33 (1971): 97-140. doi:10.2307/1595029. Pages 101-104.
⁴ Juvaynī, ʻAlāʼ al-Dīn ʻAṭā Malik, John Andrew Boyle, and David Morgan. 1997. Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pages 204-206.
⁵ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Page 105.
Monday, December 25, 2017
The True Meaning of Narblesnard.
Seasonal greetings, Burrowers!
I hope that wherever you are, your holidays of choice are or have been bringing you spiritual fulfillment and/or really freaking neat stuff.
I am at least distantly observant of the Yulesmas, if only because I can't fit any evergreen larger than a shrub through the front door of my burrow. But I do have my own rituals. I can't say that it's a goblin holiday, since I haven't really met any others of my kind- probably because I'm usually hiding. Then again, if there are any other goblins in the Upstate mountain valleys, I can't help but imagine that they must celebrate it as well.
After all, our lives depend on it.
You see, a goblin is not the most secure creature in its environment. The rivers we enjoy living next to can flood, or the weather can trap us indoors with snow, ice, or mud. The mountain-folk can occasionally make sport of hunting us down with their brand new Weatherby hunting rifles, or accidentally run us over when we attempt to cross a street. And any pet larger than a large mouse is a natural predator to us, in sufficient numbers and with the necessary viciousness of course.
But all of those pale in comparison to the danger of the squirrels.
Masters of the trees overhead, possessed of an unnatural speed and jerkiness of movement, and obsessed with gathering food in these trying months, squirrels have spelled the doom of many a hapless goblin. Either by ravaging our food stores, or attacking us directly in their rush for supplies, only woe betides one who sees those black eyes and massive incisors during the first ghost of winter.
Or so I like to imagine, to make my ideas make more sense. Like I said, I've never seen another goblin.
At any rate, a great deal of trial and error went into developing the perfect response to the hostilities of nature's most godless nibbling-machine. The answer, it turns out, is appeasement. It required cutting almost all of the acorns out of my diet, but by leaving a trail of them leading away from my territory, deep into the woods where a mighty cache of the nuts can be found, a goblin can live in peace for the most trying of weeks before the beginning of the long cold. You just have to get used to the sounds of savage fighting, if more than one squirrel followed the trail to the distraction.
That time of huddling in one's burrow is an excellent opportunity in which to try brewing any new tea recipes you've discovered on the backs of recycled boxes that year, or to finish stitching patches into the heels of your decade-old socks. Or, if you're feeling particularly daring, try taking just one or two of those acorns you secreted into your person, and roasting them in your oven made from discarded terracotta pots and votive candles.
But in the end, the sounds of chittering, narbling, and rapid munching comes to an abrupt snard of an end, and the quiet of winter can set in at last. This is Narblesnard, and it is a moment for collective sighs and relief among all goblinkind.
Of course the bushy-tailed devils don't actually hibernate, so it's back to basics every week when they wake back up to forage some more. But the spirit of the holiday is to remind us all that we can survive. That the future brings with it new potential for good, as well as for terror. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that, after the day of Narblesnard, the hundreds of convenience stores in town finally stop playing those infernal songs about jingling bells and unwheeled chariots drawn by mutant snow-deer.
So, Blessed Narblesnard to all!
May you survive the New Year, so that we can do it all again next time.
And the next time.
And the next time...
And the next time.
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