The Riddle - Alison Croggon [198]
He was coming home.
THESE notes are intended to be supplementary to and in some cases to update the Appendices to The Naming, the first volume of Pellinor, in which I sketched an introduction to the history and society of the Bards of Annar, and discussed briefly the central importance of the Speech to Bardic power. The Naming comprises the first two books of the Naraudh Lar-Chanë, the Riddle of the Treesong, the great Annaren epic that chronicles the Second Rising of the Dark in Edil-Amarandh. The Riddle is translated from Books III and V of the Naraudh Lar-Chanë.
The complex and fascinating world of Edil-Amarandh is one of the fastest-growing areas of contemporary scholarship, with branches in the disciplines of sociology, literature, history, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, women’s studies, and even in the sciences; and it is consequently almost impossible to keep up with all the ongoing research. These notes cannot be anything but the briefest introduction to this field, but I have done my best to ensure that they accord with the most recent scholarship available.
Annar and the Seven Kingdoms1
Edil-Amarandh is a general term for the continent that stretched from the deep North down to beyond the Suderain, from the Western Sea to the wilderness beyond the eastern side of the Osidh Annova. It is a term from the Speech, which can be translated variously as Earth-Throne or Navel of the Earth, and referred to the whole of the known world. Maerad’s Bardic Truename, Elednor Edil-Amarandh na, was similar to saying, in modern English, “Maerad of the World.”2
The Bards used two calendars, referred to as the Afinil and the Norloch yearcounts (A and N). The history of Edil-Amarandh was divided into three main Ages. The Age of the Elementals ended approximately 5,000 years before the time of the present story and concerns mainly the Wars of the Elementals, especially the War by Arkan, the Winterking, against the Elidhu of Annar, led by Ardina. Legends and songs, such as the many lays concerning Ardina, were preserved in tradition from this time, and were written down later.
Second was the Dawn Age, when the culture of the Dhyllin flowered across Annar, centering on the legendary citadel of Afinil. The Afinil yearcount started on its founding. It is reckoned that Bards, or Dhillarearën, appeared in Edil-Amarandh shortly before the Dawn Age, in a period known as the pre-Dawn, or Inela. The Afinil yearcount starts in the Dawn Age, and it continued until A2041, when Sharma, the Nameless One, overthrew the forces of Imbral and Lirion in the Battle of the Firman Plains and began the tyranny of the Dark, which became known later as the Great Silence.
Lanorgil3 named the third Age the Restoration; it dates from the founding of Norloch, and institutes the Norloch yearcount. At this time, Maninaë founded the Schools and the Monarchy of Annar.
The Great Silence, which lasted more than a millennium from A2041 to A3234, was not counted as an Age.
The largest realm in the continent was Annar, but within Annar the different regions were widely diverse; there were huge differences between, say, Innail and Il-Arunedh, despite their speaking a common language. The diversity of Edil-Amarandh was even clearer in the Seven Kingdoms, which were distinct both from Annar and from each other in their cultures and languages. The sharing of power between Bards and what might be called for convenience “civil authorities” varied in each of the Seven Kingdoms. But perhaps because they were relatively small, and also because they were (despite being called kingdoms) not strictly speaking monarchies, conflict between the dual authorities was extremely rare and never reached, as it did in Annar, the point of civil war. In two of the kingdoms — Amdridh and the Suderain — civil authority was determined by heredity, although rulers could be legally deposed by the other authorities if they were considered by the