[Meta] Thoughts on Calormen, part 2
Sep. 14th, 2012 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThoughts on Calormen, Part 1 (LJ crosspost) dealt with history (and some extremely rough-sketch geography in the process). Part 2 is about culture: brief thoughts on language, religion, the arts, and law/authority/taxes.
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 you want me to talk about, just tell me and I will try to world-build an answer!
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
And now I am going to read at least three chapters of "Secrets" before I allow myself to do anything else. *resolve face*
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 you want me to talk about, just tell me and I will try to world-build an answer!
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
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.
---------------
And now I am going to read at least three chapters of "Secrets" before I allow myself to do anything else. *resolve face*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-15 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-15 05:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-15 06:37 pm (UTC)Tell me, might the Calormene interest in codified, stilted phrasing as art be related (consciously or not) to the apparent impossibility of linguistic drift in this world? It just struck me that that might make the mild bending-of-standard-language-forms in the Calormene style of poetry/storytelling into an interesting challenge, as well as a way to convey thought.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-16 07:19 pm (UTC)As for prisons, if your punishment system leans toward fines and physical consequences such as whipping/beating or bodily mutilation (to say nothing of death), you don't need prisons except as a very temporary thing. Prisons are a weird philosophical balancing act between "let us rehabilitate these lost souls" and "lock the bastards up forever and hope they rot," and since Calormen doesn't really have a concept of rehabilitative justice, why would they need such a compromise? Also, prisons are EXPENSIVE to maintain! The Tisrocs prefer to spend their money on other things.
2. It might well be! That is a shiny concept and something I will need to poke at and see what I think and what the implications would be. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-25 12:53 pm (UTC)I've come to a similar conclusion about Calormene poetry and Lewis' stupidity concerning it exactly from the point of view of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, because my crossover character ended up quoting Ecclesiastes while I was thinking ahead about the Narnian embassy in Tashbaan.
I love my crossover character. He makes me think of things I would not have thought of otherwise.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-27 02:09 am (UTC)I'd have to reread HHB to say anything properly thought-out about messengers, except that I think that as people directly under the Tisroc's authority it's probably a crime to interfere with their business. Presumably this doesn't include sending fraudulent personal messages, if only because that would take too much time and money to keep track of. But to stop a message from being delivered would get you in trouble.
I was always vaguely annoyed by Lewis's attitude toward Calormene poetry, because I was a weird kid who really liked aphorisms and proverbs and it bothered me to see that kind of thing dismissed as boring and silly. Once I was older and had A) realized Lewis had put lots of Christian motifs into Narnia and B) actually read portions of the Bible for cultural literacy purposes, I got even more annoyed because I couldn't see how he could reconcile "yay Christianity!" with "by the way, this literary style used a lot in the Bible is stupid and you should mock it." (This is another reason I think the idea of Lewis as a great theologian is ridiculous.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-15 05:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-16 05:48 am (UTC)