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Month: July 2019

Gods of the Tremára

Gods of the Tremára

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While I continue to work on a map for the first sections of The Curse of Steel, I’ve come across another bit of world-building that seems very fruitful. To wit, now that I’ve developed something of a language for Kráva’s people to speak, I’m also in a position to develop mythology for them.

I had already come up with a few theonyms, but over this past weekend, I decided to work out a complete pantheon, with names, epithets, and backgrounds for a dozen or so deities. Not only am I very happy with the result, but it’s given me a number of new ideas for the story itself.

In particular, while I’ve been doing this, I’ve also been reading the new edition of the Scion roleplaying game, currently published by Onyx Path Publishing. Scion is basically an urban fantasy of the old World of Darkness stripe, but it’s chock-full of interesting ideas as to how to handle characters of divine descent in an otherwise mundane world. Clear inspirations from things like the Percy Jackson stories, American Gods, or The Wicked + The Divine. I’m honestly kind of tempted to shift my plot-development paradigm from FATE to Scion, which seems better suited for the kind of story I’m hoping to tell. Still thinking about that.

In the meantime, though, here’s a short set of first-draft notes on the gods of the Tremára people. You’ll probably detect that this is Standard Indo-European Pantheon, variant #3-b . . . you won’t have any trouble recognizing bits and pieces of inspiration here. Just as I’m applying Indo-European-like principles to my constructed languages, the same applies to my constructed mythologies.

The Tívai Atesdan

The primary deities of the Tremára are called the Tívai Atesdan, the “Twelve Gods.” The Tremára cosmology also includes a horde of minor gods, spirits of nature or of place, and divine heroes; all these lesser beings have their local cults, but the Twelve are revered by all.

Kádir Tívar, Sky-Father, Lord of the Bright Heavens

Patriarch of the Tívai Atesdan, Kádir Tívar is the divine chieftain and King. His is the oath that binds all under the law, and his is the iron rule of hospitality that keeps the peace among humans. In the time before humanity arose, he overthrew the creatures of Chaos who came before him. Now he maintains the cosmic order with stern ferocity, knowing that any respite might lead to his own overthrow.

For the most part, Kádir Tívar has been faithful to his marriage with his divine sister, the Queen of the Earth. On rare occasions, he has been known to descend to minor goddesses or mortal women in order to father great heroes. This is never a matter of lustful desire on his part, but rather a concession to the dictates of Fate – and his wife, as the arbiter of Fate, is often in full concurrence.

Athenná the All-Mother, Queen of the Earth

Athenná is the sister and wife of Kádir Tívar, the eternal foundation of all life and all existence. She is the mistress and arbiter of Fate, which stands above all law and justice. In ancient times, she was one of the children of primordial Chaos, and she retains more of that character than most of her siblings. She rarely appears to humans in their own form, but she will sometimes manifest as a force of nature, in majesty and dread.

Athenná has never been known to wander from her marriage to Kádir Tívar. That is not to say that she doesn’t create or choose heroes to carry out her will, only that their origins tend to be more indirect and mysterious.

Múrkavrio, the Great Bull

The embodiment of masculine power and procreative force, Múrkavrio gives men the power to strive and be victorious over all the challenges of life. He also manifests the power and prosperity that come from herds of domesticated beasts, especially the cattle whose form he often takes.

Múrkavrio’s insatiable desire has made him the undisputed champion among the gods for fathering children upon other divine creatures and upon mortal women. Almost every tribe and clan among the Tremára can claim descent from the Great Bull, renewed in every generation. His wife, Tálanna the Golden, seems reconciled to this, although there have been exceptions.

Tálanna the Golden, Lady of the Ripened Grain

Tálanna is the great nurturing power of the earth, the goddess who brings seed to grow and yield sustenance for all the earth’s children. Hers is the power that gives life to the grain, brings offspring to every animal kind, and sustains humanity. She is the patron and protector of women, especially in childbirth and motherhood.

