The Riddle - Alison Croggon [207]
O again utilizes a crescent, this time suggesting a waxing moon. The upward arching T form could indicate leaping (compare the form of S, an eagle rising) or may represent the womb.
U represents the full moon. Note that the circle is fully enclosed within a leaf shape, which differentiates it from the summer symbols where the circle binds the other elements. The surrounding shape could be a generalized fruit symbol.
I shows a familiar crescent shape referring to the waning moon. The horizontal line supported by two uprights probably represents a knife.
E represents the dark moon; a circle within a circle possibly indicates a lunar eclipse. The rest of the sign is unclear, but may represent uncertainty.
1. Jacqueline Allison’s monumental and pioneering study of the history of Edil-Amarandh, The Annaren Scripts: History Rewritten (Mexico: Querétaro University Press, 1998) remains the standard reference, and I have drawn from it considerably in these notes.
2. In the context of Annaren naming, Maerad’s Truename would have been considered nonsensically grandiose. Annaren naming systems generally based themselves on place names (e.g., Dringold of Fort) or occupations (Dirrik Dhurinam translates literally from the Annaren as Handfast Horsebreeder). Surnames as we understand them were unknown. In the Seven Kingdoms, the most common were systems of patronymics or matronymics (“son of” or “daughter of”), although there were no hard or fast rules. Bardic usenames were much more formalized: Bards were always named after the School in which they were instated or (in the case of the First Bards) the School over which they presided. Bards’ Truenames were kept secret and so very few are extant in the records: what little we know suggests that they were generally one-word names, with no qualifiers. Maerad was unique in that, because of her particular triple identity, her Truename was generally known but it could not be used against her. (Naming Systems of Edil-Amarandh, unpublished monograph by Cyril Atlee, 2002).
3. Lanorgil of Pellinor (N307). Lanorgil was the first great historian of the Bards.
4. For much of the information about the Pilanel, I am indebted to Joan Corbett’s essay “Pilanel Society” in Genealogies of Light: Power in Edil-Amarandh, ed. Alannah Casagrande (Chicago: Sorensen Academic Publishers, 2000) and also to Jacqueline Allison’s The Annaren Scripts: History Rewritten, cited above.
5. See “Pilanel Society” by Joan Corbett, cited above.
6. Dhillarearën Rulers among the Pilanel, Anarkin of Lirigon (N345).
7. On the Howes of the Pilanel, Belgar of Gent (N17).
8. Book V: Naraudh Lar-Chanë, Maerad of Pellinor and Cadvan of Lirigon, Library of Busk (N1012).
9. The only possible exception is in the Suderain, whose civilization predated the Restoration by several millennia. There, as Camilla Johnson has argued in her paper “Idols of Light: Aspects of Religious Worship in the Suderain of Edil-Amarandh,” delivered at the inaugural Conference of Edil-Amarandh Studies at the University of Querétaro, Mexico, in November 2003, the Elidhu and the Light were often conflated as objects of worship or respect, and she has conclusively demonstrated that in Turbansk there was a Cult of the Light, with its own shrines and rituals and even gods. This tendency led, in the later years of the Restoration, to a certain distrust between the South and Annar.
10. Across Annar, the fealty to the Light and the Balance served as what we might recognize as an organized religion, and it is tempting, but I believe a little misleading, to see the Bards as the equivalent of priests, with the concept of the Light serving as a substitute for God. It was, more properly, a complex and evolving system of ethics, developed over millennia from the days of Afinil and preserved through the Great Silence, to be reinstated during the Restoration. To a contemporary eye, many of the Bards’ most important documents seem unsettlingly modern. The idea of canonical texts received straight from the Godhead