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that, I added The Book of Torak. Fair is fair, after all, and 'equal time'
sounds sort of fair, I guess. The Testament of the Snake People was an
exercise in showing off. (A poem in the shape of a snake? Gee!) The
Hymn to Chaldan was supposed to help explain the Arends. A war
god isn't all that unusual.
The Marags are extinct, but that 'equal time' regulation was still
in place, so I took a swing at the grief-stricken God Mara. I had fun
with The Proverbs of Nedra - a sort of theological justification for pure
greed. Maybe I'll make a deal with the New York Stock Exchange,
and they can engrave those proverbs on the wall.
The Sermon of Aldur was a false start, since it speaks glowingly of
'Unmaking Things', which UL prohibited in the next section. That
section, The Book of Ulgo, was rather obviously based on The Book of
Job. Note that I'll even steal from the Bible. Gorim came off rather
well, I thought. Incidentally, 'Ul! was a typographical error the first
time it appeared. I liked the way it looked on paper, so I kept it.
(Would you prefer to have me claim 'Divine Inspiration?')
I'm going to disillusion some enthusiasts here, I'm afraid. Notice
that the Mrin Codex and the Darine Codex aren't included here.
They don't appear because they don't exist. They're a literary device
and nothing more. (I once jokingly told Lester that I'd be ~g to
write the Mrin Codex if he'd agree to publish it.on a scroll, but he
declined.) I used the 'Mrin' as a form of exposition. Those periodic
breakthroughs when Belkira and Beltira - or whoever else is handy
- finally crack the code are the things that set off a new course of
action. I catch hints of a religious yearning when people start
pleading for copies of the 'Mrin'. Sorry gang, I'm not in the business of
creating new religions. This is 'story', not 'revelation'. I'm a
storyteller, not a Prophet of God. OK?
Once The Holy Books were out of the way, I was ready to tackle the
Histories, and that's where all the 'ologies' started showing up
along with a chronology. When you've got a story that lasts for
seven thousand years, you'd better have a chronology and pay close
attention to it, or you're going to get lost somewhere in the 39th
century. The histories of the Alorn Kingdoms are fairly central to the
story~ but it was the history of the Tolnedran Empire that filled in all
the cracks. You'll probably notice how tedious the Tolnedran History
is. If you think reading it was tedious, try writing it. It was absolutely
essential, however, since much of the background material grew out
Of it.
Most of the similarities between the people of this world and our
imaginary one should be fairly obvious. The Sendars correspond to
rural Englishmen, the Arends to Norman French, the Tolnedrans to
Romans, the Chereks to Vikings, the Algars to Cossacks, the Ulgos to
Jews, and the Angaraks to Hunnish-Mongolian-Muslim-Visigoths
out to convert the world by the sword. I didn't really have
correspondences in mind for the Drasnians, Rivans, Marags, or Nyissans.
They're story elements and don't need to derive from this world.
By the time we got to the histories of the Angarak Kingdoms, we
were ready to dig into the story itself, so the Angaraks got fairly
short shrift. I wanted to get on with it.
There were footnotes in the original of these studies, but they
were included (with identifying single-spacing) in the body of the text.
These are the mistaken perceptions of the scholars at the University of
Tol Honeth. The footnotes I'm adding now are in their proper location
(at the foot of the page, naturally). These later notes usually point out
inconsistencies. Some of this material just didn't work when we got into
the actual narrative, and I'm not one to mess up a good story just for the