As with her sister Athenná, Tálanna has never been known to consort with minor deities or with mortals so that she can bear heroes. Her champions are chosen or created, and are almost always women, sent forth to protect their mortal sisters against the violence or injustices of the world.

Tario, Lord of Thunder, Champion of the Gods

Tario is the son of Kádir Tívar and Athenná, the warrior and champion of the gods. He strides forth against darkness and chaos, leading the divine beings in battle at the command of his kingly father. His greatest weapon is the lightning, which he calls down from the storm-clouds of war. From warriors he demands unfailing courage, but also wisdom and clear thinking amid battle.

Despite his masculine nature, Tario is not known for ventures away from his wife, the Lady of Horses. Instead, he tends to incarnate among humans from time to time. On each occasion he lives an apparently mortal life, adds to his legend, and then returns to his place among the gods after death. Unfortunately, Tario’s incarnations rarely live an easy life; he seems to be fated to suffer greatly and fight the most difficult battles, no matter which turn of the Wheel he may be on.

Tekuná, Lady of Horses

Daughter of Múrkavrio and Tálanna, the Lady of Horses came to the Chariot People in the earliest times, as a great white mare who bore a thousand offspring and gave humans the power to thrive and journey across the land. Later she taught the people about chariots, and she and her husband Tario taught them to be warriors of strength and courage.

Like her father, Tekuná is well-known for her affairs with mortals, and many heroes can claim descent from her. Her children and their descendants are often seen to have a special way with horses, and they make superb charioteers and riders.

Kaima Gerio, Lord of the Underworld

Originally the first human being, the “divine twin” was elevated to godhood after his death, and assigned to rule over the Underworld. He is grim and silent, but not malicious, and he treats all with the same firm justice. He is also the source of all the wealth that comes from within the earth, the patron of miners, coiners, and jewel-smiths.

Kaima Gerio has never fathered heroes upon mortals, so far as is known. Most often, he will instead select the shade of some great warrior or sage of the past, and grant it reincarnation in the living world to serve as one of his champions. Heroes connected with the Lord of the Dead are often uncanny creatures, knowing things no mortal should know, seeking objectives that no mortal can understand.

Skádna, Mistress of Shadows

Daughter of Kádir Tívar and Athenná, Skádna was (very unwillingly) married to Kaima Gerio when he became the god of the Underworld. She is the goddess of shadows and liminal spaces, who stands between light and darkness, life and death. She is the Comforter who conveys human spirits to the Underworld, and the Advocate who argues for mercy or for vengeance depending on their deeds.

Skádna despises her husband, always remembering that he was not originally of divine birth. She has been known to sneak out and enjoy affairs with other gods or with mortals. Her heroic offspring are more likely to be wise-men or sorcerers than great warriors. Kaima Gerio punishes Skádna when her activities reflect poorly upon his honor, but he never persecutes her mortal lovers, always knowing that they will one day be required to face him for an accounting.

Kórsata, the Lofty One, Lord of the Sacred Flame

Kórsata is a son of Kídar Távar by Kórsia, a minor goddess of the mountains. He is the twin brother to Advenáta. He is the god of fire, whether it be the fire of the hearth, the fire of the forge, or the fire of holy inspiration. He is the healer and protector of humans, the patron deity of smiths, and the god most revered by bards and vaitai. Kórsata’s ways are unfathomable, as he often seems to pursue wisdom beyond mortal ken.

Kórsata is unmarried, having never found a goddess capable of understanding and embracing the depths of his spirit. He has been known to father heroes upon mortal kind, but some of his most well-known champions have been creations: carvings or statues or even poems brought to life by his blessing.

Advenáta the Beautiful, Lady of Love and Passion

Advenáta was also born to Kídar Tívar and Kórsia, twin sister to Kórsata. She is the goddess of beauty in all its forms, and the passion that such beauty inspires in humans. She is the patron of lovers, and is likely to take vengeance when love is denied.

