Update Thread 40: I'm Running Out of Clever Names

[Mamorien]

One of the great paradoxes that comes from the study of history is that historians are forced to simultaneously speak in both concrete and abstract terms.  We say 'the society decided to change' at the same time as we speak of the leaders making specific decisions.  But the society did not decide to change.  The Hooligans of Berk, for example, did not, as some abstract whole, decide to adopt dragons and grow to become the core of a new sovereign nation over the next five years.  Nor did then-Chief Stoick's decision to allow for the adoption of dragons force this decision.  No.  Individuals within that society decided to change, in how they acted or how they viewed the world, while others did not.  And yet we are forced to speak in the aggregate, the cumulative, taking the broad trend of the social unit and applying it to all members inside.  We can recognize the individual dissenters when their dissent from the mean is sufficient to stand out, and yet this very recognition paints a degree of uniformity on the rest that is both unrealistic and unearned. 
Furthermore, referring to the aggregate of the society in the abstract creates a false impression of their numbers, simply due to the common fallacies of equivocation and false equivalence (i.e. we call them the same thing, ergo we see them as being roughly the same).  We project ourselves and our own modern expectations and experiences with current political entities onto the past, despite those historical units being vastly smaller, simpler, and less developed).  We speak of the Byzantine Empire and the North Sea Empire as two simple units.  Due to the difficulties that many have with comprehending large numbers and larger scales, the typical comprehension of the concept of "Empire" lends itself to a false equivalence, that one Empire is much like another Empire in size, population, economy, culture and so forth, but that mental abstraction again does a disservice in scale.  To illustrate, consider that, in AD 1040, there were more people occupying Constantinople and the Thracian farmland immediately outside the city's famous walls than there were in all of the island of Eire in that same year.  Meanwhile, Sweden, Norway and Denmark together had less than a million people combined, while the city of Baghdad alone had over a million people sheltering behind its walls.  And again, in making such comparisons, we fall prey to the lure of the abstract, of referencing the masses of otherwise anonymous people as conglomerate wholes. 
But at the same time, such abstraction is necessary; we do not have the data to be able to conclusively say that, out of the approximately 300,000 Albans who lived under King Mac Bethad's rule, 68,821 agreed with his stated desire for continued independence from Berk's influence, while another 121,749 would have been happier if he had made overtures of integration prior to his fatal duel with Astrid clan Haddock.  Such precision is not available to us and we are thus forced to speak in the abstract and the aggregate, erasing the heterogeneous beliefs and attitudes of entire generations—save those individuals who had the foresight to record their thoughts, or the impact that inspired others to record them.

In Rouen, Duke William gets a message from a Dragon Mail rider and considers the politics of his neighbors. One mile east of Bun Ilidh, Kerr and a few of his fellow fishermen* set out to warn Berk about Jarl Mildew. At Al Jazīra Al-Khadrā, on the bay of Jabal Ṭāriq, Viggo completes the first phase of his plan and explains it to Alvin, along with Alvin's role in its future. In a Constantinople brothel the morning after, Sigurd Snotlout meets up with two of the people he most needs to see, who have bad or at least urgent news for him, and one of the two people he least wants to, who is bad news for him.

And since this is of course an immensely frustrating and nervewracking moment for the narrative suddenly to switch tracks again, that is precisely what the narrative will now do.

Kerr and company arrive at the Inbhir Nis and meet with delays at the Dragon Mail station. At the Vedrarfjord skyport, Esther sees the skycarts running to schedule, including one with a particularly Vast escort. Back in Constantinople, Snotlout gets back to barracks with enough dignity that he can at least pretend to be Sigurd until the pretense becomes equal to the presence of Sigurd. In Inbhir Nis, Mac Bethad learns about the incident at the mail station and takes steps to deal with the fallout. Esther and her siblings arrive on Berk, meet up with their mother, and discuss what it's going to mean to be Jewish on Berk. In the Imperial Palace, Sigurd brings Dogsbreath and Inga to meet the Empress. On the Sea of Marmara, on final approach to Constantinople, Hiccup wonders if there's anything he could've done differently...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/104089...s/42057197
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12639117/79...Of-Vikings

* "Try saying that when you're drunk." (Jack Harkness, "The Parting of the Ways")[/i]