Of Ealdorfold, Its Governance, and Its Bearing Upon the Empire’s Northern Interests

I must confess at the outset that I have never been to Ealdorfold. What follows is drawn from secondhand accounts, merchants’ reports and the careful inferences of scholars who have been north of Wattle. I have omitted nothing I believe useful, but there will be gaps, and Your Grace should weigh it accordingly.

Ealdorfold is an ancient place. In what scholars call the Aethelgarthian age it sustained a kingdom of considerable sophistication, and that kingdom was ended neither by conquest nor by decay. It ended in the Tungolsweorc, when great boulders fell from the sky, cratered the land and erased the civilization.

Some scholars find in the Tungolsweorc the cause of later calamities also: the fall of Samarskand, the drowning of Taprobane, even the ruin of Himakatupura from which Wattle and Daub were rebuilt. Whatever the truth of that, Ealdorfold has never climbed back to its former heights.

Of Their Military and Commercial Position

Ealdorfold does not field great armies. It has hero-kings in abundance: Cynebald, said still to sleep in the Roonwud, the ancient forest that covers much of the country; Wulfhaeden the Twice-Named Archmage, whose title powerful magicians of the North and West still bear; Sunnflaed of the Seven Wells; and Eadwulf the Incomplete, from whom the Pendragons of today claim some distant descent. What it does not have is any great tale of an army.

Its navy, however, is among the finest in northern waters, and the only force expert in coldwater navigation.

The accessible coast is dominated by the broad and foggy channel of the Mistigsund, which punishes any ship without an Ealdorfold escort. The port of Roke’s Landing, a town of no great size, serves Aethelburh. It is Wattle’s principal northern trade connection, and at one remove it touches Daub and the Empire.

North of Aethelburh lies Weligadael, which in our tongue is something close to “valley of prosperity” or “wealth-dale”. It holds fertile farmland and the forts and manors of Ealdorfold’s powerful families. Aethelburh itself is a city of the first rank, comparable to Giridhora or Basnapura, and the centre of Ealdorfold’s trade with everyone.

Inland lie the mountains and the fortress-town of Cynebald’s Rest. The road through them to Staanbyrig, the great mining city carved into the Eesenhlaw highlands, is guarded by forts along its whole length. Our information on the disposition of these places is not fine. Mapmakers and surveyors are treated with great suspicion, and we must often rely upon bards’ tales to place our maps.

What bears most directly upon Your Grace’s position is that Staanbyrig produces a steel we cannot replicate. The alloy is harder than anything Singhapura or Wattle manufactures, and it incorporates the Tungolstaanas through processes the Staanwearda guilds guard with jealous care.

The Empire imports heavily from this source, and the guilds of Staanbyrig know their advantage. A supply that cannot be substituted and cannot be seized is among the most lasting forms of power there is, and they price it accordingly. The steel goes out through Roke’s Landing to Wattle, and from Wattle overland through Daub and the Hooniyang Pass to Giridhora. I have written of what the Empire pays for it, and why, in the chapter on Singhapura’s economy; here I will only say that every cart of it passes within sight of Your Grace’s walls.

Of Galdorcraeft and Its Implications

The magic of Ealdorfold is galdorcraeft, or the Craft, as they call it. Taprobane’s scholars place it among the Binders. Where the Taprobane system works through formal structure and language, galdorcraeft operates through what its practitioners call the Sympathy: a perception of hidden connections between things, worked through sound, intention and material.

Every Galdor is bound to a tungolstana, one of the rune-stones cut from the fallen sky-rock, and the binding runs in both directions. The stone anchors the Galdor’s power, which is why Galdors weaken so badly away from home. It also carries something of every Galdor who was bound to it before: memories, habits, and on occasion whole skills, passed down to whoever holds the stone next. In this respect there is an element of Invoking in the Craft as well, though what the Galdor invokes is not a god but his predecessors.

Ealdorfold is unique in that the land breeds magicians as the Church breeds priests. The Tungolstaana craters seed the land, and children born in crater-country manifest the Craft involuntarily. Ealdorfold’s magical population is thus a product of the land itself. Galdors are prohibited from leaving Ealdorfold, though over the years there have been defectors, and one of them, the Archmage Hakon Icehand, sat at the table in Taprobane where the Taprobane System was made.

The island of Sceadeg, in the Mistigsund, houses one working wonder of ancient times: the Hlystend Steepel, a structure that projects a dome suppressing all magic in its vicinity. Whatever its mechanism, it is a formidable defence, and it is said to bear some relation to the workings of the modern Order of the Sound of One Hand Clapping. Ealdorfold is thus guarded not only by its waters but by powerful workings, and there may be others yet unknown to us.

It is my opinion that the Taprobane system has, to date, shown itself superior to anything Ealdorfold’s practitioners have produced. I would not rest upon that assessment indefinitely. Anything with centuries of practice behind it develops refinements that are not readily visible from outside.

The bards of the Hasselbad School of Topological Rhyme are unique among Galdors in that they alone may travel freely, owing to Ealdorfold laws forbidding any hindrance to musicians and storytellers. Their magic may be distinct from the rest of galdorcraeft. They hold that the world is a story, and that a sufficiently precise understanding of narrative structure allows one to alter outcomes. Your Grace will find them in political situations where they have no obvious business.

Our best present understanding is that they are a potent spy network, ranging far afield, trading entertainment for information. They are best treated as any intelligence asset of uncertain loyalty: acknowledged, watched, and never trusted with anything but the most inconsequential secret.

Of the Leohtgield and Its Purpose

The governing body of Ealdorfold is the Leohtgield: a rotating council with a shared code of laws and a single diplomatic identity. The council elects a monarch, who alone may ratify the proposals brought before them, and who governs until death or removal (which, surprisingly, is also by vote). The monarch may not come from among the council. By law it must be an outsider, some galdor of great repute, sufficiently trained under the old masters. Upon selection, the monarch-to-be is stripped of all name, titles and kin before being renamed and recast for the ascension, and is forbidden to sire children.

At present this is Ursule, Queen Under Heaven, as she is styled, in the fifteenth year of her reign. Not much is known of her. She speaks to ambassadors only through an intermediary, styled the Speaker, who is the object of much interest.

I suspect that much of this structure is a device for remaining indigestible to Singhapura. The Empire has Wattle. It has Daub. It has Tangowan to the south. The Leohtgield’s members have set themselves steadfastly to making acquisition more costly than the Empire can justify.

Yet the extremes to which they have gone may yet be their downfall. In its dealings with the Empire, the Leohtgield has become a force bent upon conservation. Foreign loan-words have been purged from the language. Many classes of citizen may not leave the borders without permission. Trade and diplomacy are confined to the one port, and the Haugris Church and the worship of Raavan are banned under pain of public execution. Where Your Grace has chosen equilibrium, they have chosen exclusion.

One further observation. The Leohtgield will not provoke Singhapura directly, but it may already be participating in Daub’s politics indirectly, through the old displaced lords, and especially the Pendragon coalition. Its interests appear to align with whatever serves as a hedge against Singhapura’s dominion. I would watch for runestones in Wattle or Daub, and for any Pendragon with new friends in the north; the Leohtgield need not send an army to trouble Daub, only lend the displaced lords its confidence.

Of additional interest are the Staanwearda guilds of Staanbyrig. Of all Ealdorfold’s factions they have been the most welcoming of the Singhapura Merchants Guild, which makes them the Empire’s best point of access into the Leohtgield, and the faction most likely to develop interests diverging from the League’s conservative consensus. In the words of the Merchants, they vote as a bloc, drink as a bloc and negotiate as a bloc. Should Your Grace ever look northward, it is here that her eyes should first alight.

Of Ealdorfold’s Cultural Power

I am aware that literary matters do not usually appear in political analyses, but I beg Your Grace’s attention here.

Ealdorfold produces literature at a rate wholly disproportionate to its size and, by most material measures, its importance. The scholars of Orvaine College have proposed various explanations: an oral tradition that cultivates the narrative faculty, long winters, or the Tungolstaana craters warping whatever part of the mind produces metaphor. Whatever the cause, Ealdorfold’s books circulate through Taprobane’s students, through the Hasselbad bards, through Singhapura’s theatre circles, and through the reading habits of your own merchants.

Horda Roona Weard is read by every generation of Taprobane students; I read it as a student myself, and it remains one of the finest works I know on what it is to be young, intelligent and convinced of the failings of one’s elders. Blooma Daeg, set in Aethelburh, divided opinion so violently that it set off an explosion in Singhapura’s theatre that lasted a decade. Even Wattle’s Antler Hall takes its name from The Ballad of Broken Antlers.

The people who will one day advise the Adhiraj and make up the machinery of the Empire will have spent their formative years inside Ealdorfold’s imagination. A story costs a great deal less than an army, and it does not need feeding.

I know this is less than Your Grace wished to know. I cannot tell you how the noble houses of Ealdorfold contend with one another, or where a galdor’s authority ends and a lord’s begins. Nobody seems to know how far the Roonwud extends, either. The Merchants Guild has asked for years and still does not know.

Further Reading

On the Tungolsweorc and the Aethelgarthian age, various Taprobane Conference proceedings cover the subject in detail, though I am told that reading them is not unlike torture.

The Ithihaasa Potha contains possibly the earliest passage that mentions Ealdorfold: They fired bricks and called them stone; they smeared tar and called it eternal. They said, let us build a tower so high; let us pierce the sky itself. And the sky heard them, and moved in anger, and laid low the stones, and even banished their memory. Most scholars agree that this refers to the calamity that struck Ealdorfold in its ancient days. If so, the kingdom was old even in the time of Singhapura, though not so old as Samarskand.

The Ballad of Broken Antlers follows seven generations of a family beside a Tungolsweorc crater, and is the most thorough account of galdorcraeft from within that exists in any language. It is the only work of literature I know that requires the reader to keep a chart of genealogies at hand; but for those with the patience, it shows what knowledge, skills and consequences are handed down from one generation to the next.

Emmeline is set in the Weligadael about five generations ago, and depicts the Leohtgield cities as aspirations rather than the metropolises they are today. The story dulls the senses, but it is an excellent social history of those cities and of the forces that drove them together. Of particular note, Your Grace, is what its people believe to be their lot. Though diminished, they aspire to respectability, and especially to the respectability of convention: to an order that has been dismantled and is being rebuilt piecemeal by descendants who do not always understand why their ways must change.

Blooma Daeg follows three figures through a single day in Aethelburh: a young galdor, a trinket-peddler and his wife. It is perhaps the best portrait we have of everyday life and aspiration among the ordinary citizens of Ealdorfold. Its figures hold a deep scepticism toward the national project, and there is throughout a great sense of inertia in society and in people. I have heard it described as a pile of steaming excrement and as one of the greatest works of our time. I would suggest Your Grace have a servant provide excerpts rather than read the whole.

Staanbyrig follows a young miner who has convinced himself that great-spirited individuals are unbound by common moral law, murders an elderly galdor and her apprentice to test the belief, and discovers across the remainder of the novel that he is not among the unbound. It is the most accurate account available of how Ealdorfold justice operates from within. Of note are its depictions of poverty, and of the Staanbyrig miners themselves, young men of great social weight and little education in the finer points of law and morality.

Horda Roona Weard concerns students at one of the Leohtgield academies, which is most likely fictional. It is, as I have said, much loved. I can recommend it only if Your Grace is in need of light entertainment and wishes to feel young at heart again.

Folio XI · Of Provinces

Transcribed by Victor Konara