TOMU 2-26 Construction Post
Aug. 16th, 2011 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin4:30-5:00 (~300 words)
5:00-5:30 (~800 words, +500)
1:00-1:30 (~1200 words, +400)
5:00-5:30 (~1550 words, +350)
6:00-6:30 (~2000 words, +450)
6:30-7:00 (~2400 words, +400)
7:00-7:30 (~2850 words, +450)
[3.5 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I'd voted for it in the last class more on general principle than any particularly strong interest in the people or region. At least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended with someone battling one to the glorious death.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional. We remember the fighting because that's still impressive, always impressive. We can't imagine ourselves being cast out to sea in a boat, but we can imagine getting in a fight... having to protect what's ours, or having the strength and ability to take what we want."
It was weird to hear him say that and think about it. The fact was that I couldn't really imagine myself fighting for something that way. It's not that I was above a little fantasizing about might if not exactly making right, then at least making it easier to do right. I'd watch a show like Mecknights, or write fic inspired by it... that was all about fighting and fantastical weapons and blowing things up... there's story, too, and characters, or else it wouldn't be interesting, but the story is mostly about the the characters winning fights.
But even when I projected myself into the shoes of a character like that, it wasn't me fighting. That's not the fantasy. I've always been squeamish about violence, and then my half-demon heritage revealed itself and my grandmother instilled me the idea that I'm always one tiny hair's width away from a violent rampage... and then on a few occasions I've come way too close to seeing what actually could happen if I lost control.
For me... and probably for most people... the warrior fantasy isn't just having the ability to fight, in terms of technical prowess. It's about having the moral ability, whether it's because there's some kind of absolute clarity about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy or because it's a "simpler time" or because you belong to an imagined or recalled society where fighting's all about honor or glory or people just don't care. The heroes of the sagas Fenwick talked about killed men for insulting them and killed the people or beings or whatever or whoever lived on the rocks they landed on, and those fights were treated with the same sort of raucous gravitas as the battles where the aged hero, now a lord or a king, fights to protect his people.
Maybe it could be said that while I wasn't particularly interested in the Thyleans, I was still finding things about them interesting.
"Let's bring this back around," Hart said. "If I talk about the impact the Thyleans had on the modern world, one of the first things people... at least, people here... will think about is their exploration of the westering lands. But as remarkable a feat as that is, we treat it like it's an exceptional one in all the wrong ways."
"You're the one who said that only one sailor could have landed on a given hypothetical rock," Fenwick pointed out.
"I did," Hart said. "And if we're going to lionize one man's deeds, let's make it that. But there's a culture that produced the man... yes, 'culture' is the word. A culture of people who wear furry skins and quaff mead and carve the prow of their boats into things, a culture of people who've been so stereotyped as fearsome and savage barbarians that we can't draw or depict them without putting a pair of horns on a useless tin cap, like they're someone's idea of a devil."
I was glad he'd prefaced that with "someone's idea of"... the idea that "devils" had horns was just as much an unfounded stereotype as the idea that Thylean helmets had them. It wasn't that Thyleans were given horned helmets by way of implied infernal association; it was that humans liked to put horns on things they thought of as bestial and scary.
For as curious as I'd been about Twyla the day before, I was fast becoming more than a little sick of horns and everything having to do with them.
"The point," Hart continued, "is that a random hero of the northlands did not just decide to take a boat he'd otherwise use for regional coastal plundering and see what happened if he steered it in the other direction. During an age when the main activity of the old empire's naval and merchant fleets was in sailing around their own little archipelago and shuttling back and forth to the mainland, the Thyleans were sailing past the Mother Isles, down the coast, into the Ardan... all over the place. We may never have a complete account of everywhere they visited, because they didn't leave many records themselves, and because historians in the best Magisterian and Metropolitan scholastic traditions have done a fairly sh... poor job of interrogating the records kept by other peoples in a serious way. There are stories about white skinned human visitors before what we think of as 'the age of empires' all over the place, and while they're probably not all about Thyleans, they're probably not all... or even mostly... pure invention."
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[3 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I'd voted for it in the last class more on general principle than any particularly strong interest in the people or region. At least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended with someone battling one to the glorious death.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional. We remember the fighting because that's still impressive, always impressive. We can't imagine ourselves being cast out to sea in a boat, but we can imagine getting in a fight... having to protect what's ours, or having the strength and ability to take what we want."