Advenáta has so far refused to accept a husband, preferring her freedom. Indeed, not even her father Kádir Tívar has seen fit to insist on her attachment to any god or mortal, knowing that she must be left free to move as her spirit wills. As might be expected, Advenáta is renowned for the number and variety of her romantic affairs with gods, spirits, and mortals. She has borne several mortal heroes, a surprising number of whom have become great chieftains and kings.

Marapótio, Divine Master of the Seas

The brother of Kádir Tívar and Kaima Gerio, Marapótio was little known to the ancient Chariot People, but he has become more prominent as the Tremára interact with coast-dwelling folk. He is the solitary master of the great waters, the bringer of sea-storms and the king of sea-monsters. Few humans love him, but all fear and revere him, and call upon him when traveling upon the sea.

Marapótio has fathered few heroes among the Tremára, who have dwelt far from the sea for many centuries. The bards suspect that he has been more active among dwellers in the coastlands to the west and south, although those people likely know him by other names.

Kekóna, the Trickster, Mistress of Twists and Turns

Another daughter of Múrkavrio and Tálanna, Kekóna is a trickster-deity, goddess of lies and deception. She is a patron of merchants, thieves, and all those who must travel and cross boundaries. She is also a patron of warriors, but she favors those who use cunning stratagems to win, rather than those who rely upon brute force and courage. Strangely, she is usually portrayed as not resembling the Tremára, instead being light of hair and pale of skin like some people of the cold Northlands.

Despite her freedom of spirit, Kekóna is not known for casual dalliance with other gods or with mortals. Her love affairs are infrequent but very intense. Her gender is somewhat fluid; she has been known to engage with goddesses or women, and even to manifest herself as male if that is more likely to suit a prospective partner. Her rare children tend to be tricksters, wanderers and outcasts, much like their divine parent.

. . . and a Bonus Diagram

So, almost by accident, I tried putting together a little chart to help me visualize the relationships among all these gods. Turned out pretty well, given that it only took an hour or two to assemble. Enjoy:

First Sketch Map: Talmoi Móran

First Sketch Map: Talmoi Móran

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Now that I’ve got a solid foundation for my constructed languages for The Curse of Steel, I’ve rewritten about the first 10 kilowords of the novel, and I’m pretty happy with how that much has turned out. Now, though, Kráva and her friends are about to leave their starting point and set out cross-country, and I need to have a good picture of their surroundings. So now it’s time to do some map work.

Over the past couple of evenings I’ve laid out a very rough sketch map of parts of the continent Kráva’s people call Talmoi Móran, or “the Great Lands.” This is roughly equivalent to Europe (or western Middle-Earth), stretching from about 30 to 65 degrees North latitude, and across about sixty degrees of east-west longitude.

Kráva begins her adventure in the region labeled the Tremára Lands, an area roughly the size of France, bounded by the major Black River on the east, the Blue Mountains on the west, and a series of large inland seas (the “Great Lakes”) on the south. The Tremára (“Mighty Folk”) are one branch of the so-called “Chariot People,” this universe’s equivalent of the Indo-Europeans. The Chariot People have been spreading out from their eastern homeland for a few millennia at this point, and most countries around the edges of the Great Plains at the center of the map are inhabited by their offshoots.

I don’t think I’m going to go to great lengths to fill in this map in fine detail, not yet and possibly not ever. All that’s important for now is that I get a general idea of where everything is. I also got a reality check: I used an application called G.Projector to overlay this map on a map of Earth, just to be sure the layout and scale were at all plausible. So far, so good.

I might use this sketch map to work through some of the climate zones, just to be sure I know how that will fall out. But the most likely next step is to focus on the Tremára Lands area, and possibly the coastal regions adjacent to it, which is where about three-quarters of The Curse of Steel will be set. That map, I’ll probably take some time with.

Lexical Breakthroughs

Lexical Breakthroughs

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Who knew that building a constructed language would be so much work?

Okay, well, I knew that, because I’ve been struggling with it off and on for years. As often happens with my creative process, it’s a matter of building a workflow that will reliably produce good results. On many previous attempts, I’ve run aground on one step or another and had to stop and rethink – sometimes for months, while I worked on other projects.

So, the workflow seems to have turned out to be something like this:

  1. I started by selecting the phonemes and basic word structure for words in an ur-language, reminiscent of Proto-Indo-European. I didn’t make any attempt to closely imitate the full glorious mess that is reconstructed PIE, but I built a set of rules that would lead to PIE-like words.
  2. I wrote a Perl script to generate all the legal word roots in the ur-language, including adding some weights to help me get a plausibly uneven distribution in which phonemes were most likely to appear.
  3. I dumped all of the generated roots, with their weights, into an Excel spreadsheet. That’s my master lexicon.
  4. Now, when I need a new word, I start by browsing through the spreadsheet – possibly also looking at the etymology of similar words in real IE languages, so I can pick something plausible but not identical. I pick a root and assign it a meaning. Most of the roots have verbal meanings, then you get nouns, adjectives, and so on by adding inflectional suffixes.
  5. Once I’ve generated one or more new word roots, I hand-copy those into an ur-language lexicon I’m building in a Word document. Each root is the header of a short section, and I spend a few lines laying out the potential verbs, nouns, and other items that are derived from that word.
  6. Then I copy the word form I want to use into another Word document, which is the main lexicon for my complete language. There I apply the sound-change rules I’ve developed, give the resulting word or phrase a quick reality check (is it aesthetically pleasing to me, does it duplicate an existing word, and so on), and then save the result.

As of today, this workflow seems to be polished enough that I’ve been able to sit down and rattle off a few dozen new words, phrases, or names in no more than a couple of hours. (As opposed to struggling for days to be confident in a word or two.)

The results are pleasing, at least to me, and that’s the important part. I think I may be able to call this part of the process finished and get to other story-development tasks. I should now be able to generate new names and vocabulary in the fly. And, when my story gets to the point where my protagonist is meeting people from other cultures, it shouldn’t take me months on end to figure out what they will sound like.

Some examples might illustrate how this is working. Here’s a row from my Excel spreadsheet, recording a word-root that’s been particularly productive:

1@em384Noun“earth, the earth”Likely borrowed from another language1

Here we have the word root, written in an idiosyncratic code I’m using to make sure all the phonemes require only one character each. The numeric value is the root’s weight, on a scale from 1-1000. Then the part of speech, a gloss of the meaning, any notes, and finally a note as to which “batch” the root was created in (so I can track any changes later).

This then goes into my ur-language lexicon, where the entry currently looks like this:

*h1dhem-

  • Thematic verb root “to stand”
  • Thematic noun root “resolute position”
  • Thematic noun root (with neh2– prefix) neh2h1dhem- “battle line” (literally “where one stands”)
  • Athematic noun root (Ø-stem) “the earth”
  • Athematic noun root (edhas­-stem) “human,” literally “child of the earth”
  • Athematic noun root (neh2-stem) “earth goddess”
  • Athematic noun root (r-stem) “earth” (mass noun)

How do I pick roots? I basically follow Tolkien’s method, which was to riffle through his list and find something he considered both aesthetically pleasing and suggestive of the meaning. This root *h1dhem– certainly isn’t the same one that appears in PIE with that meaning; that would have been something like *dheghom instead. In this case, I think I was inspired by a bit of Hebrew – adamah “red earth, ground.”

Anyway, you’ll see one of the final outcomes of that root in the partial lexicon I’ve laid out below. Basically I copy out the word h1dhemneh2 (root plus an affix that indicates a theonym) and apply a series of (well-defined and organized) minor tweaks. The result: athenná “earth goddess.”

So, without further ado, a first lexicon for the gexan Tremárar, the language that will be spoken by Kráva and her friends in The Curse of Steel.

Personal Names

  • akretetha “child of the bear,” from h2kretedhas
  • alikóra “white horse,” from h2eldh “white” + keh3ras “horse”
  • alitha “white one,” from h2eldhas
  • araiadan “kingly man,” from h1rey “to rule, to be kingly” + dh2en man”
  • aregdani “protector of men,” from h1regh “to protect” + dh2eny “men”
  • arevga “red one,” from h1rewghas
  • arevírai “protector of warriors,” from h1regh “to protect” + weh1ray “warriors”
  • axesa “ruler, governor,” from h1ghesas
  • derga “cave lion,” from dherghas “plains lion”
  • dóva “dark one,” from deh3was
  • drúthan “sacred tree,” from dreh3 “having sacred power” + dheh2n “tree”
  • dúvelka “dark wolf,” from deh3w “dark” + welkas “wolf”
  • kólma “unmarred one,” from kh3elmas
  • kráskora “black horse,” from kreh2s “black” + keh3ras “horse”
  • kráva “raven,” from kreh2was
  • kúndan “loyal man,” from kweh3n “to be loyal” + dh2en “man”
  • lóka “one who burns,” from leh3kas
  • múraxesa “great ruler,” from meh3r “great” + h1ghesas “ruler, governor”
  • múrvira “great man,” from meh3r “great” + weh1ras “warrior, man”
  • náran “glorious one,” from neh2ran
  • náretha “child of glory, child of the sun, from neh2redhas
  • pelikórai “lover of horses,” from ph1el “fond of, holding a preference” + keh3ray “horses”
  • resa “the best one, the excellent one,” from resh1as
  • resavíra “excellent warrior,” from resh1 “best, excellent” + weh1ras “warrior, man”
  • resaxesa “excellent ruler,” from resh1 “best, excellent” + h1ghesas “ruler, governor”
  • róvira “royal or noble warrior,” from reh3weh1ras
  • tívetha “child of a god,” from teh1wedhas

Theonyms (Names for Deities)

  • athenná “earth goddess,” from h1dhemneh2
  • gerio “god of death,” from gheryos “death god”
  • kádir tívar “sky-father, god of the bright heavens,” from keh2deh1r teh1war “father of the sky”
  • kávrio “bull god,” from keh2wryos
  • skádna “goddess of shadows,” from skeh2dhneh2 “shadow goddess”
  • tálanna “goddess of grain,” from teh2lmneh2 “land goddess”
  • tario “thunder god,” from th2eryos
  • tekuná “horse goddess,” from tekwneh2

Ethonyms (Names for Peoples)

  • ravathen “by the (sacred) grove,” from rewh2dhen
  • ravatheni “those by the sacred grove,” a tribal name, plural form of ravathen
  • sanadmára “elven folk,” from senh2dh “old, ancient” + meh2ras “host, tribe, folk”
  • sanatha “ancient one, elf,” from senh2dhas “ancient one”
  • tremára “the mighty folk,” from tren “mighty” + meh2ras “host, tribe, folk”
  • trenvíra “mighty man, member of the tremára,” from tren “mighty” + weh1ras “warrior, man”

Place Names

  • alevo kanta “Kanta river,” from h2lewos (kanta is borrowed from a local hydronym)
  • alevo krá “black river,” from h2lewos kreh2s
  • kólami angar “iron hills,” from keh3lmy h2enghr “hills of iron”
  • kórsani konan “blue mountains,” from keh3rsany kh3enn
  • mara násetar “Western Sea,” from merh2 neh2setr “sea of the west”
  • múrtalmoi “the great lands,” from meh3r “great” + teh2lmoy “lands”
  • teimar nár “glorious hill-fort,” from teymar neh2r
  • teimar velkri “hill-fort of the wolves,” from teymar welkri
  • verkanta “over (the river) Kanta”

Miscellaneous

  • gexan tremárar “language of the mighty folk,” from geghh2en “language”
  • tás ravami “I love (or desire) you,” from teh2s rewh2mi

Not bad for a couple of months’ work. Not to mention that the back of my brain has been coming up with all manner of neat ideas for the setting and the story. The trick is to organize your world-building time so it actually contributes to the end result and keeps your creative mind engaged.