Two of my saga’s nations were born from the very same refusal to bend the knee, and grew into opposites. That contrast is what I want to talk about this Friday.
It starts at the border of the Oslari Reaches, the homeland of the elves. I’ve written before about what the Reaches were like in the old days, before the Hammerfall. The strong owned everything, and everyone else was property. If one elf wanted what another had, he took it, unless the owner could stop him. And a human, in that world, ranked somewhere below the lowest elf, because elves were indoctrinated to their martial culture from birth and they also had the ability to disappear. Normal people by comparison were at a disadvantage to stop them.
The people who couldn’t live under that ran. They ran to the borderlands: human refugees, families looking to carve out a patch of their own, and, yes, even elves who would rather flee their own kind than keep submitting to harsh masters. Different clades and different cultures at the start. What they shared was a common idea: they would not be ruled by whoever happened to be strongest.
Out of that refusal, two nations grew. And they did not grow into the same thing.
Raleigh became a republic. The kind of place that writes its freedoms down and elects people to guard them, with their Rangers to lead the fight to guard their freedoms. The Selen Confederation went the other way. Selen was formed from a loose knot of city-states, closer to the old Greek cities than to anything with a capital, bound together by compact instead of crown. Every town and city keeps its own laws and its own militia — and, this being Selen, a healthy stock of its own quarrels. However, Church laws still rein in the people.
Selen is the harder of the two. Not meaner. Harder. They will tolerate almost anything from a neighbor — any viewpoint (as long as it’s not heretical – but even that …well, that’s a story for another time), any trade, the stranger the better. What they will not tolerate is being told what to do or what to be. That edge didn’t come from nowhere. Selen took the worst of the elven boot, and the people who walked out the far side of it came out allergic to masters. You can be anything you want in Selen. You just can’t rule anybody. There’s a real tension with the Church, as you might imagine.
Two answers to the same tyranny. Same wound, different scars.
I think about this because of something Colin Woodard wrote about my own country — that America was never really one culture. It is a set of rival regional ones: the frontier West, the old plantation South, the mercantile North, the mountain holdouts who trust nobody, all crammed into a single nation that argues with itself constantly and holds together anyway. We endure in spite of our regional differences. To me, that is the quiet miracle of the land.
My saga’s world is built from those same kinds of rival cultures. Ten of them, and they never joined. America stays together in spite of our differences, but in my world the nations stay separate. Proud, wary of one another, each clutching its own idea of freedom. From where I sit, that ought to look like strength. Ten peoples, not one of them bowing to another.
Spoiler alert…
That isn’t strength. Not for what is coming.
The people of these nations have never once had to weigh their independence against their survival. Nothing has ever been big enough to force that question. They get to enjoy their separateness precisely because it has never cost them anything they could not afford.
That is about to change. When it does, they will have to decide which freedom they actually believe in: the freedom to stand apart from one another, or the freedom from something that would take everything they have and never once ask. Or even think that asking was necessary.
The people of my saga don’t know it yet, but the choice is coming. Fast. And they are all going to have to make it. Hopefully enough will make the right decision.