It was weird to hear him say that and think about it. The fact was that I couldn't really imagine myself fighting for something that way. It's not that I was above a little fantasizing about might if not exactly making right, then at least making it easier to do right. I'd watch a show like Mecknights, or write fic inspired by it... that was all about fighting and fantastical weapons and blowing things up... there's story, too, and characters, or else it wouldn't be interesting, but the story is mostly about the the characters winning fights.
But even when I projected myself into the shoes of a character like that, it wasn't me fighting. That's not the fantasy. I've always been squeamish about violence, and then my half-demon heritage revealed itself and my grandmother instilled me the idea that I'm always one tiny hair's width away from a violent rampage... and then on a few occasions I've come way too close to seeing what actually could happen if I lost control.
For me... and probably for most people... the warrior fantasy isn't just having the ability to fight, in terms of technical prowess. It's about having the moral ability, whether it's because there's some kind of absolute clarity about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy or because it's a "simpler time" or because you belong to an imagined or recalled society where fighting's all about honor or glory or people just don't care. The heroes of the sagas Fenwick talked about killed men for insulting them and killed the people or beings or whatever or whoever lived on the rocks they landed on, and those fights were treated with the same sort of raucous gravitas as the battles where the aged hero, now a lord or a king, fights to protect his people.
Maybe it could be said that while I wasn't particularly interested in the Thyleans, I was still finding things about them interesting.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[2.5 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I had no particularly strong interest in them, but at least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended battling them.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[2 hours.]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I had no particularly strong interest in them, but at least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended battling them.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[1.5 hours.]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
[]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[1 hour in.]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[Beginning.]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
5:00-5:30 (~800 words, +500)
1:00-1:30 (~1200 words, +400)
5:00-5:30 (~1550 words, +350)
6:00-6:30 (~2000 words, +450)
6:30-7:00 (~2400 words, +400)
7:00-7:30 (~2850 words, +450)
[3.5 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I'd voted for it in the last class more on general principle than any particularly strong interest in the people or region. At least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended with someone battling one to the glorious death.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional. We remember the fighting because that's still impressive, always impressive. We can't imagine ourselves being cast out to sea in a boat, but we can imagine getting in a fight... having to protect what's ours, or having the strength and ability to take what we want."
It was weird to hear him say that and think about it. The fact was that I couldn't really imagine myself fighting for something that way. It's not that I was above a little fantasizing about might if not exactly making right, then at least making it easier to do right. I'd watch a show like Mecknights, or write fic inspired by it... that was all about fighting and fantastical weapons and blowing things up... there's story, too, and characters, or else it wouldn't be interesting, but the story is mostly about the the characters winning fights.
But even when I projected myself into the shoes of a character like that, it wasn't me fighting. That's not the fantasy. I've always been squeamish about violence, and then my half-demon heritage revealed itself and my grandmother instilled me the idea that I'm always one tiny hair's width away from a violent rampage... and then on a few occasions I've come way too close to seeing what actually could happen if I lost control.
For me... and probably for most people... the warrior fantasy isn't just having the ability to fight, in terms of technical prowess. It's about having the moral ability, whether it's because there's some kind of absolute clarity about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy or because it's a "simpler time" or because you belong to an imagined or recalled society where fighting's all about honor or glory or people just don't care. The heroes of the sagas Fenwick talked about killed men for insulting them and killed the people or beings or whatever or whoever lived on the rocks they landed on, and those fights were treated with the same sort of raucous gravitas as the battles where the aged hero, now a lord or a king, fights to protect his people.
Maybe it could be said that while I wasn't particularly interested in the Thyleans, I was still finding things about them interesting.
"Let's bring this back around," Hart said. "If I talk about the impact the Thyleans had on the modern world, one of the first things people... at least, people here... will think about is their exploration of the westering lands. But as remarkable a feat as that is, we treat it like it's an exceptional one in all the wrong ways."
"You're the one who said that only one sailor could have landed on a given hypothetical rock," Fenwick pointed out.
"I did," Hart said. "And if we're going to lionize one man's deeds, let's make it that. But there's a culture that produced the man... yes, 'culture' is the word. A culture of people who wear furry skins and quaff mead and carve the prow of their boats into things, a culture of people who've been so stereotyped as fearsome and savage barbarians that we can't draw or depict them without putting a pair of horns on a useless tin cap, like they're someone's idea of a devil."
I was glad he'd prefaced that with "someone's idea of"... the idea that "devils" had horns was just as much an unfounded stereotype as the idea that Thylean helmets had them. It wasn't that Thyleans were given horned helmets by way of implied infernal association; it was that humans liked to put horns on things they thought of as bestial and scary.
