[Meta] Thoughts on Calormen, parts 1 & 2
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rthstewart, who suggested I crosspost my Calormene world-building here for more general discussion. The original posts are on my own journal: part 1: history, and part 2: culture.
So, what are your thoughts on Calormen, Liz? In brief, they are an attempt to elaborate on what Lewis wrote in his books while mitigating his racism, ethnocentrism, and religious... um... blinders, shall we say. Extra-canonical material, such as the Narnian timeline that Lewis wrote at some point, is incorporated or ignored depending on whether Lewis's ideas make sense or sound to me as if he was talking through his hat. Also, please bear in mind that I am not Christian, that I read the books in complete ignorance of Lewis's Christian allegory for most of my childhood, and that I have always fervently disliked the theological aspects of The Last Battle. With that basic framework in place, I will now relate a brief sketch of the history and culture of Calormen as I see it. (And by brief I mean "brief compared to a textbook," not that this is actually short. *wry*)
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The History of Calormen, in 2,900 words and 2,500 years:
Sometime around the year 100 (counting from the creation of the Narnian world), the people who would become Calormenes fell through a gate between worlds. They did not come directly from Earth -- they had lived in at least one other world before reaching the Narnian world -- but I believe their distant ancestors came from the region between Iran and the Punjab, sometime after the Mongol invasions. They settled the broad, rich valley of the Shirush River on the southern edge of the great desert, pushing south and west as their population grew. Initially they organized themselves into a series of independent city-states, which fought over territory, over slights against their princes' honor, and over theological issues such as which god should take precedence in heaven. When one city defeated another, the victors imposed a tribute payment on the losers but made no effort to create a proper unified empire.
In the year 204, the losers of a civil war in Archenland fled south across the desert and ran into the feuding Calormene city-states. The Archenlanders had been fighting over the inclusion of Talking Beasts and other non-human beings as citizens, since a significant percentage of the people who followed King Col I over the pass to found Anvard did so because they were uncomfortable living in Narnia. The exclusionists lost, but the aftermath of the conflict led to the majority of Archenlandish beasts and beings moving back to Narnia or west into the Wild, which is why Archenland is a country of humans despite being Narnia's sister land. The Calormenes easily drove the Archenlandish exiles away from their lands, pushing them upriver into the then-unpopulated west, where the northerners settled and became uneasy neighbors with the westernmost Calormene city-states.
Matters continued in this pattern for roughly seventy-five years, until Jadis arrived in Calormen from the eastern islands. *evil grin* You see, I do not believe Tash is Aslan's opposite or his devil or whatever terminology you want to use. No. Tash is his own deity, and if he's ugly and vengeful and deceitful, what of it? Lots of pagan gods are. (Heck, Aslan is downright inconsistent himself -- which is one reason I spent my childhood convinced he was a pagan lion god, and often wish I could go back to not knowing about Lewis's Christianity, because that way of thinking removes SO MANY ethical conundrums from the series.) In any case, if Aslan has a devil? It is Jadis. He left many things unfinished when he faffed off after singing the world into form, and I am 100% sure Jadis is the one who filled in a lot of the details. The magical islands in the Eastern Ocean? The giants of Harfang? Very much up her alley.
So Jadis arrived in Calormen, attempting to stir up trouble and find out the secrets of Aslan's power, and was promptly mistaken for an avatar of the goddess Acharith. She talked the ruler of Tashbaan into changing his strategy for dealing with defeated foes -- properly conquering them instead of just beating them and going home. That ruler, Idrath Tarkaan, took the title of Tisroc and the epithet "World-Conqueror," and set about building the empire of Calormen.
Meanwhile, Jadis was appalled to learn that the Calormene gods regarded her as a marvelously useful accident and were only too happy to have their people learn from her, provided she left as soon as Idrath got properly started on his path. (Acharith was annoyed that she suffered a name change from the mistaken identity bit, but deities often have many names; she took it in stride.) Jadis faffed off to the Western Wild and busied herself twisting Talking Beasts and beings to her will (in some cases reshaping them entirely, which is the origin of werewolves and hags, among other things), leaving the Calormenes to their own devices again. They promptly conquered the descendants of the Archenlandish exiles, but while Idrath was fairly successful at creating common cause among ethnic Calormenes, the new western provinces retained a greater sense of separate identity, which led to centuries of resistance and rebellion.
Around the year 300, Idrath led his armies into the highlands that formed the northern edge of the great desert. This was easy to do, since at the time only Archenland was a proper nation; the other areas were scarcely populated at all. Idrath moved his army across the desert piece by piece, building forts and transplanting civilians as he went, which is how Telmar was initially settled. He was about to invade Archenland when he had an accident with his horse on a bridge and died. Two of his seven sons both claimed his throne and Calormen descended into civil war for over ten years. This was later known as the First Brothers' War, and is remembered as the nadir of Calormene history.
The western provinces used the collapse of central government to rebel and declare independence. The people who had been forcibly settled in Telmar were largely driven back south across the desert by retaliatory Archenlandish raids, adding to the chaos. The two princes' armies frequently destroyed farms and storehouses in their enemies' territory, hoping to starve each other into submission. Plague broke out in the wake of overcrowding as refugees piled into the few cities still standing. Meanwhile, the people of the eastern islands began to raid the coast instead of trading, and the people of Kutu, who had stumbled into the delta of the Nandrapragaan River around the same time the Calormenes stumbled into the Shirush river valley, began their own territorial expansion. In short, the two decades after Idrath World-Conqueror's death were nearly the end of Calormen as a political entity.
His third son, Ziranool Tisroc, eventually defeated his brothers and began rebuilding the core of the empire -- first beating back the coastal raiders, then reconquering the west, and finally fighting a series of inconclusive wars against the Kutulese that resulted in a semi-official boundary midway between the Shirush and the Nandrapragaan that both sides frequently attempted to shift. Ziranool Tisroc's reign was a time of great bitterness and soul-searching among the Calormenes, as they recovered from the crash of their initial boundless ambitions and optimism and reassessed their place in the world. This is the beginning of Calormen's tradition of monumental architecture, and also the time in which the high priests and priestesses of Tashbaan finally won nominal authority over the entire empire and began to codify the rituals and myths of their pantheon.
Then there is a long period in which I do not have much interest. Suffice it to say that between the year 350 and the year 800 Calormen slowly expanded to the borders it had during Narnia's Golden Age: namely, the Tisroc held the coast from the Shirush south to the Nandrapragaan, excepting only the Nandrapragaan delta itself. That is about 450 miles as the crow flies, roughly the distance from Boston to Washington, D.C. (Rishti Tisroc is not kidding when he says Narnia is comparatively tiny!) The great desert formed the northern border, which creeps south as one heads inland from the coast, following the curve of the Shirush. A tribe of semi-nomadic people lived in the western desert and controlled access to the great oasis, but they were tributaries of Calormen rather than direct subjects.
To the west, Calormen reached the hill country and its long, narrow lakes (they stretch east-west, like fingers reaching to the distant sea). These restive provinces were originally settled by Archenlandish refugees and were now home to a defiantly Calormene-but-not culture that named Azaroth king of heaven instead of Tash, and clung to a musical and poetic tradition halfway between that of Tashbaan and that of the north. The Tisroc's writ petered out before the pine-covered mountains that serve as foothills to the wall around the world. The mountains were inhabited by a mix of fiercely independent peoples, refugees who fell into the world through myriad gates and formed tiny nations in a harsh but beautiful land. The Calormenes found it more cost-effective to leave the mountain principalities under their own rule but bring them into Calormen's economic sphere via the fur trade and the purchase of metal and jewels from western mines.
The inland south was a land of rich, rolling plains between the marshy headwaters of the Nandrapragaan and the rougher hills of western Calormen. Successive Tisrocs had attempted to conquer the muddle of small nations that checkered the region, but those peoples did not anathemize magic the way that the Calormenes and the Kutulese did; they used spells and curses spectacularly in the first few campaigns against them, and then relied on legends of ill-luck to deter further attacks. As Kutu expanded its territory south of the Nandrapragaan, the southern countries also began to play the two empires against each other, allying with Kutu when Calormen's threat loomed large, and Calormen when Kutu's demands became too great.
After the year 800, Calormen ceased to expand territorially. The Kutulese fiercely resisted any incursions beyond the Nadapragaan and began to push the border back north; magic and superstition made the plains countries unpalatable to attack; difficult terrain hindered any attempt to expand into the western mountains; and the hill countries north of the great desert had been settled by people who had adopted Archenland's historic wariness and antagonism toward Calormen, which made anything more than lightning raids through the far western hills (or via the Winding Arrow into Archenland itself) impractical. This territorial stagnation was somewhat countered by economic expansion, as Calormen stretched trading networks into the surrounding lands and the eastern islands, and as its merchants and bankers developed a concept halfway between a classic partnership and a joint-stock company, but by and large Calormen turned inward. This fed another period of artistic and architectural flourishing, but also led to increased internal turmoil as soldiers were released from the northern and western armies and found themselves unfamiliar with rural and urban civilian life. Those who returned to the west formed the nuclei of the great rebellions -- the west had always been restive, but now it began to explode every generation.
Additionally, the years of conquest had seen relatively orderly transitions between one Tisroc and the next -- each king named his heir and was able to give his son experience in war by keeping him on the front lines, give him experience in civilian administration by making him govern the provinces in which he was stationed, and prevent him from launching coups or falling to assassins by keeping him well away from the morass of court politics in Tashbaan. Without the constant wars of expansion, that system fell apart. The chaos of the First Brothers' War returned, with princes battling each other for their inheritance and sometimes killing their fathers as well. The armies of various portions of the empire often supported different candidates for the throne, thus exacerbating regional tensions that each Tisroc in his turn spent his reign attempting to defuse only to have his would-be successors inflame them again.
The constant civil wars led to increased external pressure, as Kutu reclaimed more and more of its ancient lands north of the Nandrapragaan and the plains and mountain principalities grew bolder and began their own wars of conquest, gradually combining into fewer and stronger countries and nibbling at the edges of Calormen's border provinces. Additionally, in the year 900 the northern country of Narnia was conquered by a sorceress who plunged the land into magical winter, thus blocking its borders, destroying its trade, and sending waves of refugees fleeing into the surrounding lands. That destabilization on Calormen's northern borders is all that prevented Archenland and its neighbors from joining the general assault on the empire... and even Archenland got in near the end, by way of commissioning privateers to attack Calormene shipping under the guise of reclaiming children illegally stolen to feed the slave trade.
(Note: Archenland would tell that story very differently. The truth is somewhere between the two accounts.)
Around the year 990, Prince Rishti, the fourth son of Zarman Tisroc, began fighting two of his brothers and one of his cousins for the throne. He was aided by the counsel of Axartha of Irtaanir, and by the political maneuvering of Malindra Tarkheena, his second wife. In the year 1000 -- the same year as the end of the Winter in Narnia -- he captured Tashbaan and took the throne. Over the next fourteen years, his armies slowly and inexorably crushed the remnants of rebellion in all corners of the empire, until he had achieved peace. (No one else since the year 800 had managed this; there was always at least one conflict flaring at any given moment.) But Rishti Tisroc's court was still plagued by the same symptoms as his predecessors' had been, and his eldest son and presumed heir, Prince Rabadash, began to plan an assassination. This was stymied by a machination of the gods that eventually led to Rabadash trapped by a curse that forbade him to go more than ten miles from the center of Tashbaan.
Despite that handicap, Rabadash Tisroc duly inherited the throne and managed to play various factions against each other without letting them erupt into outright war. Because he did not dare let any of his relatives or generals gain renown at his expense, he was forced to deal with his subjects' complaints rather than simply suppressing them. His reign laid the foundations of Calormen's federal civil service and marked the end of army regiments composed of soldiers from a single province; henceforth the army was arranged on a more national basis. Because of these efforts he was officially titled Rabadash Peacemaker, though he is more commonly remembered by the unofficial epithet "the Ridiculous," in reference to the animal transformation that signaled the start of his curse. Calormenes tend to look down on him for that affliction and his seeming cowardice despite the many achievements of his forty-year reign.
Rabadash's second son, Ilmagin the Wise, took the united empire, sound economy, and well-organized army his father bequeathed him and began the long struggle that, after two centuries of intermittent war, crushed the Kutulese capitol of Angyoko and brought the Nandrapragaan delta under Calormene control, thus extending the Tisroc's writ all the way to the southern wall around the world. The remnants of Kutu split into three fragments: Yin in the inland jungles of the deep south, Ijezu on the upper Nandrapragaan, and Gekutu in the far southwestern plains. The new queen of Gekutu promptly made a marriage alliance with the largest of the plains countries, creating the double kingdom of Gekutu-Marya.
Gekutu-Marya took on Kutu's historical role as the chief rival of Calormen, though its landlocked nature was a notable handicap in terms of trade and wealth. The new Calormene provinces south of the Nandrapragaan proved as restive as the northwestern provinces once had; smuggling and rebellion ran rampant for generations. Also, starting during Ilmagin's reign Archenland underwent something of a renaissance under the influence of King Ram the Great and his immediate successors, nearly monopolizing coastal shipping for several generations, while the eastern islands turned cold to Calormen in the wake of Angyoko's destruction and the resulting loss of their property and trade.
There follows another long period I am not much interested in. In the year 1998, a contingent of Telmarines invaded and conquered Narnia; they were fleeing both a famine and religious persecution. Narnia again turned inward and cut off external contact save for minor overland trade with Archenland and the coastal settlements that bordered Ettinsmoor. Meanwhile, Calormen had spent centuries engaged in a pattern of alternating war and peace with Gekutu-Marya and a slow trade war with Archenland that ended with Archenland's oceanic shipping industry nearly broken and the Calormene slave trade extended through the eastern islands, legally or otherwise.
Narnia remained self-isolated for another three centuries while Calormen again lapsed into a period of stagnation and internal disarray. Angyoko and the Nandrapragaan provinces were lost to Ijezu; Archenland regained control over northern coastal shipping; Gekutu-Marya swallowed many mountain principalities, thus taking their resources away from Calormen; and the eastern islanders began to buy controlling shares in many Calormene merchant firms and take control of the slave trade. When Narnia reemerged under Caspian X in the early 2300s, this pattern began to break as the islanders and northern hill countries worried once again about their northern borders and their shipping concerns.
The Calormene incursion into Narnia in the year 2555 was part of a pattern of resurgence that mirrored the resurgence under Ilmagin the Wise and his successors. The idea was to use Narnia as a way to encircle Archenland, Telmar, and the other hill countries, thus winning control of their resources without the expense and bloodshed that a war of conquest would require. The northern focus was a result of the strength of Ijezu and Gekutu-Marya in the south and west. Narnia fell more quickly than foreseen, as a result of weak government and a doomsday cult that the Calormene army attempted to coopt and turn to their own ends.
And then Aslan ended the world. Sometimes, you just can't win.
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Language:
Now that I've gotten the broad sweep of history (and some implicit notes on geography) out of the way, let me move on to talking about squishier subjects: namely, the bits that make a culture individual.
Let me state upfront that I do not believe Calormen has its own language. No country in the Narnian world has its own language. This can be quite clearly inferred from the way Shasta understands the Narnians in Tashbaan. They have no reason to speak a hypothetical Calormene language to him, since they believe him to be Corin, and Shasta had neither reason nor opportunity to have learned a hypothetical northern language; therefore, they are speaking the same language. (Which is English, as I discussed in a previous post.) There is also no linguistic drift over the roughly 2,550 year life of the Narnian world, unrealistic though that is.
Obviously the Deep Magic is at work here, though I am not sure of the mechanism behind the observed effects. Does the Deep Magic erase people's native tongues as they fall into the world? Does it simply implant English as another option? Do people lose their languages more gradually over a generation or three? I have no idea. Suffice it to say that by the time the Archenlandish exiles fled south across the desert, they had no trouble communicating with the Calormenes despite having had no previous contact with them, and the Calormenes had retained nothing from their previous language except a handful of titles, a non-English sound pattern for names, and perhaps a few curses.
But language is only one of the things that defines a culture.
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Religion:
Calormene religion is polytheistic, with nine major deities: five male, four female. Tash the Inexorable is the god of war and vengeance. Official theology names him king of heaven, and states that Idrath World-Conqueror was his descendant. The queen of heaven is Achadith, goddess of change and all things out of time or place (also victory, which is, after all, a change). She is Tash's counselor and is considered the guardian of Calormen.
The other three goddess -- Zardeenah the Pure, lady of the moon and stars, the night, and maidens; Soolyeh the Fair, light of the sun and mother of mares; and Nazreen the Wise, keeper of memory and regret, who lowers the veil of twilight and raises the veil of dawn -- are kind of a Triple Goddess setup in the classic maiden/mother/crone pattern. They are each associated with a god. Impetuous Sokda, the god of storms, horses, and the ocean, constantly pursues Zardeenah, but to no fruition. Garshomon, the god of rivers, cattle and agriculture, is married to Soolyeh. Nur, the god of scholars, doctors, and disease, is married to Nazreen.
Azaroth, the ninth god, is master of silence, darkness, and death. He walks alone.
This is not the only belief system in Calormen, though. It's merely the one that has government backing and control of the temple system. There are tens of thousands of people in the western provinces who swear that Azaroth is king of heaven, Achadith is his wife, and Tash is the god who walks alone. There are also tens of thousands of people who don't really give a fig about the hierarchy of heaven and simply pay attention to the deity or deities whose spheres of influence are most important in their lives. Farmers are devotees of Soolyeh and Garshomon and have little time for Tash. People who make their living in forests or on the ocean tend to think most highly of Zardeenah and Sokda. Nazreen and Nur are important to the professional classes, including merchants. Etcetera.
There are also a number of superstitions. Some people call rivers Garshomon's daughters. Others say the Shirush and the Nandrapragaan are his left and right arms. People say that if you see the full moon reflected in a forest pool and speak Zardeenah's name three times before the water breaks or a cloud passes over its face, a drink of that pool's water will cure any disease. Salt is associated with Achadith -- it's an edible rock, which is definitely a thing out of place -- and is therefore used as a charm to avert ill-luck or to ward against demons.
Worship is based on ritual and sacrifice. Temples and shrines are built to provide venues for those rites and offerings and are the major focal sites of Calormene religion, but a lot of everyday religion occurs in the home or at the site of an event, as people burn incense and give flowers or fruit to small household idols or perform rituals related to planting, harvesting, markets, medicine, and so on.
The four great festivals are held on the points of the solar year -- spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, and winter solstice. Those days mark the change from one season to the next. These days have less physical meaning in the south of the empire, where it is nearly always warm and the presence or absence of rain (brought from the east by ocean storms from roughly January to March, as per VDT, and from the west in September and October, as per because-I-say-so) is more relevant than the length of day. But the festivals are celebrated wherever the Tisroc reigns. There are also days sacred to each god or goddess in particular, and days commemorated for their historical importance, but they don't stop the entire empire the way the four solar festivals do.
The Spring Festival marks the change from one year to the next. It is a day of beginnings, when the old is cleared away to make room for the new. It is marked by the dedication of a newborn animal to represent the coming year, and the sacrifice of the previous year's symbolic animal. It is traditional to forgive small debts in the week leading up to the Spring Festival, and the week immediately after is considered an auspicious time for marriages and new commercial ventures.
The Summer Festival is a celebration of history and power. It is the most militarily oriented of the four solar holidays, basically a celebration of the empire via the gods who favor it. In the week leading up to the festival itself, stylized pantomime histories of the settlement of Calormen, various great battles, and the life of the current Tisroc are acted out in the public space around the local temples. Any criminals sentenced to death or mutilation in the month before the festival are held in prison until the day itself, whereupon they receive their punishment en masse at the hands of the priests and priestesses of Tash, Achadith, and Azaroth. Celebrants have their foreheads marked by a splash of blood or paint to show their connection to the gods and the empire. Military regiments parade frequently in the week before and after the festival.
The Autumn Festival is about harvest. It is the most agriculturally oriented of the four solar holidays. Its observation revolves around handing out bread and wine to all celebrants. Images of the gods are made from fruit and grain, paraded around the city, drenched in wine, and ceremonially thrown into a handy body of water or well. Gunpowder does not explode in the Narnian world, but the Calormenes have invented a mildly effective substitute that is just strong enough for the sparkler type of fireworks, which are set off in vast numbers after the drowning of the effigies. Often effigies of demons (most commonly lions, scorpions, or crocodiles) are constructed from bare wood or reeds -- to contrast with the life-giving composition of the gods' effigies -- and then set on fire to destroy them, rather than given to the water to renew the cycle of life.
(For Aslan to choose this festival for restoring Rabadash to human form is... interesting. It's not as jarring as the Summer Festival would have been, nor as ominous as the Winter Festival, but it's still awkward in that it meshes the power of a foreign "demonic" power with a rite that specifically separates the life-giving gods from the barren life-destroying demons.)
The Winter Festival is about death and faith. It is observed in complete silence. From sunrise to sunset, nobody eats, drinks, or speaks. At sunset, all fires are put out except those in the temple, from which all others are then rekindled: a promise from the gods that light and warmth will return. The procession of torch-bearers from house to house is accompanied by discordant drums and song, to ward off evil spirits until the gods' protection (in the form of light) is renewed. This is the night when the veil between earth and the afterlife is thinnest, and demons can slip through to stalk the earth. In response, people invoke the favor of Achadith, Azaroth, Nazreen, and Nur, through various charms placed around their windows and doors: pouches of ash for Achadith, copper coins for Nur, memory-catchers for Nazreen, and sickles or painted eyes for Azaroth.
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The Arts:
Calormene poetry is epigrammatic, not epic. This is not a bad thing. Calormene poets are regarded as somewhat closer to mystics than storytellers, and are also frequently involved in finding elegant ways to phrase the collected wisdom of the empire. Rather like, oh, say, the Book of Proverbs. Or Ecclesiastes.
(If you cannot tell that I find Lewis's attitude toward Calormene poetry infuriating, I will state it outright: I find his blithe dismissal and denigration of Calormene poetry ethnocentric, petty, stupid, and also representative of a shocking poverty of taste. Particularly when Greek poetry also has a lot of epigrammatic verses to go along with the Homeric epic stuff, and Lewis evidently thought highly enough of Greco-Roman culture to include their river and forest spirits in his favored country, to say nothing of Bacchus and his wild dances! Gnrgh.)
Poetry is considered the highest art, but storytelling takes a close second place. The Calormenes place great value on facility with words, as can be readily discerned from their tendency toward ornate and elaborate speech even in fairly everyday conversations. Many verbal exchanges follow set patterns, and it's considered a mark of distinction to be able to embroider seamlessly on those patterns. Relatively few people in the empire learn to read or write, but everyone memorizes poetry and learns to distill events into entertaining stories.
Theater is restricted to religious pageants in the early centuries of the empire, but an underground secular theater culture takes root around Rabadash's time and from around the year 1200 to 1600 it flowers exuberantly. After that there is a minor religious backlash against the immorality of avant-garde theater, followed by a diversion of public attention to other forms of entertainment -- such as the novel, which grows out of the oral storytelling tradition rather than the non-existent epic poetry tradition, and therefore begins as books of interlinked short tales that only gradually become more unified -- and theater becomes a backwater for a few centuries. Around the year 2000 it reemerges, invigorated by new techniques adopted from the novelistic tradition and continues strongly until the premature end of the world.
Calormene architecture tends toward the monumental, always with an eye toward the use of water elements and intricate ornamentation. Walls are almost never left plain -- they will be plastered and stamped into faux-relief patterns, painted, carved, covered in mosaics, or any of a dozen ways to bring color and interest to blank space. Imitation of natural forms is common; arches and domes that mimic flower petals and buds are considered extremely visually pleasing. Fountains and pools abound, even in relatively modest homes. They frequently double as sources of drinking water, since laws about water contamination are exceedingly strict.
Painting and sculpture are used mostly in service of architecture, to elaborate on a structure or a space. A free-hanging picture is quite rare, though miniatures that fit in lockets enter Calormene artistic vocabulary around the year 800 and remain popular as love-gifts. Free-standing sculptures are generally restricted to monuments and temples, as an honor fit only for gods and for their most favored agents on earth.
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Legal Authority:
At the time of LWW/HHB, the Calormene legal system is halfway between a collection of conflicting traditional ways and a codified set of written laws. The economy is under relatively tight legal control, for instance -- there are strict laws about counterfeiting, payment of interest, the proper form for contracts, and so on. On the other hand, family blood feuds are still perfectly legal and there is no unified agreement on their rules and limitations, though over the past centuries there's been a growing idea that before starting one, the families involved ought to go to the courts or their local lord to try mediation, on the theory that money can be regained but a dead relative cannot be resurrected.
The most common acceptable reasons for starting a blood feud include unprovoked murder, the breaking of a courting dance, unilateral divorce, and the escalation of a lesser feud (generally over a property dispute or a question of face) into violence. Rape sometimes counts and sometimes doesn't. If a rape occurs in the context of a pre-existing lesser feud, it will invariably trigger a blood feud. If it's an isolated incident, it depends on how strongly the female victim can make her case to the male head of her family. (Male victims generally either kill themselves or kill their rapists. The former is hushed up and the latter starts a blood feud on a different pretext; the rape itself is generally never mentioned.)
Calormen is patriarchal in the sense that men are the legal heads of their families and women move from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. However, women among the lower classes actually have a fair amount of de facto power because they are laborers like their husbands -- the specific tasks are gender-segregated for the most part, but without two or more adults working full time, a family generally cannot support itself. It's only among the wealthy merchant class and the nobility that women become restricted in their mobility, and that restriction is somewhat compensated for by increased educational opportunities: noblewomen are invariably taught to read and write because they are expected to teach their sons in turn.
Punishment for criminal offenses against the empire (counterfeiting, embezzlement, false contracts, giving false witness, some types of theft, highway robbery and piracy (which break the Tisroc's protection of the roads and seas), murder or blackmail of government officials, etc.) is meted out by a system of imperial agents who generally have authority to co-opt the local Tarkaans' soldiers (or the local imperial army garrison, if one exists) for that purpose. Punishment for criminal offenses against private individuals is meted out by those individuals and their families, insofar as they are able to do so. There are no police as such; the closest thing would probably be neighborhood watches (like the one Corin runs into in Tashbaan), or the temple guards in large religious complexes, who tend to extend their influence outward into the surrounding streets. There are, however, quite a lot of thief-catchers who work for hire, and in cities there is also generally a municipal jail of some sort, to hold offenders until they can be sentenced.
The Tarkaans operate in the gray areas between imperial justice and informal justice. They do not have authority to make laws, but because their private armies are the backbone of the imperial army, they can and do decide which ones they will work to enforce. They also serve as a supposedly neutral authority to whom feuding families can take their grievances -- though in many cases, the Tarkaan will appoint an official to hold court for him rather than do so in person. Tarkaans are imperial officials insofar as they are the legally designated tax collectors for the lands they hold -- either directly from the Tisroc or via the intermediary of a provincial High Lord. They are allowed to keep a certain amount for their own living expenses and to maintain their armed retinues. That may be a fixed amount or a percentage; it varies depending on the historical context in which the tax-collection authority was granted. Tarkaans therefore have wildly variable income levels, though that is not generally discussed in polite society.
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I still want to say things about climate, slavery, patterns of trade (internal and external), child-rearing, marriage and divorce, and the organization and physical layout of communities, but those will have to wait for part 3. Also, if there is anything in particular you want me to talk about, just tell me and I will try to world-build an answer!
rthstewart, who suggested I crosspost my Calormene world-building here for more general discussion. The original posts are on my own journal: part 1: history, and part 2: culture.So, what are your thoughts on Calormen, Liz? In brief, they are an attempt to elaborate on what Lewis wrote in his books while mitigating his racism, ethnocentrism, and religious... um... blinders, shall we say. Extra-canonical material, such as the Narnian timeline that Lewis wrote at some point, is incorporated or ignored depending on whether Lewis's ideas make sense or sound to me as if he was talking through his hat. Also, please bear in mind that I am not Christian, that I read the books in complete ignorance of Lewis's Christian allegory for most of my childhood, and that I have always fervently disliked the theological aspects of The Last Battle. With that basic framework in place, I will now relate a brief sketch of the history and culture of Calormen as I see it. (And by brief I mean "brief compared to a textbook," not that this is actually short. *wry*)
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The History of Calormen, in 2,900 words and 2,500 years:
Sometime around the year 100 (counting from the creation of the Narnian world), the people who would become Calormenes fell through a gate between worlds. They did not come directly from Earth -- they had lived in at least one other world before reaching the Narnian world -- but I believe their distant ancestors came from the region between Iran and the Punjab, sometime after the Mongol invasions. They settled the broad, rich valley of the Shirush River on the southern edge of the great desert, pushing south and west as their population grew. Initially they organized themselves into a series of independent city-states, which fought over territory, over slights against their princes' honor, and over theological issues such as which god should take precedence in heaven. When one city defeated another, the victors imposed a tribute payment on the losers but made no effort to create a proper unified empire.
In the year 204, the losers of a civil war in Archenland fled south across the desert and ran into the feuding Calormene city-states. The Archenlanders had been fighting over the inclusion of Talking Beasts and other non-human beings as citizens, since a significant percentage of the people who followed King Col I over the pass to found Anvard did so because they were uncomfortable living in Narnia. The exclusionists lost, but the aftermath of the conflict led to the majority of Archenlandish beasts and beings moving back to Narnia or west into the Wild, which is why Archenland is a country of humans despite being Narnia's sister land. The Calormenes easily drove the Archenlandish exiles away from their lands, pushing them upriver into the then-unpopulated west, where the northerners settled and became uneasy neighbors with the westernmost Calormene city-states.
Matters continued in this pattern for roughly seventy-five years, until Jadis arrived in Calormen from the eastern islands. *evil grin* You see, I do not believe Tash is Aslan's opposite or his devil or whatever terminology you want to use. No. Tash is his own deity, and if he's ugly and vengeful and deceitful, what of it? Lots of pagan gods are. (Heck, Aslan is downright inconsistent himself -- which is one reason I spent my childhood convinced he was a pagan lion god, and often wish I could go back to not knowing about Lewis's Christianity, because that way of thinking removes SO MANY ethical conundrums from the series.) In any case, if Aslan has a devil? It is Jadis. He left many things unfinished when he faffed off after singing the world into form, and I am 100% sure Jadis is the one who filled in a lot of the details. The magical islands in the Eastern Ocean? The giants of Harfang? Very much up her alley.
So Jadis arrived in Calormen, attempting to stir up trouble and find out the secrets of Aslan's power, and was promptly mistaken for an avatar of the goddess Acharith. She talked the ruler of Tashbaan into changing his strategy for dealing with defeated foes -- properly conquering them instead of just beating them and going home. That ruler, Idrath Tarkaan, took the title of Tisroc and the epithet "World-Conqueror," and set about building the empire of Calormen.
Meanwhile, Jadis was appalled to learn that the Calormene gods regarded her as a marvelously useful accident and were only too happy to have their people learn from her, provided she left as soon as Idrath got properly started on his path. (Acharith was annoyed that she suffered a name change from the mistaken identity bit, but deities often have many names; she took it in stride.) Jadis faffed off to the Western Wild and busied herself twisting Talking Beasts and beings to her will (in some cases reshaping them entirely, which is the origin of werewolves and hags, among other things), leaving the Calormenes to their own devices again. They promptly conquered the descendants of the Archenlandish exiles, but while Idrath was fairly successful at creating common cause among ethnic Calormenes, the new western provinces retained a greater sense of separate identity, which led to centuries of resistance and rebellion.
Around the year 300, Idrath led his armies into the highlands that formed the northern edge of the great desert. This was easy to do, since at the time only Archenland was a proper nation; the other areas were scarcely populated at all. Idrath moved his army across the desert piece by piece, building forts and transplanting civilians as he went, which is how Telmar was initially settled. He was about to invade Archenland when he had an accident with his horse on a bridge and died. Two of his seven sons both claimed his throne and Calormen descended into civil war for over ten years. This was later known as the First Brothers' War, and is remembered as the nadir of Calormene history.
The western provinces used the collapse of central government to rebel and declare independence. The people who had been forcibly settled in Telmar were largely driven back south across the desert by retaliatory Archenlandish raids, adding to the chaos. The two princes' armies frequently destroyed farms and storehouses in their enemies' territory, hoping to starve each other into submission. Plague broke out in the wake of overcrowding as refugees piled into the few cities still standing. Meanwhile, the people of the eastern islands began to raid the coast instead of trading, and the people of Kutu, who had stumbled into the delta of the Nandrapragaan River around the same time the Calormenes stumbled into the Shirush river valley, began their own territorial expansion. In short, the two decades after Idrath World-Conqueror's death were nearly the end of Calormen as a political entity.
His third son, Ziranool Tisroc, eventually defeated his brothers and began rebuilding the core of the empire -- first beating back the coastal raiders, then reconquering the west, and finally fighting a series of inconclusive wars against the Kutulese that resulted in a semi-official boundary midway between the Shirush and the Nandrapragaan that both sides frequently attempted to shift. Ziranool Tisroc's reign was a time of great bitterness and soul-searching among the Calormenes, as they recovered from the crash of their initial boundless ambitions and optimism and reassessed their place in the world. This is the beginning of Calormen's tradition of monumental architecture, and also the time in which the high priests and priestesses of Tashbaan finally won nominal authority over the entire empire and began to codify the rituals and myths of their pantheon.
Then there is a long period in which I do not have much interest. Suffice it to say that between the year 350 and the year 800 Calormen slowly expanded to the borders it had during Narnia's Golden Age: namely, the Tisroc held the coast from the Shirush south to the Nandrapragaan, excepting only the Nandrapragaan delta itself. That is about 450 miles as the crow flies, roughly the distance from Boston to Washington, D.C. (Rishti Tisroc is not kidding when he says Narnia is comparatively tiny!) The great desert formed the northern border, which creeps south as one heads inland from the coast, following the curve of the Shirush. A tribe of semi-nomadic people lived in the western desert and controlled access to the great oasis, but they were tributaries of Calormen rather than direct subjects.
To the west, Calormen reached the hill country and its long, narrow lakes (they stretch east-west, like fingers reaching to the distant sea). These restive provinces were originally settled by Archenlandish refugees and were now home to a defiantly Calormene-but-not culture that named Azaroth king of heaven instead of Tash, and clung to a musical and poetic tradition halfway between that of Tashbaan and that of the north. The Tisroc's writ petered out before the pine-covered mountains that serve as foothills to the wall around the world. The mountains were inhabited by a mix of fiercely independent peoples, refugees who fell into the world through myriad gates and formed tiny nations in a harsh but beautiful land. The Calormenes found it more cost-effective to leave the mountain principalities under their own rule but bring them into Calormen's economic sphere via the fur trade and the purchase of metal and jewels from western mines.
The inland south was a land of rich, rolling plains between the marshy headwaters of the Nandrapragaan and the rougher hills of western Calormen. Successive Tisrocs had attempted to conquer the muddle of small nations that checkered the region, but those peoples did not anathemize magic the way that the Calormenes and the Kutulese did; they used spells and curses spectacularly in the first few campaigns against them, and then relied on legends of ill-luck to deter further attacks. As Kutu expanded its territory south of the Nandrapragaan, the southern countries also began to play the two empires against each other, allying with Kutu when Calormen's threat loomed large, and Calormen when Kutu's demands became too great.
After the year 800, Calormen ceased to expand territorially. The Kutulese fiercely resisted any incursions beyond the Nadapragaan and began to push the border back north; magic and superstition made the plains countries unpalatable to attack; difficult terrain hindered any attempt to expand into the western mountains; and the hill countries north of the great desert had been settled by people who had adopted Archenland's historic wariness and antagonism toward Calormen, which made anything more than lightning raids through the far western hills (or via the Winding Arrow into Archenland itself) impractical. This territorial stagnation was somewhat countered by economic expansion, as Calormen stretched trading networks into the surrounding lands and the eastern islands, and as its merchants and bankers developed a concept halfway between a classic partnership and a joint-stock company, but by and large Calormen turned inward. This fed another period of artistic and architectural flourishing, but also led to increased internal turmoil as soldiers were released from the northern and western armies and found themselves unfamiliar with rural and urban civilian life. Those who returned to the west formed the nuclei of the great rebellions -- the west had always been restive, but now it began to explode every generation.
Additionally, the years of conquest had seen relatively orderly transitions between one Tisroc and the next -- each king named his heir and was able to give his son experience in war by keeping him on the front lines, give him experience in civilian administration by making him govern the provinces in which he was stationed, and prevent him from launching coups or falling to assassins by keeping him well away from the morass of court politics in Tashbaan. Without the constant wars of expansion, that system fell apart. The chaos of the First Brothers' War returned, with princes battling each other for their inheritance and sometimes killing their fathers as well. The armies of various portions of the empire often supported different candidates for the throne, thus exacerbating regional tensions that each Tisroc in his turn spent his reign attempting to defuse only to have his would-be successors inflame them again.
The constant civil wars led to increased external pressure, as Kutu reclaimed more and more of its ancient lands north of the Nandrapragaan and the plains and mountain principalities grew bolder and began their own wars of conquest, gradually combining into fewer and stronger countries and nibbling at the edges of Calormen's border provinces. Additionally, in the year 900 the northern country of Narnia was conquered by a sorceress who plunged the land into magical winter, thus blocking its borders, destroying its trade, and sending waves of refugees fleeing into the surrounding lands. That destabilization on Calormen's northern borders is all that prevented Archenland and its neighbors from joining the general assault on the empire... and even Archenland got in near the end, by way of commissioning privateers to attack Calormene shipping under the guise of reclaiming children illegally stolen to feed the slave trade.
(Note: Archenland would tell that story very differently. The truth is somewhere between the two accounts.)
Around the year 990, Prince Rishti, the fourth son of Zarman Tisroc, began fighting two of his brothers and one of his cousins for the throne. He was aided by the counsel of Axartha of Irtaanir, and by the political maneuvering of Malindra Tarkheena, his second wife. In the year 1000 -- the same year as the end of the Winter in Narnia -- he captured Tashbaan and took the throne. Over the next fourteen years, his armies slowly and inexorably crushed the remnants of rebellion in all corners of the empire, until he had achieved peace. (No one else since the year 800 had managed this; there was always at least one conflict flaring at any given moment.) But Rishti Tisroc's court was still plagued by the same symptoms as his predecessors' had been, and his eldest son and presumed heir, Prince Rabadash, began to plan an assassination. This was stymied by a machination of the gods that eventually led to Rabadash trapped by a curse that forbade him to go more than ten miles from the center of Tashbaan.
Despite that handicap, Rabadash Tisroc duly inherited the throne and managed to play various factions against each other without letting them erupt into outright war. Because he did not dare let any of his relatives or generals gain renown at his expense, he was forced to deal with his subjects' complaints rather than simply suppressing them. His reign laid the foundations of Calormen's federal civil service and marked the end of army regiments composed of soldiers from a single province; henceforth the army was arranged on a more national basis. Because of these efforts he was officially titled Rabadash Peacemaker, though he is more commonly remembered by the unofficial epithet "the Ridiculous," in reference to the animal transformation that signaled the start of his curse. Calormenes tend to look down on him for that affliction and his seeming cowardice despite the many achievements of his forty-year reign.
Rabadash's second son, Ilmagin the Wise, took the united empire, sound economy, and well-organized army his father bequeathed him and began the long struggle that, after two centuries of intermittent war, crushed the Kutulese capitol of Angyoko and brought the Nandrapragaan delta under Calormene control, thus extending the Tisroc's writ all the way to the southern wall around the world. The remnants of Kutu split into three fragments: Yin in the inland jungles of the deep south, Ijezu on the upper Nandrapragaan, and Gekutu in the far southwestern plains. The new queen of Gekutu promptly made a marriage alliance with the largest of the plains countries, creating the double kingdom of Gekutu-Marya.
Gekutu-Marya took on Kutu's historical role as the chief rival of Calormen, though its landlocked nature was a notable handicap in terms of trade and wealth. The new Calormene provinces south of the Nandrapragaan proved as restive as the northwestern provinces once had; smuggling and rebellion ran rampant for generations. Also, starting during Ilmagin's reign Archenland underwent something of a renaissance under the influence of King Ram the Great and his immediate successors, nearly monopolizing coastal shipping for several generations, while the eastern islands turned cold to Calormen in the wake of Angyoko's destruction and the resulting loss of their property and trade.
There follows another long period I am not much interested in. In the year 1998, a contingent of Telmarines invaded and conquered Narnia; they were fleeing both a famine and religious persecution. Narnia again turned inward and cut off external contact save for minor overland trade with Archenland and the coastal settlements that bordered Ettinsmoor. Meanwhile, Calormen had spent centuries engaged in a pattern of alternating war and peace with Gekutu-Marya and a slow trade war with Archenland that ended with Archenland's oceanic shipping industry nearly broken and the Calormene slave trade extended through the eastern islands, legally or otherwise.
Narnia remained self-isolated for another three centuries while Calormen again lapsed into a period of stagnation and internal disarray. Angyoko and the Nandrapragaan provinces were lost to Ijezu; Archenland regained control over northern coastal shipping; Gekutu-Marya swallowed many mountain principalities, thus taking their resources away from Calormen; and the eastern islanders began to buy controlling shares in many Calormene merchant firms and take control of the slave trade. When Narnia reemerged under Caspian X in the early 2300s, this pattern began to break as the islanders and northern hill countries worried once again about their northern borders and their shipping concerns.
The Calormene incursion into Narnia in the year 2555 was part of a pattern of resurgence that mirrored the resurgence under Ilmagin the Wise and his successors. The idea was to use Narnia as a way to encircle Archenland, Telmar, and the other hill countries, thus winning control of their resources without the expense and bloodshed that a war of conquest would require. The northern focus was a result of the strength of Ijezu and Gekutu-Marya in the south and west. Narnia fell more quickly than foreseen, as a result of weak government and a doomsday cult that the Calormene army attempted to coopt and turn to their own ends.
And then Aslan ended the world. Sometimes, you just can't win.
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Language:
Now that I've gotten the broad sweep of history (and some implicit notes on geography) out of the way, let me move on to talking about squishier subjects: namely, the bits that make a culture individual.
Let me state upfront that I do not believe Calormen has its own language. No country in the Narnian world has its own language. This can be quite clearly inferred from the way Shasta understands the Narnians in Tashbaan. They have no reason to speak a hypothetical Calormene language to him, since they believe him to be Corin, and Shasta had neither reason nor opportunity to have learned a hypothetical northern language; therefore, they are speaking the same language. (Which is English, as I discussed in a previous post.) There is also no linguistic drift over the roughly 2,550 year life of the Narnian world, unrealistic though that is.
Obviously the Deep Magic is at work here, though I am not sure of the mechanism behind the observed effects. Does the Deep Magic erase people's native tongues as they fall into the world? Does it simply implant English as another option? Do people lose their languages more gradually over a generation or three? I have no idea. Suffice it to say that by the time the Archenlandish exiles fled south across the desert, they had no trouble communicating with the Calormenes despite having had no previous contact with them, and the Calormenes had retained nothing from their previous language except a handful of titles, a non-English sound pattern for names, and perhaps a few curses.
But language is only one of the things that defines a culture.
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Religion:
Calormene religion is polytheistic, with nine major deities: five male, four female. Tash the Inexorable is the god of war and vengeance. Official theology names him king of heaven, and states that Idrath World-Conqueror was his descendant. The queen of heaven is Achadith, goddess of change and all things out of time or place (also victory, which is, after all, a change). She is Tash's counselor and is considered the guardian of Calormen.
The other three goddess -- Zardeenah the Pure, lady of the moon and stars, the night, and maidens; Soolyeh the Fair, light of the sun and mother of mares; and Nazreen the Wise, keeper of memory and regret, who lowers the veil of twilight and raises the veil of dawn -- are kind of a Triple Goddess setup in the classic maiden/mother/crone pattern. They are each associated with a god. Impetuous Sokda, the god of storms, horses, and the ocean, constantly pursues Zardeenah, but to no fruition. Garshomon, the god of rivers, cattle and agriculture, is married to Soolyeh. Nur, the god of scholars, doctors, and disease, is married to Nazreen.
Azaroth, the ninth god, is master of silence, darkness, and death. He walks alone.
This is not the only belief system in Calormen, though. It's merely the one that has government backing and control of the temple system. There are tens of thousands of people in the western provinces who swear that Azaroth is king of heaven, Achadith is his wife, and Tash is the god who walks alone. There are also tens of thousands of people who don't really give a fig about the hierarchy of heaven and simply pay attention to the deity or deities whose spheres of influence are most important in their lives. Farmers are devotees of Soolyeh and Garshomon and have little time for Tash. People who make their living in forests or on the ocean tend to think most highly of Zardeenah and Sokda. Nazreen and Nur are important to the professional classes, including merchants. Etcetera.
There are also a number of superstitions. Some people call rivers Garshomon's daughters. Others say the Shirush and the Nandrapragaan are his left and right arms. People say that if you see the full moon reflected in a forest pool and speak Zardeenah's name three times before the water breaks or a cloud passes over its face, a drink of that pool's water will cure any disease. Salt is associated with Achadith -- it's an edible rock, which is definitely a thing out of place -- and is therefore used as a charm to avert ill-luck or to ward against demons.
Worship is based on ritual and sacrifice. Temples and shrines are built to provide venues for those rites and offerings and are the major focal sites of Calormene religion, but a lot of everyday religion occurs in the home or at the site of an event, as people burn incense and give flowers or fruit to small household idols or perform rituals related to planting, harvesting, markets, medicine, and so on.
The four great festivals are held on the points of the solar year -- spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, and winter solstice. Those days mark the change from one season to the next. These days have less physical meaning in the south of the empire, where it is nearly always warm and the presence or absence of rain (brought from the east by ocean storms from roughly January to March, as per VDT, and from the west in September and October, as per because-I-say-so) is more relevant than the length of day. But the festivals are celebrated wherever the Tisroc reigns. There are also days sacred to each god or goddess in particular, and days commemorated for their historical importance, but they don't stop the entire empire the way the four solar festivals do.
The Spring Festival marks the change from one year to the next. It is a day of beginnings, when the old is cleared away to make room for the new. It is marked by the dedication of a newborn animal to represent the coming year, and the sacrifice of the previous year's symbolic animal. It is traditional to forgive small debts in the week leading up to the Spring Festival, and the week immediately after is considered an auspicious time for marriages and new commercial ventures.
The Summer Festival is a celebration of history and power. It is the most militarily oriented of the four solar holidays, basically a celebration of the empire via the gods who favor it. In the week leading up to the festival itself, stylized pantomime histories of the settlement of Calormen, various great battles, and the life of the current Tisroc are acted out in the public space around the local temples. Any criminals sentenced to death or mutilation in the month before the festival are held in prison until the day itself, whereupon they receive their punishment en masse at the hands of the priests and priestesses of Tash, Achadith, and Azaroth. Celebrants have their foreheads marked by a splash of blood or paint to show their connection to the gods and the empire. Military regiments parade frequently in the week before and after the festival.
The Autumn Festival is about harvest. It is the most agriculturally oriented of the four solar holidays. Its observation revolves around handing out bread and wine to all celebrants. Images of the gods are made from fruit and grain, paraded around the city, drenched in wine, and ceremonially thrown into a handy body of water or well. Gunpowder does not explode in the Narnian world, but the Calormenes have invented a mildly effective substitute that is just strong enough for the sparkler type of fireworks, which are set off in vast numbers after the drowning of the effigies. Often effigies of demons (most commonly lions, scorpions, or crocodiles) are constructed from bare wood or reeds -- to contrast with the life-giving composition of the gods' effigies -- and then set on fire to destroy them, rather than given to the water to renew the cycle of life.
(For Aslan to choose this festival for restoring Rabadash to human form is... interesting. It's not as jarring as the Summer Festival would have been, nor as ominous as the Winter Festival, but it's still awkward in that it meshes the power of a foreign "demonic" power with a rite that specifically separates the life-giving gods from the barren life-destroying demons.)
The Winter Festival is about death and faith. It is observed in complete silence. From sunrise to sunset, nobody eats, drinks, or speaks. At sunset, all fires are put out except those in the temple, from which all others are then rekindled: a promise from the gods that light and warmth will return. The procession of torch-bearers from house to house is accompanied by discordant drums and song, to ward off evil spirits until the gods' protection (in the form of light) is renewed. This is the night when the veil between earth and the afterlife is thinnest, and demons can slip through to stalk the earth. In response, people invoke the favor of Achadith, Azaroth, Nazreen, and Nur, through various charms placed around their windows and doors: pouches of ash for Achadith, copper coins for Nur, memory-catchers for Nazreen, and sickles or painted eyes for Azaroth.
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The Arts:
Calormene poetry is epigrammatic, not epic. This is not a bad thing. Calormene poets are regarded as somewhat closer to mystics than storytellers, and are also frequently involved in finding elegant ways to phrase the collected wisdom of the empire. Rather like, oh, say, the Book of Proverbs. Or Ecclesiastes.
(If you cannot tell that I find Lewis's attitude toward Calormene poetry infuriating, I will state it outright: I find his blithe dismissal and denigration of Calormene poetry ethnocentric, petty, stupid, and also representative of a shocking poverty of taste. Particularly when Greek poetry also has a lot of epigrammatic verses to go along with the Homeric epic stuff, and Lewis evidently thought highly enough of Greco-Roman culture to include their river and forest spirits in his favored country, to say nothing of Bacchus and his wild dances! Gnrgh.)
Poetry is considered the highest art, but storytelling takes a close second place. The Calormenes place great value on facility with words, as can be readily discerned from their tendency toward ornate and elaborate speech even in fairly everyday conversations. Many verbal exchanges follow set patterns, and it's considered a mark of distinction to be able to embroider seamlessly on those patterns. Relatively few people in the empire learn to read or write, but everyone memorizes poetry and learns to distill events into entertaining stories.
Theater is restricted to religious pageants in the early centuries of the empire, but an underground secular theater culture takes root around Rabadash's time and from around the year 1200 to 1600 it flowers exuberantly. After that there is a minor religious backlash against the immorality of avant-garde theater, followed by a diversion of public attention to other forms of entertainment -- such as the novel, which grows out of the oral storytelling tradition rather than the non-existent epic poetry tradition, and therefore begins as books of interlinked short tales that only gradually become more unified -- and theater becomes a backwater for a few centuries. Around the year 2000 it reemerges, invigorated by new techniques adopted from the novelistic tradition and continues strongly until the premature end of the world.
Calormene architecture tends toward the monumental, always with an eye toward the use of water elements and intricate ornamentation. Walls are almost never left plain -- they will be plastered and stamped into faux-relief patterns, painted, carved, covered in mosaics, or any of a dozen ways to bring color and interest to blank space. Imitation of natural forms is common; arches and domes that mimic flower petals and buds are considered extremely visually pleasing. Fountains and pools abound, even in relatively modest homes. They frequently double as sources of drinking water, since laws about water contamination are exceedingly strict.
Painting and sculpture are used mostly in service of architecture, to elaborate on a structure or a space. A free-hanging picture is quite rare, though miniatures that fit in lockets enter Calormene artistic vocabulary around the year 800 and remain popular as love-gifts. Free-standing sculptures are generally restricted to monuments and temples, as an honor fit only for gods and for their most favored agents on earth.
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Legal Authority:
At the time of LWW/HHB, the Calormene legal system is halfway between a collection of conflicting traditional ways and a codified set of written laws. The economy is under relatively tight legal control, for instance -- there are strict laws about counterfeiting, payment of interest, the proper form for contracts, and so on. On the other hand, family blood feuds are still perfectly legal and there is no unified agreement on their rules and limitations, though over the past centuries there's been a growing idea that before starting one, the families involved ought to go to the courts or their local lord to try mediation, on the theory that money can be regained but a dead relative cannot be resurrected.
The most common acceptable reasons for starting a blood feud include unprovoked murder, the breaking of a courting dance, unilateral divorce, and the escalation of a lesser feud (generally over a property dispute or a question of face) into violence. Rape sometimes counts and sometimes doesn't. If a rape occurs in the context of a pre-existing lesser feud, it will invariably trigger a blood feud. If it's an isolated incident, it depends on how strongly the female victim can make her case to the male head of her family. (Male victims generally either kill themselves or kill their rapists. The former is hushed up and the latter starts a blood feud on a different pretext; the rape itself is generally never mentioned.)
Calormen is patriarchal in the sense that men are the legal heads of their families and women move from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. However, women among the lower classes actually have a fair amount of de facto power because they are laborers like their husbands -- the specific tasks are gender-segregated for the most part, but without two or more adults working full time, a family generally cannot support itself. It's only among the wealthy merchant class and the nobility that women become restricted in their mobility, and that restriction is somewhat compensated for by increased educational opportunities: noblewomen are invariably taught to read and write because they are expected to teach their sons in turn.
Punishment for criminal offenses against the empire (counterfeiting, embezzlement, false contracts, giving false witness, some types of theft, highway robbery and piracy (which break the Tisroc's protection of the roads and seas), murder or blackmail of government officials, etc.) is meted out by a system of imperial agents who generally have authority to co-opt the local Tarkaans' soldiers (or the local imperial army garrison, if one exists) for that purpose. Punishment for criminal offenses against private individuals is meted out by those individuals and their families, insofar as they are able to do so. There are no police as such; the closest thing would probably be neighborhood watches (like the one Corin runs into in Tashbaan), or the temple guards in large religious complexes, who tend to extend their influence outward into the surrounding streets. There are, however, quite a lot of thief-catchers who work for hire, and in cities there is also generally a municipal jail of some sort, to hold offenders until they can be sentenced.
The Tarkaans operate in the gray areas between imperial justice and informal justice. They do not have authority to make laws, but because their private armies are the backbone of the imperial army, they can and do decide which ones they will work to enforce. They also serve as a supposedly neutral authority to whom feuding families can take their grievances -- though in many cases, the Tarkaan will appoint an official to hold court for him rather than do so in person. Tarkaans are imperial officials insofar as they are the legally designated tax collectors for the lands they hold -- either directly from the Tisroc or via the intermediary of a provincial High Lord. They are allowed to keep a certain amount for their own living expenses and to maintain their armed retinues. That may be a fixed amount or a percentage; it varies depending on the historical context in which the tax-collection authority was granted. Tarkaans therefore have wildly variable income levels, though that is not generally discussed in polite society.
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I still want to say things about climate, slavery, patterns of trade (internal and external), child-rearing, marriage and divorce, and the organization and physical layout of communities, but those will have to wait for part 3. Also, if there is anything in particular you want me to talk about, just tell me and I will try to world-build an answer!
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Date: 2012-09-17 02:10 am (UTC)(Heck, Aslan is downright inconsistent himself -- which is one reason I spent my childhood convinced he was a pagan lion god, and often wish I could go back to not knowing about Lewis's Christianity, because that way of thinking removes SO MANY ethical conundrums from the series.)
This is so true. I have huge problems with some of what Aslan does and cannot reconcile it. He's much nicer and more explicable as pagan lion god with a small g.
Matters continued in this pattern for roughly seventy-five years, until Jadis arrived in Calormen from the eastern islands. *evil grin* ...I am 100% sure Jadis is the one who filled in a lot of the details. The magical islands in the Eastern Ocean? The giants of Harfang? Very much up her alley.
So Jadis arrived in Calormen, attempting to stir up trouble and find out the secrets of Aslan's power, and was promptly mistaken for an avatar of the goddess Acharith.
And what does Acharith think of this? This is fascinating. The idea that Jadis is out there creating, too, and not just the Morgoth like twisting of things to make her own orcs from Elves.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-17 07:02 am (UTC)Here is an excerpt:
When the soldiers of Tashbaan looked out upon a battlefield strewn with broken statues, not even Jadis's decree could keep them from naming her a goddess. In exasperation, Jadis summoned the prince to her side and told him she was leaving. "Heaven's favor is not infinite. I have given you what you need to take the world. Your failures from now will be on your own head."
The prince smiled through gritted teeth and offered to ease her way back to her fellow gods with great sacrifices at the main temple of his city. A goddess, he implied, needed a fittingly grand departure, lest rumors spread that she was merely a sorceress and thus vulnerable to treachery in the dark.
Jadis had no fear of human attempts at guile, but it occurred to her that the Calormene gods might know of the Lion and his secrets. It would be wasteful not to summon and interrogate them before she moved on. If they proved strong enough, she might even offer alliance.
"I can and will provide my own sacrifices," she told the prince, but she accepted his offer of an escort to the main temple. It stood to the east of the palace, on the highest point of the island city, and was ringed by tiny shrines to the other gods. Compared to the great temple complexes of Charn, it was pitiful, but this world was young. Perhaps these human gods would be housed in true imperial splendor someday.
Jadis locked the doors behind her with chains of ice and slit her escorts' throats upon the altar.
"I am Jadis, last and greatest Empress of Charn, destroyer of worlds and scourge of the Lion," she said, giving her titles in the form gods tended to expect. "One day I will rend him to pieces, but first I must learn the secret to walking between the worlds that he keeps for himself. Your people are not born of this world; you came from another universe. Tell me how to part the walls between the worlds and I will lay this world at your feet when I depart for other universes."
She expected Tash to appear -- a vulture-headed, multi-armed monstrosity -- but the spirit that tore the air over the altar was shaped like the silhouette of a woman, flickering between midnight black and blinding white. In her left hand she held a spear; in her right, a sickle; and around her waist, a belt of human bones.
"Jadis of Charn, you who have claimed my aspect," the human god said, her voice like honey and razors, "we will not bargain with you. We go where our people go; we and they open ways together. You have no people. You have no world. You are naught but a cancer. If you seek to destroy the shaper of this world, you do so alone."
The goddess flickered forward, her spear stabbing toward Jadis like lightning from a clear blue sky. Despite herself, Jadis closed her eyes against the searing light.
She opened them to empty sand and a thousand stars.
And that is the end of the section titled "South." :-)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-02 02:37 pm (UTC)And I how much new respect does one gain for Rabadash (and more understanding of what Susan saw in him) to think that he could manage the factions to maintain stability in Calormen when he was unable to travel to be seen to be be a viable warleader. I mean, that's serious political skill.
I kniw I'll have more to say and admire when I have read more, but I have already lost one attempted comment by stopping to go back and read more, so I'll post this now, while I know I can. Great reading here -- thanks!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-04 04:33 am (UTC)I hate the idea of innate evil, but I can certainly see Jadis twisting beasts and beings so a combination of their own cultures plus their new physical natures make them more disposed to choose evil.
Also, Rabadash IS a pretty impressive Tisroc! Lewis himself admits as much, even if he undercuts that impression as hard as he can by titling him "the Ridiculous" immediately thereafter. I figure he could not possibly have done it alone and had some equally impressive advisers and troubleshooters to speak with his voice outside Tashbaan, but even so, ruling an empire the size of Calormen takes a lot of work and a lot of intelligence.