Travolore Wrote:Bare Squadron arrives on Sylvawen and contacts the factitious Treemen. Meanwhile Jemini Linaki narrows her search for the Emperor's least favourite nudists...

In The Wing and the Ax, Queen Marshal Astrid Haddock I Wrote:Furthermore, it bears repeating that when choosing to have a battle, one should choose a place and time in which one’s own advantages are maximized, and the opponent’s are rendered as reduced as possible. While this might seem obvious, I have seen far too many generals and other commanders of high rank who feel that having a “fair” and “honorable” fight for glory is of more importance than achieving their objectives or safeguarding the lives of the soldiers who follow them. So, for all of the glory that appears to come with two armies lined up on a field, ready to hack and chop each other to pieces and let the side who died the least say that they won the day, I believe that it is more honorable to have the other army be soundly defeated by overwhelming force if they cannot be brought to parley and negotiation. For sure, the young hotheads who feel otherwise will throw themselves into conflicts and waste their lives, but those who reserve fighting for when it will do the most good will have far fewer dead friends and allies to mourn.

And for those times when a battle is inevitable, then a wise general will do everything they can to arrange things in their favor. Allies. Supplies. Their morale and that of their enemies. Differences in culture. Surprise. Reputations. The weather. The land itself. All are ultimately tools in the hands of those who would wage war with their final goals in mind. And the more of these that the wise general can bring to bear, the more weight they remove from the arms of their own soldiers when it comes time for the clash itself.

To those that say that this is the cowardly route, all I can say is this: Which is more glorious? An army marching to its doom, shedding bodies and blood like leaves from a tree in autumn, beautiful and transient and weakened after the fight with rain and cold? Or a force that loses as few men as possible, and comes home with stories about how their foes fell like wheat before the scythe, and achieved victory?

Quote:Happy New Year! And with it, the payoff for some foreshadowing going all the way back to the Hiccstrid wedding in chapter 30! Hope you all enjoyed! ^_^

Quote: The Second Battle of the Seine River was then-Princess-Marshal Astrid Haddock I’s debut battle in the military sphere as a formal commander. This battle—insofar as it was a battle and not just a rout—left as much of an impact on the political and military spheres as it did on the landscape, where her artificial river-flood changed the course of the Seine River, closing one meander downstream of Rouen and creating a new oxbow lake. In the military and political calculus, it took some time for the full scale of her impact to penetrate. News was comparatively slow to get out, hampered by the fact that the Hooligans had their hands full with other considerations and problems, and was liberally mixed with rumor and hearsay, along with outright libel. But as the details spread in conjunction with her subsequent actions, the sheer lethality and pragmatism of the Princess-Marshal’s tactics combined with the reputation of Berk as a whole and her husband in particular. This was, after all, the first wife of the Hero, and she had clearly not gotten her position on nepotism. Her wife, Princess-Herald Wulfhild, made pointed use of her spouses’ reputations in her negotiations…

—Dragons of the North: Profiles Of The Viking Lords, Waterford University Press, 1733

(01-09-2023, 06:58 PM)batzulger Wrote: And someone has already identified the crossover!

Quote: The roots of the present lie in the seeds of the past. The seduction of painting the times of our ancestors as blessed, as ideal, as better, is ever-present. But the drumbeat of progress marches forward, not back! For all of the relative advantages that our ancestors had over their neighbors, it is important to remember that such advantage was relative! Old Berk, for all of its mythologized acceptance and welcomeness, was still an unequal authoritarian society! Let us not forget that there was obligated combat service and disdain for anyone that could not martially contribute, incredible centralization of power and control of resources in the hands of a small minority in the form of the chief and clanheads, whose word could be literal life or death at a whim, a communal outlook that prioritized the rights of the group over those of the individual, and active pressure on outsiders to assimilate and conform with the majority!

Oh yes, they accepted the individual deviations from the norm in gender, religion or sexuality… but only so long as those people were able to materially contribute to the survival of the tribe! This was hardly a society of perfect egalitarians, as many try to now paint it. Yes, they gave nominal equality and freedom to thralls who would otherwise have no investment into their society, but it was strictly nominal acceptance, and based entirely on pragmatic reasoning, as they could not afford to waste capable bodies! But the freedmen were still a lower class, denied most access to the structures of power! For all of the egalitarian trappings, Berk was still held in the grip of a scant few, who could demand the very lives of everyone else at their whim! Yes, a ‘Chief Takes Care Of His Own,’ because doing otherwise would be wasting his soldiers!

And all of that was before the ending of the Dragon War—and within three years of that, the very same people who are now mythologized as ‘accepting and welcoming’ repeatedly moved to keep power in their own hands! The structure of this very body dates back to those early power grabs! The Conclave of Houses and the Chamber of Commons are unequal bodies whose inequity can be traced back to the greed of those who are unjustly venerated—

—Lord Hardnut House Thorston IV, From Speech delivered to the Conclave of Houses of the Grand Thing, before being removed from the chamber; his remarks sparked a vocal protest and a brief fracas among the assembly, during which the Speaker attempted to call for order, and there was a motion to have his words stricken from the minutes of the Grand Thing’s records