For as curious as I'd been about Twyla the day before, I was fast becoming more than a little sick of horns and everything having to do with them.
"The point," Hart continued, "is that a random hero of the northlands did not just decide to take a boat he'd otherwise use for regional coastal plundering and see what happened if he steered it in the other direction. During an age when the main activity of the old empire's naval and merchant fleets was in sailing around their own little archipelago and shuttling back and forth to the mainland, the Thyleans were sailing past the Mother Isles, down the coast, into the Ardan... all over the place. We may never have a complete account of everywhere they visited, because they didn't leave many records themselves, and because historians in the best Magisterian and Metropolitan scholastic traditions have done a fairly sh... poor job of interrogating the records kept by other peoples in a serious way. There are stories about white skinned human visitors before what we think of as 'the age of empires' all over the place, and while they're probably not all about Thyleans, they're probably not all... or even mostly... pure invention."
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[3 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I'd voted for it in the last class more on general principle than any particularly strong interest in the people or region. At least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended with someone battling one to the glorious death.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional. We remember the fighting because that's still impressive, always impressive. We can't imagine ourselves being cast out to sea in a boat, but we can imagine getting in a fight... having to protect what's ours, or having the strength and ability to take what we want."
It was weird to hear him say that and think about it. The fact was that I couldn't really imagine myself fighting for something that way. It's not that I was above a little fantasizing about might if not exactly making right, then at least making it easier to do right. I'd watch a show like Mecknights, or write fic inspired by it... that was all about fighting and fantastical weapons and blowing things up... there's story, too, and characters, or else it wouldn't be interesting, but the story is mostly about the the characters winning fights.
But even when I projected myself into the shoes of a character like that, it wasn't me fighting. That's not the fantasy. I've always been squeamish about violence, and then my half-demon heritage revealed itself and my grandmother instilled me the idea that I'm always one tiny hair's width away from a violent rampage... and then on a few occasions I've come way too close to seeing what actually could happen if I lost control.
For me... and probably for most people... the warrior fantasy isn't just having the ability to fight, in terms of technical prowess. It's about having the moral ability, whether it's because there's some kind of absolute clarity about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy or because it's a "simpler time" or because you belong to an imagined or recalled society where fighting's all about honor or glory or people just don't care. The heroes of the sagas Fenwick talked about killed men for insulting them and killed the people or beings or whatever or whoever lived on the rocks they landed on, and those fights were treated with the same sort of raucous gravitas as the battles where the aged hero, now a lord or a king, fights to protect his people.
Maybe it could be said that while I wasn't particularly interested in the Thyleans, I was still finding things about them interesting.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[2.5 hours]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I had no particularly strong interest in them, but at least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended battling them.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
I took an open seat off to the side. I supposed their goal in joining the circle was to make things more comfortable for us, but to me it meant that I'd either be sitting hear them or in their line of sight. Maybe there would be days where neither of those things would feel like a big deal, but I hadn't slept well and I didn't want to be looking into people's faces or hearing their disembodied voices off to my side.
"Ah, shall we begin?" Fenwick said to Hart a few minutes later, when all the chairs were filled.
"Looks like it's that time," Hart said. "Anybody mind if I just jump right in? Okay. Thyleans. They havedefinitely had a bigger impact on our modern world than a bunch of part-dragon mercenaries the other empire made use of way back when."
"Don't underestimate the ripple effect, dear Aaron," Fenwick said.
"Don't underestimate the danger of calling me 'dear'," Hart said.
"The fact that the old empire's history with the Pelorian dragonbloods goes back so far means that it's had a chance to influence everything that came after," Fenwick said. "Whatever alterations the Thyleans wrought upon the landscape of the world, that landscape was itself created by Pelorians."
"Well, maybe... okay, granted, but we talked about the Pelorians last time," Hart said. "The deal was that it's Thyleans today."
"Naturally," Fenwick said. "I didn't even raise the subject of the Pelorians."
"Okay, so," Hart said. "The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world. Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order. We don't think of the Thyleans as explorers or traders... we tend to think of them as invaders, the kind who swoop off with all the valuables and women and other livestock as quickly as they swoop in, not the sort of people who'd sail over the horizon to see what was there, much less decide to move in when they get there."
"That's a shame," Fenwick said. "Exploration is as common a theme in the great Thylean sagas as fighting, if not more so... a good deal of the fights that were worth singing about came about because the hero ventured somewhere past the boundaries of the known world."
