Fic Updates 48

[Norgarth]

A thing of Vikings returns from a 3 week hiatus
https://archiveofourown.org/works/104089.../104794461

Prior to the end of the Dragon War, the societies of the Hooligan Norse and their close cultural allies in the Eirish Sea region existed in a fundamental contradiction brought on by two opposing cultural forces.

On the one side, there was a cultural incentive towards, and acceptance of, romantic love and associated romantic courtship—it was expected that couples would meet, court, and grow more and more romantically entwined, regardless of the social classes or origins of the respective partners. A chief’s heir could even court and marry a freed thrall and be seen not as a fool for marrying so far below their social rank but instead as a fine upstanding member of the tribe, bringing in an outsider fully into the tribal society. This romanticized xenophilia was culturally adaptive for the Hooligan Norse due to the need to bring in and integrate outsiders as a result of the birth rate dysfunctions brought about by exposure to Deadly Nadder venom.

On the other side, however, there were rigid clan and social structures, with individual members expected to conform with social roles and existing under the control of the clanhead, who had the legal right to demand from each member a month’s worth of uncompensated labor every year, along with effective taxes to the clan coffer. Besides control of the clan coffer, the clanhead also had veto rights over many forms of personal expression by the members of their clan. Furthermore, due to the social and economic stresses of the dragon raids, jobs that were perceived as unproductive were stigmatized against by the general populace.

As a result of these pressures, romantic impulses were given a legal standing that was atypical in many Norse societies, as an outlet for individual wants—but only in certain prescribed ways that were seen as acceptable. Specifically, the accepted social path began with a formal courtship and romantic encounters, followed by a formal binding betrothal with semi-illicit sexual encounters and ultimately culminating in one form of marriage or another.

The end of the Dragon War, however, destroyed this unstable equilibrium, removing the constrained economy that granted the clanheads their near-total control over people’s personal finances, and the population boomed through territorial expansion, immigration, and natural growth from the end of Nadder venom exposure. New people, new economic opportunities, and new social opportunities all challenged the control of the clanheads who had ruled their sections of the tribe as personal fiefs just a few years earlier. As a result, the rising groups of young adults found themselves in an environment where they were wealthy, socially attractive, and free from the close supervision of their elders and tribe which had been the rule during their childhoods. As such, they acted accordingly along the lines of their cultural romantic ideal with new tribal members and various foreigners alike.

This caused no end of problems and entanglements. Some, indeed, reached the level of becoming the basis for enemy propaganda during future conflicts, where Christian Crusaders painted the pagan Hooligans as sexually depraved and predatory, using exaggerated reports as the basis for their accusations, alongside wholesale fabrications, with the seed of truth in the exaggerations rendering the accusations hard to rebut and refute…

—The Dragon Millennium, Manna-hata University Press, Ltd.