The other fundamental aspect of belief was more personal, and taken more seriously. This was a concept of life after death, and perhaps also before birth, most often referred to as the River. At its simplest this was an image of the passage to the afterlife, which the common folk of both lands often identified with the Milky Way. More sophisticated thinkers took darker, more abstract metaphysical views, in which the River seems to have been an image of Time, often incorporating concepts of reincarnation. Yet for them, too, the astral image was never wholly abandoned. It may have had its roots in a tradition that their ancestors had stemmed from the stars, and tales of a celestial army that had once descended to earth to help their estranged kin. A similar story linked to the Milky Way, of two halves of a sundered people led by brother princes, is found among the mythologies of the Magyar peoples, and curiously enough also among the Finno-Baltic peoples who were indeed estranged from them, some eighteen hundred years earlier.
These beliefs were fundamentally common to both the Svarhath and Penruthya, and pervaded all their cultures. In Kerys they had been observed as a religion in the fullest sense, held personally but also identified with the state, having temples, worship and formal beliefs and schools of doctrine. In Morvan the state aspect had grown, and in Ker Bryhaine it became the chief element, with little left to personal belief. In Nordeney, by contrast, worship became more relaxed, often to the point of superstition, and often ignored or derided as myth. Often cults were related to trades, sailors praying for safe voyages and farmers offering for a good harvest. Seasonal festivals, such as Athalby’s Spring Fair, originally celebrated the Powers, but were now chiefly occasions for meeting, marketing and merry-making. Neither state ever had a formal priesthood; lords, guildmasters and other leading citizens officiated at major rites, but ordinary folk worshipped for themselves.
The existence is also established, almost exclusively in the South, of an ancient, small and necessarily secretive cult of the Ice. This was a direct worship which practised rites and rituals possibly derived from certain cult practices of the Ekwesh, or sharing their roots. Its philosophy and purpose was a hatred of mankind based on quasi-aesthetic disgust, and a worship of pure sterile mind, as represented by the Ice powers. Its rites, though profoundly solemn, appear to have demanded mortification of the flesh in ordeals imposed to harden bodies and stiffen wills – and, no doubt, like so many medieval practices, for sado-masochistic gratification. They also included isolating cruelty, acts so unpleasant they set their celebrants apart from humanity, in a brotherhood of atrocity. The rites of terrorist groups such as certain Serbian secret societies and the Mau-Mau often display the same characteristics.
Like many smiths, Kunrad was not especially religious, perhaps because their educated skills diminished their acceptance of superstition. As far as can be told he swore by the Powers occasionally, drank deep at Guild feasts to celebrate the great patron of smiths Ilmarinen, and otherwise thought little about them – at least in his early life. Others displayed even less respect, as witness Gille’s irreverent little song. It was probably original, extempore even; but may have followed a familiar model. There is some evidence, in the North especially, of riotous misrule festivals, like the Roman Saturnalia or its medieval descendants, at which satirical songs were sung about the Powers. This, though, seems to have been basically affectionate. Nobody wrote rude songs, or any other kind, about the Ice.
These festivals the South considered very barbaric. They tended to honour the Powers with great solemnity and pomp in ceremonies descended from the rites of Kerys, but more in celebration of their own self-importance than the Powers concerned. These were considered chiefly aristocratic rituals, linked with their warrior-cult and their belief in their own manifest destiny. Only at regular festivals or times of national joy or disaster did the common folk share in them.
Which view, if any, the Powers themselves preferred is not recorded.
Michael Scott Rohan (1951 – )
Michael Scott Rohan, born in Edinburgh in 1951, writes both fantasy and science fiction. Whilst studying law at Oxford, Rohan joined the SF group and met the president, Allan J Scott, who started him writing for the group’s semi-professional magazine SFinx alongside names such as Robert Holdstock and Ian Watson. His first novel, Run to the Stars, was published in 1983 and he collaborated with Allan J Scott on The Hammer and the Cross, a non-fiction account of how Christianity arrived in Viking lands. Rohan is best known for his acclaimed The Winter of the World sequence, an epic fantasy set in and ice-bound world.
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The Castle of the Winds Page 49