"Right," Hart said. "But see, when you make up a story about the guy who does that and you center it on fighting and slaying, people don't think of him as an explorer, they think of him as an adventurer. When a boat full of warriors lands on a rock and kills the giant two-headed thing that lives there, then statistically probably any boatload of comparable warriors might have done the same if they'd landed there. But only one boat did. It's getting there that's a unique and impressive feat.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[2 hours.]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
But I had to admit, his presence did add something to the class. Having someone to play off of meant that Professor Hart might end up going in directions he wouldn't otherwise have thought to,
The topic for the day's discussion was the Thyleans. I had no particularly strong interest in them, but at least they had very little to do with dragons, outside of a few epics that ended battling them.
The stereotypically fierce warriors of the north occupied a weird spot in the cultures that had grown up in their shadow. They were admired as well as feared for their legendary battle-prowess... being not just human but white meant that they for the majority factions of the two empires they made as good stock heroes as they did villains. Some of the oldest extant stories in any form of Pax were based on older Thylean accounts.
I had a feeling that Hart had something more recent in mind. Ostensibly, the overarching subject of the class was how past events shaped the modern world, after all... but there was enough time to fill and an informal enough structure to the class that things could go all over the place.
Fenwick and Hart were sitting on one side of a circle of chairs when I got to the classroom. They'd both given us permission to use their first names, partly in order to foster an informal and free-flowing discussion environment but mostly really because their last names were too similar. Having had Hart before, he was still Hart to me... but Professor Hall was definitely a Fenwick. It was the sort of name I might have made up for him if I didn't know what he was called.
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[1.5 hours.]
My first class of the day was discussion-based. It had sounded interesting in the course catalogue: an interdisciplinary examination of how events recorded in history and lore had shaped the modern world.
It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual practice things had started off kind of... rough. The teachers from the two disciplines had wildly divergent points of views and nobody had really thought about how that would play out in a classroom setting. By the end of the first session, though, they'd seemed to have found a working dynamic and a measure of professional... if not actual... respect for each other's fields.
I was glad, because this was the one class I'd taken purely for pleasure, as treat for myself. It wasn't the only class I'd hoped to enjoy, but most of the classes I love are the ones that relate specifically to my major. History has never exactly been my passion, but it's an interest... well, I suppose stories are my interest, and as classroom subjects went the stories hinted at through history lessons had frequently been more interesting to me than the ones assigned in high school lit classes.
Professor Aaron Hart, who represented the history department's half of The Making of the World, was not someone I probably would have wanted to hang out with outside of class. He sponsored the school's model warfare club. He had a tendency to be brusque in the way that sounded rude even when it wasn't, and usually was.
He was a good teacher, though, and he had an interest in the sorts of vivid details and tangled backstories that get left out of the typical "On such and such a date, a law was passed and a war happened." tellings of history.
Fenwick Hall, the lore professor of the class, was far more pleasant and personable, and I couldn't stand him. He was condescending in the worst possible way, where the person doesn't seem to have a clue that they're condescending. Hart had made no attempt to hide his contempt for his colleague's profession. Hall had made no sign that he was aware of his own equally obvious loathing.
You might have thought that if I was interested in history for the stories, I'd be all about having a loremaster giving input on everything, but Hall just seemed like a walking embodiment of every reason why the more disciplined approach of historians... once derided as overly scientific in its approach to measuring and verifying fact... had mostly supplanted the bardic traditions in the area of record keeping.
[]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[1 hour in.]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."
"Giants as gods?" [][][]
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become. [][]
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants, one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes. They would be powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they must rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring."
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
[Beginning.]
"The focus of this class is how historical events... well, historical events and stories that may have not been entirely fictional during historical ages... shaped the modern world," Hart said. "Now, one of the things that has been nearly a constant throughout history is borders. Not that any one set of boundaries has ever been a constant, but there have always been dividing lines... practical, political, geographical... between this place and that, these people and those people.
"Where we see history being made... where we see the shape of the world changing... is when someone or something ignores those boundaries and goes crashing right through them. Exploration. Invasion. Colonization. Trade. Or... as often happens... all of the above, in that order.
"The Thyleans are mostly renowned for their fighting prowess. That makes sense. In this day and age, the ability to make a craft made out of wood and take it out into the ocean and reach land alive is undervalued. We use magic to make boats and pilot them, and even the ocean part is optional.
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
"Ah, religion," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate.
"In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons."