Shin farmers are hiding something

[ThoughtWeaver]

1.  WoK chapt. 28. dalinar digs a letrine pit using his shardplate. he spends a while wondering why shardplate is only used for fighting, and not for farming or building... why didn't the randiants build shard shovels or picks? - he asks himself

2. the very next chapter is I-4. rysn and her basbsk are trading with an important shin man. rysn thinks he has a lot of slaves. her basbsk corrects her, telling her they are his gaurds. the shin treat warriors as the lowest of society, trading them in ownership with rocks.. he goes on to tell her that farmers are reveared in shin society. and the noble man they are trading with is a farmer. "you mean a land owner?"- Ryan asks. "no, just a farmer"- he replies... in fact, outsiders are not even allowed anywhere near the shin farming villages...

 

supporting ideas : 

3. Dalinars vision at Feverstone keep tells us there are many missing sets of shardblade and plate. 

4. the shin collected most of the honorblades, is it a stretch that they might have collected regular shardblades too? I've seen this going around on the forum that the shin might have the extra shards. 

5. in WoK I-6 - there is a man "recruiting" Szeth on taravangians behalf; he says Szeth is wasted potential like a "shardblade used to cut vegitables"  , szeth replies - "you think like a "cukari", he who adds is to be reveared, I am he who takes away." 

 

I'm paraphrasing these parts. but any thoughts on this? I jumped to the conclusion that the shins "noble" class of farmers might be using shards? any other conclusions? 

[Karger]

20 minutes ago, ThoughtWeaver said:

I'm paraphrasing these parts. but any thoughts on this? I jumped to the conclusion that the shins "noble" class of farmers might be using shards? any other conclusions? 

The Shin have the Honorblades and a lot of other really weird stuff going on.  It has been theorized that they have all or a lot of the left over shards and are hiding them for now.  Many hundreds of shards are unaccounted for.

[FantasyFanatic]

That is a very good point. But I don't really believe that. I don't really have much logic to the belief other than that the Shin already have the Honorblades, so I don't think that they would also have the missing shards. I think that that would make them way too powerful, to have both hundreds of shards and also swords that can literally turn you into gods. Just doesn't seem likely to me. 

[+robardin]

31 minutes ago, Karger said:

The Shin have the Honorblades and a lot of other really weird stuff going on.  It has been theorized that they have all or a lot of the left over shards and are hiding them for now.  Many hundreds of shards are unaccounted for.

This, plus the occasionally reference the multiple times that there were "Shin invasions" when they attempted to conquer all of Roshar, during the "Era of Solitude" (which according to "modern" Vorinism, was after Aharietam but before the Recreance and the fall of the Knights Radiant). During which invasions, the Shin wielded the Honorblades and the Surges they granted - which is doubly interesting, because if the Vorinism timeline is at least that accurate about the "Era of Solitude", that implies the Radiants fought Surgebinder to Surgebinder against Shin Honorblade wielders, i.e., had irrefutable evidence that the Heralds had abandoned the Oathpact even though the spren were still bonding humans with the Five Ideals for each Order, and as they fought Voidbinders (wouldn't that have caused some head-scratching?).

It could be something like that that fed into the Recreance. The Stormfather recalls it as Honor already dying, and "instead of supporting that generation of Knights" he "raved about the Dawnshards" - but something like "hey, Jezrien and the other Heralds told us we'd won for good, yet here we are fighting Voidbringers and Unmade in another Desolation anyway, what is going on exactly?" could have contributed as well.

Edited March 2, 2020 by robardin

[Quantus]

Well, at the very least Shin would not use it for any literal stone-cutting activities like Dalinar did, given their cultural restriction against mining or even walking on stone.  And that's really the only instance I can thing of where a Shardblade would be superior to ordinary tools.  I also get the sense that they maintained more of the knowledge of what Shardsblades actually are, and if they consider walking on Stone to be disrespectful, using spren corpses to chop wood would be at least as bad.

 

4 minutes ago, FantasyFanitic said:

That is a very good point. But I don't really believe that. I don't really have much logic to the belief other than that the Shin already have the Honorblades, so I don't think that they would also have the missing shards. I think that that would make them way too powerful, to have both hundreds of shards and also swords that can literally turn you into gods. Just doesn't seem likely to me. 

We know per WOB that the shin believe they are the only ones that still Know what happened back in the Radiant times.  And we know that they invaded several times since the Recreance trying to conquer the rest of Roshar, and that they used Honorblades and Surgebinding when they did so.  So while they are not the only candidate for those currently hoarding all the missing Blades, they have had the Means, Motive and the Opportunity to gather and sequester them. 

I personally expect they are part of it but doubt they are the only ones to have done so, with other candidates being the Sons of Honor, the Skybreakers, the Aimians, the Singers, the Ghostbloods, and the Shadesmar Spren themselves.  I could even see the Stormfather himself occationally exerting influence on the Storm to make sure a dropped Blade would get buried in crem or lost at sea or some such, given his opinion of Radiants and Bonding at the start of our tale.

[Stark]

You and I tend to agree:

 

The Shin have the most

 

My Theory runs along the lines that the Shin self-appointed themselves the guardians of the abandoned Honorblades, and later, after the Recreance, they further appointed themselves the guardians of the abandoned shards.  I further believe that they used the Shin Invasion as a cover for the collection of as many abandoned blades and plate that they could.

[DiePie]

3 hours ago, Stark said:

My Theory runs along the lines that the Shin self-appointed themselves the guardians of the abandoned Honorblades, and later, after the Recreance, they further appointed themselves the guardians of the abandoned shards.  I further believe that they used the Shin Invasion as a cover for the collection of as many abandoned blades and plate that they could.

Which would also be another reason why the Alethi would have so many more than the rest of the known world, they just haven't lost as many since they're not on the frontlines

[ftl]

Heck yes. I like this theory.

[RadiantCat]

9 hours ago, DiePie said:

Which would also be another reason why the Alethi would have so many more than the rest of the known world, they just haven't lost as many since they're not on the frontlines

They're so culturally war focused that the Shin might have struggled to win many Blades from them, or the Shin just knew that they wouldn't stand much of a chance.

But wasn't the purpose of the Shin invasion to take land from the Singers? My understanding is that the invasion happened, the Shin won, and then they broke off into the various human populations that we see today. I don't think the Shin ever invaded other humans, to our knowledge.

Edited March 3, 2020 by RadiantCat

[Stark]

3 hours ago, RadiantCat said:

I don't think the Shin ever invaded other humans, to our knowledge.

Dalinar mentions the Shin invasions, which would imply that they are recent enough to still be remembered in history - so more recent than the Desolations, and if my theory holds true, more recent than the Recreance.  It is an off-hand, one line mention when he is talking about other conquerors, like the Sunmaker - about as small as the references to what Ishi was doing before we 'knew' he was Ishi.

13 hours ago, DiePie said:

Which would also be another reason why the Alethi would have so many more than the rest of the known world, they just haven't lost as many since they're not on the frontlines

This is exactly what we were discussing in the linked post - Alethkar is geographically the furthest from Shinovar, and is the historic homeland of the Radiants - so they would have had the highest concentration of discarded shards,and the Shin would have been at untenable levels of extension by the time they reached that far.

It is further supported by the non-canon original Szeth chapters that can be found that have some details about a militaristic lifestyle in the Shin homeland, as compared to what is shown to the world.

 

I am very attached to this theory, was very proud of myself for coming up with it, especially seeing as no one could shoot it down. I'm even more happy that other people are connecting the same dots completely independently from each other.  It lends more weight to the potential veracity of the theory.

[agrabes]

5 hours ago, RadiantCat said:

They're so culturally war focused that the Shin might have struggled to win many Blades from them, or the Shin just knew that they wouldn't stand much of a chance.

But wasn't the purpose of the Shin invasion to take land from the Singers? My understanding is that the invasion happened, the Shin won, and then they broke off into the various human populations that we see today. I don't think the Shin ever invaded other humans, to our knowledge.

Remember that at the time the first humans left the "Shin" lands they were not yet called Shin lands.  All humans lived in the special protected area where only the Shin now live.  The people who live there only became called the Shin much later.  Dalinar calling the first human-parsh war the "Shin Invasions" would be like someone today calling the ancient Assyrian Empire's conquest of Ancient Cimmeria the "Turkish Civil War of 671 BC".  

It hasn't been revealed yet, but it seems likely that the "Shin" of Dalinar's time are descendants of the humans who refused to leave the original lands they were given on Roshar.  It would make sense why they still stay isolated there for the most part, why they value non-violent professions and why they might have more knowledge of the past.